Joseph Reagle on Wikipedia -10 Years Later

With the recent celebration of Wikipedia's 10th year anniversary it is interesting to reflect upon how lousy we are at predicting technological trends. In my book Good Faith Collaboration I argue that Wikipedia was an imperfect realization of a long pursued vision of a universal encyclopedia. So, was the launch of Wikipedia then an intentional fulfillment of a century's old dream? Not quite. I think it is more accurate to think of Wikipedia as a happy accident: it started as an experimental "feeder" project for the struggling Nupedia project, a project it soon outpaced beyond even its founders' expectations.

Thanks to the recent fortuitous discovery of a log of edits (i.e., diffs) from the first months of Wikipedia -- content that was thought to be lost to bit rot -- it is now possible to explore what the nascent site was like. Using these log files, I reconstructed the first 10,000 contributions to the English Wikipedia. There are a lot of silly and half-baked articles. Popular topics seemingly include philosophy, geography, the Dewey Decimal System, Ernest Hemingway, the United States (and its Constitution), Isaac Asimov, the Japan Constitution, Metallica, statistics, and a huge collection of articles on Atlas Shrugged. However, today there are over 260 language editions/versions of the encyclopedia, three of which exceed 1 million articles. The largest, the English Wikipedia, has 3,540,518 articles. It has come a long way in ten short years.