The Wikipedia Phenomenon

In January 2001, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia in an entirely new way—by tapping the collective wisdom of millions of amateur experts, semi-experts, and just regular folks who thought they knew something.

This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone; and it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute.

Wales started with a few dozen prewritten articles and a software application called a Wiki (named for the Hawaiian word meaning “quick” or “fast”), which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what’s there. The ambition: Nothing less than to construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.

This was, needless to say, controversial.

For one thing, this is not how encyclopedias are supposed to be made. From the beginning, compiling authoritative knowledge has been the job of scholars.

It started with a few solo polymaths who dared to try the impossible. In ancient Greece, Aristotle single-handedly set out to record all the knowledge of his time. Four hundred years later, the Roman nobleman Pliny the Elder cranked out a thirty-seven-volume set of the day’s knowledge. The Chinese scholar Tu Yu wrote an encyclopedia on his own in the ninth century.

And in the 1700s, Diderot and a few of his pals (including Voltaire and Rousseau) took twenty-nine years to create the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.

Individual work gradually evolved into larger team efforts, especially after the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. In the late eighteenth century, several members of the Scottish Enlightenment started to apply the industrial principles of scientific management and the lessons of assembly lines to the creation of an encyclopedia such as the world had never before seen.

The third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, published between 1788 and 1797, amounted to eighteen volumes plus a two-volume supplement, totaling over 16,000 pages.

Groups of experts were recruited to write scholarly articles under the direction of a manager, organized by a detailed work chart.

Now Wales has introduced a third model: the open collective.

Instead of one really smart guy or a number of handpicked smart guys, Wikipedia draws on tens of thousands of people of all sorts—ranging from real experts to interested bystanders—with a lot of volunteer curators adopting entries and keeping an eye on their progression.

In Wales’s encyclopedia calculus, 50,000 self-selected Wikipedians equal one Pliny the Elder.