Wikipedia turns 10!

Wikipedia turns 10 today! So first and foremost a BIG thanks to the people behind WikiPedia, and ofcourse the HUGE community that build an encyclopedia. A dynamic community that anybody can help to write – whether a pupil or a professor! Where else can you get access (and free access) to an “Encyclopedia” which have almost real time updated entries! And all of that which is financed by its reader donations!
If it weren’t for the Wikipedia community, am sure a lot of us so called ‘students’ would have had tough time in understanding concepts, learning theories with real examples, and even help in making those assignments. Heck and ofcourse the last minute notes.. even if some of those “last minute” ones were beyond the last minute, pulled from a mobile browser during..err.. examinations!

So THANK YOU!

Started during tough times, ten years ago when online companies vanished almost as quickly as they appeared. A time otherwise popularly called as the Dot com bubble

January 2001, Nupedia was born, a concept nobody thought. An encyclopedia, that went online in January 2001 and not only became a success, but also an indispensable tool for millions of users.

If you have seen (and liked) the movie The Social Network, the wikipedia story is no less entertaining! It even has bollywood masala to it! So if anyone interested in making a movie! Google/Wiki for the full story ;)!

Its a story of two guys who met due to the common trait of ‘Online Philosophy’, one of whom ran an ‘entertainment’ domain and volunteered to help Sanger a philosopher by providing capital!

– Jimmy Wales, who ran the Bomis.com.
An online portal, which got its revenues through men’s entertainment such as sports, gossip and ofcourse ****!

Lary Sanger, a philosopher born in 1968, became editor of Nupedia, from which emerged Wikipedia.

Neither of them believed that thousands of users could and would ever want to ‘write’ an encyclopedia. The big question remained why would authors spend their own time crafting entries which do not bear their own names. To top it up may end up rewritten by someone else – or deleted with a click of the mouse!

Hence, to keep it serious, strict standards were applied to Nupedia. In principle, anybody could contribute. However only qualified experts in their field had access to edit the articles. The editor being used also had a lot of challenges!

Each entry underwent atleast seven checks. The first ever entry on Nupedia was on “atonality” More: here This too was only uploaded after seven long months of preparation!

The site crawled to 20 entries in that first year.
Sanger realised that for growing, they need to make it easier for users to participate. This was the turning point… In came the “Wiki software”
It provided a free-accessible system which allowed the users to access and edit content via their web browsers.

The developers were so confident of their work, (like most of us) that they opted for a new domain name to ensure the entries don’t get mixed with the ‘new’ ones 😉 Thus on January 15, 2001, a test bed named Wikipedia was born.

Little did they know that the test bed would grow more popular than nupedia! Within a month, wikipedia had 600 entries,
Within a year it was 20,000!

It was only a matter of time that, Wikipedia entries started topping Google search lists for any given subject!
This ensured that people were soon turning to it for information! A near real time updated encyclopedia ensured that conventional encyclopedias could not compete!

Sanger soon left Wikipedia in 2002. Rumours suggest that this was in a dispute over quality control. Wales remained – and hence is known as the sole founder!

Anyone still wants to make a masala bollywood flick on this story can surely go ahead!

May be you could call the movie ‘Frankenstein’ as that’s the only other Beta product that I could think of which over shadowed the original product or its creator!