The Information - James Gleick [183]
Alone among the great enterprises of the early Internet, Wikipedia was not a business; made no money, only lost money. It was supported by a nonprofit charity established for the purpose. By the time the encyclopedia had 50 million users daily, the foundation had a payroll of eighteen people, including one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Australia, and one lawyer, and everyone else was a volunteer: the millions of contributors, the thousand or more designated “administrators,” and, always a looming presence, the founder and self-described “spiritual leader,” Jimmy Wales. Wales did not plan initially the scrappy, chaotic, dilettantish, amateurish, upstart free-for-all that Wikipedia quickly became. The would-be encyclopedia began with a roster of experts, academic credentials, verification, and peer review. But the wiki idea took over, willy-nilly. A “wiki,” from a Hawaiian word for “quick,” was a web site that could be not just viewed but edited, by anyone. A wiki was therefore self-created, or at least self-sustaining.
Wikipedia first appeared to Internet users with a simple self-description:
HomePage
You can edit this page right now! It’s a free, community project
Welcome to Wikipedia! We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 3,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know! Read our welcome message here: Welcome, newcomers!
The sparseness of the coverage that first year could be gauged by the list of requested articles. Under the heading of Religion: “Catholicism?—Satan?—Zoroaster?—Mythology?” Under Technology: “internal combustion engine?—dirigible?—liquid crystal display?—bandwidth?” Under Folklore: “(If you want to write about folklore, please come up with a list of folklore topics that are actually recognized as distinct, significant topics in folklore, a subject that you are not likely to know much about if all you’ve done along these lines is play Dungeons and Dragons, q.v.).”♦ Dungeons and Dragons was already well covered. Wikipedia was not looking for flotsam and jetsam but did not scorn them. Years later, in Alexandria, Jimmy Wales said: “All those people who are obsessively writing about Britney Spears or the Simpsons or Pokémon—it’s just not true that we should try to redirect them into writing about obscure concepts in physics. Wiki is not paper, and their time is not owned by us. We can’t say, ‘Why do we have these employees doing stuff that’s so useless?’ They’re not hurting anything. Let them write it.”
“Wiki is not paper” was the unofficial motto. Self-referentially, the phrase has its own encyclopedia page (see also “Wiki ist kein Papier” and “Wikipédia n’est pas sur papier”). It means there is no physical or economic limit on the number or the length of articles. Bits are free. “Any kind of metaphor around paper or space is dead,” as Wales said.
Wikipedia found itself a mainstay of the culture with unexpected speed, in part because of its unplanned synergistic relationship with Google. It became a test case for ideas of crowd intelligence: users endlessly debated the reliability—in theory and in actuality—of articles written in an authoritative tone by people with no credentials, no verifiable identity, and unknown prejudices. Wikipedia was notoriously subject to vandalism. It exposed the difficulties—perhaps the impossibility—of reaching a neutral, consensus view of disputed, tumultuous reality. The process was plagued by so-called edit wars, when battling contributors reversed one another’s alterations without surcease. At the end of 2006, people concerned with the “Cat” article could not agree on whether a human with a cat is its