Wikipedia @ 20 : stories of an incomplete revolution
The MIT Press
2020
EISBN 9780262360609
Wikipediaâs first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the worldâs most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accidentâa wiki attached to an nascent online encyclopediaâhas become the worldâs most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of âfree access to the sum of all human knowledgeâ when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipediaâs first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal. The contributors consider Wikipediaâs history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as âthe most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in historyâ; and the acknowledgment that âfree accessâ includes not just access to the material but freedom to contributeâthat the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it.
