The Birth of Wikipedia
In 2000, Y2K enthusiast Larry Sanger joined BOMIS, bringing a large number of followers from his on-line Y2K digest. The Y2K movement was an informal network of programmers and community activities that formed in the late nineties, out of concern for the two digit dates used in early computers. The fear was that computers built before 1990 would be unable to tell whether the two digit "00" represented the year 1900 or the year 2000 -- and crash. Disaster was averted, thanks to the frantic rewriting (in 1998 and 1999) of millions of lines of code on government and corporate computers
After Sanger joined BOMIS, one of the first projects they undertook was an on-line encyclopedia-style "blog" called Nupedia. Wales, Shell and Sanger drew in friends and on-line acquaintances to help with drafting and editing articles. However the process of editing successive drafted on-line turned out to be extremely slow and cumbersome. By January 2001, Nupedia had only finalized and posted two dozen entries.
Wiki Protocol
BOMIS' discovery of Cunningham's Wiki protocol changed all this, enabling first hundreds, then thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of computer users anywhere to register and post draft articles and to register and edit them. The beauty of Wiki software is that keeps a list of all edits made and the identity of the editor, which makes it possible at any point to restore an earlier version. Wales, Shell and Sanger registered Wikipedia Foundation as a non-profit in January 2001 The only rules were that Wikipedia had to be freely accessible to the public, have a Neutral Point of View (NPOV), and only describe existing research (in other words, original research was forbidden).
The Wikipedia project quickly drew in members of Slashdot and other techie communities to write and edit articles. Sanger was paid to oversee the project and used an electronic mailing list and occasionally the Internet Relay Chat (a precursor to instant messaging) to coordinate the work of core editors, administrators and system operators. Each article was divided up into a user page and a "talk" page, where editors could discuss how the article was progressing. In addition to hundreds of volunteer editors, a number of proven members were made administrators, who had the power to delete and undelete articles that contained copyright violations, libelous speech or inappropriate personal information. Above the administrators were System Operators who were charged with dealing with trolls and vandals who added inappropriate material to articles. The most common type of Wikipedia vandalism seems to occur in high school social studies classes, when students get bored and post lewd entries about their teachers and friends.
Does Occupying the Commons Lead to Anarchy?
In the beginning detractors predicted that allowing thousands of strangers to post and edit articles would lead to total anarchy (I recall dire predictions in the mainstream media that the Occupy movement would result in anarchy). However the volunteers who keep Wikipedia going believe so passionately in the concept of a free and open encyclopedia that they volunteer literally hundreds of hours as administrators and System Operators to make it work. In fact, as in other forms of community organizing, stress and burn out has been a major problem among Wikipedia. The second half of Wikipedia Revolution describes at length various technical difficulties created by the encyclopedia's explosive growth, and the solutions devised to address them. Many of the technical glitches related to adapting Wikipedia for non-English languages and cultures.
By January 2002, Wikipedia had 20,000 articles. In 2002, Derek Ramsey created a "bot" (short for software robot) capable of simultaneously adding census data from 3,000 counties and 33,832 cities. Ramsey's contribution increased the number of Wikipedia articles from 50,000 to more than 85,000 in one week. In March 2003, Wikipedia had 100,000 articles, which was on a par with commercial (subscription) on-line encyclopedias like Britannica and Microsoft's Encarta, and was being cited in mainstream sources.
A Question of Censorship
In 2003 Wikipedia had 480 active editors, 100 core editors and 48 administrators. By 2006, it became virtually impossible for manual editors to keep up with the encyclopedia's explosive growth. The solution was a bot developed by a 13 year old Canadian hacker/programmer who called himself Tawker (aka Andrew Phillips). Tawker's bot works like a spam filter by screening articles for objectionable sexually explicit or toilet terms that recur frequently. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a somewhat less flattering biography of Tawker that accuses him of deliberate censorship of political content (http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Wikipedia_IRC_Bouncers)
As of 2009, when Lih published Wikipedia Revolution, Wikipedia had 10 million articles in 200 languages and an administrative structure in which several hundred administrators and System Operators make editorial decisions about controversial articles and edits. While the original goal was to have all administrative decisions made by consensus, this is no longer possible, owing to the sheer volume of traffic on the site. Critics accuse Wikipedia of a "pro-corporate" drift (i.e. censorship) in the process.
In addition to 2.5 million articles in English, the German Wikipedia has 800,000 articles. French, Polish and Japanese editions have 500,000 words each.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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