Happy birthday, Wikipedia! The free online encyclopedia turns 20 years old
Lesson summary
Hi there, I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and this is Plain English lesson number 330. The full lesson is online at PlainEnglish.com/330.
Coming up today: The world’s biggest encyclopedia turns 20 years old—and it’s free. The expression is “over the years” and we have a quote of the week.
Wikipedia turns 20
Last Friday, January 15, 2021, Wikipedia turned 20 years old. Very few websites have been around as long as that. Today we’re going to take a brief look at its history, and how it became a household name.
Back in the late 1990s, when the internet was first spreading into mainstream culture, people talked a lot about the newfound access to information the internet would bring. The world’s knowledge would be at our fingertips, we were told. This exciting new era would see us all take to the “information superhighway.”
The reality didn’t quite live up to the hype, at least at first. The world wide web in the 90s didn’t look anything like it does now. It was a lot more homespun. Animated “under construction” gifs were commonplace. It was a wild west run by enthusiasts and crackpots. Official, reliable information from reputable sources was often hard to find.
If you wanted to look up a fact, you still had to search through a printed encyclopedia. These large multivolume books were expensive and took up a lot of shelf space, so most people didn’t have one at home—to access one, you had to go to a library. Microsoft had an encyclopedia called “Encarta,” which was available on CD-ROM. This was a slightly better option than the average web site, but the digital world had yet to deliver on its promise of easy access to knowledge for all.
In the year 2000 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger began a project to create an online encyclopedia, which they called Nupedia. Their plan was to have articles written and peer-reviewed by experts, but this proved to be slow going. (They published just 12 articles in their first year.) So, on January 15, 2001, they created Wikipedia, a side-project where people could discuss articles that might be added to Nupedia. The fundamental difference was that anyone could contribute to Wikipedia.
The spinoff proved more popular than the original. A month after it began, Wikipedia published its 1,000th article. By the following September it had 10,000. And by the end of its first year it had over 20,000. Fast-forward two decades to the present day and it has over six million articles in English, with millions more in other languages. Wikipedia articles have been created in 316 languages all told.
Wales and Sanger eventually abandoned Nupedia in 2003, by which time it had produced just 24 articles in total. It had become completely eclipsed by Wikipedia, which became the main focus of Wales’s work. Wales created a Wikimedia foundation, in order to run Wikipedia as a non-profit organization. To this day the site has never featured advertising and relies instead on donations from its users to keep the site going.
Wikipedia has held numerous fundraising drives over the years, and in every year of its operation has collected more in donations than it spent on running the site. The extra money (technically “net assets” rather than profits) is kept in reserve to go toward the site’s future operating costs.
There was some good information to be found on Wikipedia right from the start, but there was also plenty of inaccurate material. Some people wrote articles for laudable reasons, to share what they knew with the world. Others wrote incorrect or irrelevant articles for fun, to see what they could get away with. A few had darker motives, hoping to discredit others or profit from sowing misinformation.
Wikipedia relies on its users not just to write the articles, but also to edit them and ensure that what is published on the site is true. There are around 30,000 users who regularly edit the English version of Wikipedia—minuscule compared to the 40 million total users who have registered to write or edit articles. The number of people simply visiting the site is higher still, many millions per day.
Still, between them these editors manage to make something like 1.9 edits per second, guided by three overarching principles. To appear on Wikipedia’s pages, information must come from a reputable source, it must come from a verifiable source, and it must be presented from a neutral point of view.
Over the years, Wikipedia’s editors have worked hard to ensure the accuracy of its articles, and the site’s reputation for unreliability has faded. In 2003, just two years after Wikipedia began, an IBM study concluded that purposeful inaccuracies on the site were usually corrected so quickly that most users were unlikely ever to see its effects.
A significant case of vandalism was uncovered in 2005, however. The “Seigenthaler incident,” as it became known, involved a well-known figure whose biography was found to have been changed on purpose. An unknown person edited the page to falsely state that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. By the time this was discovered, the damage had gone unnoticed for months.
In response, Wikipedia implemented new policies designed to prevent such damage. In particular, unregistered users were no longer permitted to publish new articles. Biographies of living people were also subject to stricter review.
Faced with such a large editing task, Wikipedia has employed artificial intelligence to lighten its volunteers’ load. Software bots scan new edits for copyright infringement or libel. When a bot finds a problem, it can either revert the edit back to its original state automatically or flag the issue for attention from a human editor, of whom there are usually between 10 and 20 available at any time.
Wikipedia has grown steadily year over year, adding hundreds of new articles each day and expanding its coverage in other languages. In 2017 and again in 2018 Wikipedia was declared the fifth most popular site on the internet. This was the peak of the site’s popularity. Its user engagement has fallen in recent years and in 2020 it held the number 11 spot. Part of the reason is that Wikipedia is blocked in China. This block initially focused on the Chinese language version only, but was expanded to cover versions in all languages in 2019.
Wikipedia encouraged its users to plan events to mark the site’s 20th anniversary, and provided grants to those planning to hold community celebrations. On the day itself, in mid-January, organizers held a global virtual party. They hope to hold another event later in the year, in October or November if the pandemic has eased by then.
An internet success story
It turned out well though, right? Wikipedia, I mean. It was a joke. I graduated from college in 2003, so we never really used it in any official sense in college. But I remember college professors openly ridiculing it. It seemed that the early opinion was that, if something was on Wikipedia, it must be false. Not that it might be false: it must be false. But now it’s pretty reliable. The wisdom of crowds, right? Hats off to the editors and managers who keep that site alive.
I donated in 2020. I thought, I use this site so much for everything, I should contribute, so I gave $20. It’s a good site and a great story.
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