aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, August 03, 2006

The Atlantic on Wikipedia

Last week I complained about Stacy Schiff’s Wikipedia profile in The New Yorker. This week The Atlantic gives me what I was looking for (though in fairness The Atlantic’s website is only a wee bit better than The New Yorker’s - neither has an RSS feed but The Atlantic at least allows its subscribers to access the contents online).

In The Hive, Marshall Poe does a terrific job of telling the Wikipedia story. He explains that the original vision of both Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger was less about gleaning the wisdom of the crowd and more about getting volunteer experts to set up a web directory. They set out to build “an online academic journal” called Nupedia. It was the hive mind that found them:

Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The initial purpose was to get the public to add entries that would then be “fed into the Nupedia process” of authorization. Most of Nupedia’s expert volunteers, however, wanted nothing to do with this, so Sanger decided to launch a separate site called “Wikipedia.” Neither Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark. This is evident in Sanger’s flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he wrote. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” And, to Sanger’s surprise, go they did. Within a few days, Wikipedia outstripped Nupedia in terms of quantity, if not quality, and a small community developed. In late January, Sanger created a Wikipedia discussion list (Wikipedia-L) to facilitate discussion of the project. At the end of January, Wikipedia had seventeen “real” articles (entries with more than 200 characters). By the end of February, it had 150; March, 572; April, 835; May, 1,300; June, 1,700; July, 2,400; August, 3,700. At the end of the year, the site boasted approximately 15,000 articles and about 350 “Wikipedians.”