Wikipedia

History and Organization

Wikipedia was started in the United States in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wales, in particular, was influenced by the ideas of Ayn Rand, whose novels portray a world in which reality is objectively knowable; Friedrich Hayek, who favored markets over central planning as the best way to coordinate the efforts of individuals; and Eric Raymond, who argued that open-source software can be as reliable as proprietary software.

Wales and Sanger set up Wikipedia as a wiki, that is, a website on which all users can create and edit content. In the beginning, Wikipedia was an editorial free-for-all—Sanger borrowed Stephen King's instruction to “ignore all rules” and made it the first item in the Wikipedia guidelines. Meanwhile, Wales's objectivist influences were reflected in the injunction on authors to write from a neutral point of view.

Since its inception, Wikipedia has carried no advertisements—thereby forgoing an annual income of tens of millions of dollars—relying instead on donations. It is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charity based in San Francisco with fewer than 20 employees. The task of managing the encyclopedia's content—repairing vandalized articles, dealing with complaints, mediating in edit wars, occasionally blocking troublesome users—is undertaken by volunteer administrators, experienced editors who are nominated and elected by other administrators. Despite the continuing advice to editors to “ignore all rules,” vandalism, edit wars, and the risk of copyright infringement have resulted in the formulation of a large number of rules and procedures.

Criticisms of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been criticized as Eurocentric for three reasons. First, the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are in European languages. Of the 23 languages with over 100,000 articles, only Japanese and Chinese are non-European in origin; English Wikipedia has more than 3.5 times as many as the next language, French. In response, it can be pointed out that the balance among languages may change over time: The rate of increase of English articles has recently slowed. Further, non-English Wikipedias operate mostly independently and develop a character of their own; Japanese Wikipedia, for example, has a much larger proportion of anonymous edits than its English counterpart. It is also a far richer source of information about Japanese topics.

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