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"The paradox is this: despite Wikipedia, which is the first time that reliable and objective information is available for free all over the world, the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories has never been higher than today."--Sholem Stein

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Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia that the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation supports.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001.

History

The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Library of Pergamum, but the modern concept of a general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's 1934 book Traité de Documentation; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum, an institution dedicated to indexing the world's knowledge, in 1910. This concept of a machine-assisted encyclopedia was further expanded in H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm-based Memex in his essay "As We May Think" (1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, which was begun in 1960.

The use of volunteers was integral and instrumental in creating and maintaining Wikipedia. However, even without the internet, huge complex projects of similar nature had made use of volunteers. Specifically, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived with the speech at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, Nov 5, 1857 by Richard Chenevix Trench. It took 70 years to complete. Dr. Trench envisioned a grand new dictionary of every word in the English language, and to be used democratically and freely. According to author Simon Winchester "The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature—and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals—must be instead 'the combined action of many.' It would be necessary to recruit a team—moreover, a huge one—probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers."

Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form of encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia Britannica, were often book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates; this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998. His published document outlined how to "ensure that progress continues towards this best and most natural outcome." On Wednesday 17 January 2001, two days after the founding of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia, but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has stated that the germ of the concept for Wikipedia, for him, came back when he was a graduate student at Indiana University where he was impressed with the successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy to be quite interesting. At the time, Wales was studying finance and was intrigued by the incentives of the many people who contributed as volunteers toward creating free software where there were many examples having excellent results.

According to The Economist, Wikipedia "has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education and enlightenment."


See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Wikipedia" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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