Crowdsourcing Wikipedia’s encyclopedia: Best ideas of the century
Hostility and discord are hallmarks of the internet more so than collaboration and cooperation. So the fact that a public encyclopaedia, editable by anyone, has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is, frankly, unbelievable. “Thank God it works in practice, because it would never work in theory,” says Anusha Alikhan at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia. The website was set up in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, who remains involved today, and Larry Sanger, who left the project the following year – but continues to criticise it from afar. He recently wrote that the site had been “hijacked by ideologues”. Needless to say, Sanger’s view isn’t shared by most. Every month, Wikipedia’s 64 million articles in more than 300 languages receive 15 billion visits. At the time of writing, it is the ninth-most visited website in the world. “The fact that it is now one of the most trusted resources on the web is not something that anyone could have contemplated, but we’re here,” says Alikhan. Fostering trust on …
