--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
My first edit was on 2 January 2002. Boy was the place a mess (have you seen UseMod ; ugly ; en.wikipedia had less than 20,000 articles and Larry Sanger was still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do. Almost every article I saw was obviously a work in progress. We were still working out basic rules and conventions. WikiProjects were just getting underway. Just about anybody could have a major influence on policy formation and the direction of WikiProjects.
At the time we thought it would take us 5 years to to reach our initial goal of 100,000 articles. All the focus I saw was on development, not use in the near to mid term. I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could have dreamed we would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
Now when I look around, most articles that cover subjects encyclopedias should cover look fairly complete. Articles on technology, popular culture, and current events are even better on average.
Wikipedia becoming useful; well, that is something that kinda snuck up on me while I was helping make it useful. I'm sure it also surprised many other old timers as well. The idea seemed too far in the future to even think about.
There were fewer than 20 reads per write when I started. Now there are now more than 200 reads per write. I guess now somebody has to work on sorting the wheat from the chaff for our readers. Heck, let them do it through an article validation feature. We have an encyclopedia to write. :)
-- mav
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