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Free Encyclopedia Project, Wikipedia, Creates 20,000 Articles in a Year
SAN DIEGO, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- The free encyclopedia project Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.com ) celebrates its first anniversary today. In its first year, the collaborative project has created over 20,000 articles, organizers say. Wikipedia is a so-called WikiWiki, which means that anyone with an Internet connection can visit the website and edit an article without signing up. For such an open project, some may find it remarkable that many of the articles are reasonably good and that the project has attracted a large number of well-educated, articulate contributors.
Wikipedia is not only free to read, it is free to distribute. It is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, which ensures that anyone may reuse the entries on the site in any way they wish, including commercially, as long as they too preserve that right in their own versions. Many participants are attracted to the notion that they are contributing to a completely free resource that can be used worldwide.
The founders of Wikipedia are Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger. Wales has supplied the financial backing and other support for the project, and Sanger, who earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ohio State in 2000, has led the project. Sanger and Wales attribute Wikipedia's success so far to the presence of a strong core group of contributors who together maintain community standards of quality and neutrality. "Participants all keep a watchful eye over the 'Recent Changes' page," Wales said. "They edit each others' work constantly. It seems surprising that it works very well, but it does."
The project began life quietly in January 2001 as an offshoot of its more academic sister project, Nupedia ( http://www.nupedia.com ), but has long since overtaken it in terms of size. Wikipedia announced 10,000 articles last September, and claims to have doubled that number in the past four months. This growth, and the project dynamics that fuel it, have recently been the subject of articles in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and MIT's highly-respected Technology Review, as well as technology news websites such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin.
At present, nearly 200 people are working on the project daily, from all around the world; organizers estimate that the project has had well over a thousand contributors. The success of such an open project, staffed by such a large and diverse body of writers, is a puzzle: how can so many people with so many different backgrounds collaborate with such little oversight? Project organizers say that it is partly because the participants can edit each others' contributions easily, and partly because the project has a strong "nonbias" policy; this keeps interaction relatively polite and productive. Sanger explains: "If contributors took controversial stands, it would be virtually impossible for people of many different viewpoints to collaborate. Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working together on the same articles. It's quite remarkable."
What motivates a scholar to participate in such a wide-open project? For Axel Boldt, a mathematics professor at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, the motivation to contribute dozens of mathematics articles is "the same that motivates me to work in academia: it's fun to teach, it's fun to learn, it's fun to interact with intelligent people."
Sanger has been invited to speak about Wikipedia at the Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory colloquium on January 16; the press is invited to attend or to view the talk via the Internet. Please see http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ for details.
Wikipedia may be found on the web at http://www.wikipedia.com .
Interview contacts: Larry Sanger, +1-702-631-7301 (except Jan. 16, and until Jan. 20), lsanger@nupedia.com, or Jimmy Wales, +1-619-296-1732, jwales@bomis.com, both of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.com ), 3585 Hancock St., Suite A, San Diego, CA 92110, Tel. 619-296-1732, Fax 619-296-1754.
SOURCE Wikipedia Web Site: http://www.wikipedia.com