Wikipedia turns 15

Wikipedia, the online, crowd-sourced encyclopedia that has become the source of all facts for many, turns 15 on Jan 15. The free site was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It was meant as a place where anyone with knowledge of a topic could write it up and make it available to the world, without ads or traditional gatekeepers. The site quickly caught on, to the detriment of traditional encyclopedias and other printed sources. Today it is often the first place online users go for information.

Wikipedia’s brilliance was that it was non-profit and crowd-sourced. Eventually its editing model became a problem, as people with an axe to grind realized they could change entries and effectively re-write the truth for millions of readers This came to be known as “edit warring.” It could be as harmless as an ongoing debate over the proper spelling of Caesar Salad to back-and-forth changes to articles about President George W. Bush, circumcision and global warming, according to research by scientists at Oxford University. Wikipedia instituted stronger editing guidelines to curb some of the worst abuses, which also had the effect of limiting participation. "The controversy and excitement that surrounded the service in the early days has passed,” said Aleksi Aaltonen, a professor of information systems at Warwick University in Coventry, United Kingdom. "If Wikipedia can maintain its success, it will be remembered as a gift of an open internet that is now under attack from many directions. It may even turn out to be an example of a new type of social and perhaps more humane way of organizing production. We have already seen similar models of production used in open-source software development,” he said.