I recently learned about the history of Wikipedia, which was actually very interesting. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that was officially created in 2001. It was launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The original idea for an online encyclopaedia was actually developed by Richard Stallman. Wikipedia was originally created to be a feeder into the online encyclopaedia, "Nupedia." Nupedia incorporated the peer-review concept that Wikipedia is now famous for. Though Nupedia actually had many of the same ideas as Wikipedia, it started off very slow, with only 12 articles in the first year. When it was clear the Nupedia wasn't doing very well, Larry Sanger suggested that they start a separate online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, just to test what was going wrong with Nupedia. Wikipedia grew in every respect, and eventually Nupedia was terminated. By 2003, Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles. By 2005, hundreds of new languages were introduced. By 2007, more than 5 million peer-editors were participating. In my experience, I have found that Wikipedia can be very flawed, but it definitely is a very impressive feat of technology. Currently, Wikipedia has 14 million articles, in more than 100 languages, with more than 1,000,000 contributors.
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This is cool, i never really knew much about wikipedia, even though I use it all the time. I cant believe it was only started in 2001, I cant imagine what we did before then to find out information.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Wikipedia can be flawed, though it is interesting to find out how it started. It is a really smart idea, and, although it is not necessarily one hundred percent accurate, i think it does serve its purpose and I find it very helpful for certain things.
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