Wikipedia

Contributing the Meaning of Everything (Wikipedia)

While the use of wiki software to form Wikipedia was a breakthrough in allowing anyone to edit any page at any time, the assembling of a reference work from distributed strangers is actually not new. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the history of which is masterfully documented by Simon Winchester in The Meaning of […]

The GFDL (Wikipedia)

Just before Wales and Sanger created Wikipedia, they happened to adopt a new license covering its content. Originally Nupedia used the Nupedia Open Content License, which allowed people to copy and modify content. However, with that license Bomis, Inc., was still the legal copyright holder. In January 2001, after some exchange of emails with Richard […]

UseMod Grows (Wikipedia)

As Slashdot provided an influx of volunteers, Wikipedia was evolving quickly. Clifford Adams created a more elegant way of pointing to pages by using free links in double brackets. Now Wikipedia looked more like a proper work, and not one littered with strange CamelCase. To move forward with its popularity, it would need to get […]

Give Me More Space (Wikipedia)

One of the additions of the MediaWiki software was the creation of "namespaces." The bulk of Wikipedia’s pages are in the "article" namespace, as actual entries one would find in an encyclopedia. Pages are named like the article itself, like [[Dog]] or [[George Washington]]. But as the community grew, contributors needed pages not in the […]

Server Load (Wikipedia)

The first year of Wikipedia’s existence, the encyclopedia was growing quickly, but by technology standards it was not too demanding on computing resources. It had grown to 20,000 articles in one year, but it was still a project largely known only to the tech elite. Wikipedia basically ran on one large computer for the first […]

COMMUNITY AT WORK (THE PIRANHA EFFECT) (Wikipedia)

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." When we want to understand how communities cooperate, we are compelled to look at examples in the animal kingdom. How do teams of organisms hunt, build, feed, and survive together as a clan? Behavioral scientists work for years, homing in on the minutiae […]

Usenet’s Legacy (Wikipedia)

One of the earliest online community message systems was Netnews, which ran on a system called Usenet. This USEr NETwork, started in 1979 by two Duke University students, predated even the Internet and goes back to the era of old computer "bulletin board systems." Usenet worked on a simple principle. BBS systems were small communities […]

Lessons from Usenet (Wikipedia)

Why is the story of Usenet and Netnews so important? Because so many things pioneered by Usenet have become foundations for the Wikipedia community and its resulting success. If we fast-forward to Wikipedia today, much the same dynamic exists as did with Usenet. The power of Wikipedia’s model is that it is free-form—anyone can edit […]

Growth (Wikipedia)

When Sanger and Wales decided to start what would become Wikipedia in January 2001, it was always thought that it would be a proving ground for articles to feed into Nupedia. As Slashdot and other tech communities noticed Wikipedia, the academic Nupedians who were the first Wikipedians suddenly found many computer programming types joining the […]

How Wikipedia Works

To outsiders, how articles get created and grow on Wikipedia is a bit of a mystery. It’s actually simpler than one would think. The original wiki software conceived by Ward Cunningham indicated missing pages by presenting a clickable question mark after the page name. The MediaWiki software created for Wikipedia presents links that are red […]

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