The Economist January 9th 2021|International “Wikipedia at 20 The other tech giant” “On its 20th anniversary, Wikipedia’s reputation has never been higher”
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Summary of Article
Wikipedia, administered by Wikimedia Foundation a SF-based charity “that provides the site’s infrastructure, arose from Douglas Adams’ initial effort known as the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as a fictional “mixture of travel book and encyclopedia, but with an absurd-seeming twist: instead of being written by experts, anyone could contribute.” On yesterday, January 15th, it celebrated its 20th anniversary as the “biggest and most read reference work ever.” Wikipedia “hosts more than 55m articles in hundreds of languages” with the English written articles being expansive enough to fill “2,800 volumes in print” and is ranked as the “13th-most popular site” ahead of “Reddit, Netflix and Instagram.” Its success has happened without “shareholders” or “advertising” coming to “scale” “organically, as more and more ordinary people decided to contribute.” Without advertising the platform is unbridled by dominant commerical interests.
Early on considered a “joke” by library experts “even now, after numerous academic studies highlighting its reliability, Wikipedia still lacks gravitas…”. As it turns out wanting to be “correct” while gaining notoriety as a contributing editor has help keep Wikipedia surprisingly accurate and is what the administrators trumpet as a “guardian of truth” and “tech behemoths now use it as a neutral arbiter.” Wikipedia is used by YouTube, as a factual warning attached to some posts, “Amazon and Apple rely on it to allow Alexa and Siri…to answer factual questions…and “Google uses it to populate the ‘fact boxes’ that often accompany searches based on factual questions.” Errors especially in popular citations can happen inadvertently or maliciously but are usually caught quickly by readers and other volunteer editors. Admittedly in niche articles errors could persist longer.
Times change and Wikipedia is making an effort be more accessible to mobile users and to potential users and contributors for parts of the world that aren’t widely using Wikipedia. Britain, Germany, United States, Japan and Russia have most page views per person at about 13.5, 12, 10, 8 and 4.5 per month based on December 2020. Brazil is at about 1.5, India 0.9, Nigeria 0.4 and China 0.006. Many of these latter populations interface primarily by mobile device. As Wikipedia strives to diversify, currently 80% of editors are male, the vision remains Wikipedia for the world “where every single human being can share in all knowledge.”
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