Timothy Garton Ash: Look It Up: Wikipedia is Turning 10
[Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.]
Wikipedia is 10 years old Saturday. It is the fifth-most-visited site on the Internet. About 400 million people use it every month.
What is extraordinary about this free encyclopedia, which contains more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages, is that it is written, edited and self-regulated almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. All the other most-visited sites are multibillion-dollar businesses; Facebook, with just 100 million more users, has been valued at $50 billion.
Visit Google in Silicon Valley and you find yourself in a vast complex of modern buildings, like the capital of a superpower. You have to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you even get through the door. The language of Google executives veers between that of a U.N. secretary-general and a car salesman. One moment we're talking universal human rights, the next "rolling out a new product."
Wikipedia is overseen by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which occupies one floor in an anonymous office building in downtown San Francisco. You have to knock hard on the door to gain admission.
If Wikipedia's founder and principal architect, Jimmy Wales, had chosen to commercialize the enterprise, he could be worth billions, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Putting it all under the not-for-profit umbrella was, Wales quipped to me, at once the stupidest and the cleverest thing he ever did....
Read entire article at LA Times
Wikipedia is 10 years old Saturday. It is the fifth-most-visited site on the Internet. About 400 million people use it every month.
What is extraordinary about this free encyclopedia, which contains more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages, is that it is written, edited and self-regulated almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. All the other most-visited sites are multibillion-dollar businesses; Facebook, with just 100 million more users, has been valued at $50 billion.
Visit Google in Silicon Valley and you find yourself in a vast complex of modern buildings, like the capital of a superpower. You have to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you even get through the door. The language of Google executives veers between that of a U.N. secretary-general and a car salesman. One moment we're talking universal human rights, the next "rolling out a new product."
Wikipedia is overseen by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which occupies one floor in an anonymous office building in downtown San Francisco. You have to knock hard on the door to gain admission.
If Wikipedia's founder and principal architect, Jimmy Wales, had chosen to commercialize the enterprise, he could be worth billions, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Putting it all under the not-for-profit umbrella was, Wales quipped to me, at once the stupidest and the cleverest thing he ever did....