The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is 10 today. It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is now the largest and most popular reference website with over 17 million articles and 400 million readers. The name came from the Hawaiian word wiki which means “quick” and the word encyclopedia.
At the moment though the site reaches its tenth anniversary at a difficult time where it is trying to find a way to move forward. Every page you visit on the site has an appeal from Wales for donations and a great many people are criticising it for being too complicated for most people to edit.
The site has aims to increase its readers to 1bn by 2015 but they have a lot of work to do first to get there. If you want to create or edit a Wikipedia article it’s like wading through old HTML treacle to do so. The site needs a new WYSWIG editor quickly if its to remain popular.
That said there really is nothing to challenge it and, while the site might be off-limits in academia, there can be no doubting that everybody has heard about it.
So, happy anniversary Wikipedia, congratulations on a very successful 10 years so far and we look forward to what you give us in the next 10.
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Yes, I love Wikipedia. When I need some info quick I look it up here and then cross reference it by searching for the given facts on academic and reference web sites. And you know what, I’ve found wrong info only on 2 occasions. And both times next day when I checked back the articles had been edited and the wrong entries removed by the volunteers. It’s online democracy at it’s best.
Oh and congrats to Wikipedia on turning 10.