Wikipedia Turns 10: Where Does it Go From Here?

January 13th, 2011 by K. T. Bradford

When Wikipedia first launched on January 15, 2001, founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales had merely conceived of it as a feeder project for their more traditionally focused online encyclopedia, Nupedia. The parent site didn’t last past 2003, but Wikipedia’s popularity soared, spawning thousands of articles and more than 160 foreign language editions by the end of 2004. Alexa currently ranks the site as the eighth most popular on the Internet, and as it nears its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia can boast more than 16 million articles, more than 3 million of which exist in English. Users from around the globe—both named and anonymous—have collaborated on this content, which has made Wikipedia the target of almost as much distrust as praise.

What can we expect from Wikipedia in the next ten years? The site’s growth is no longer as exponential as it once was, and some claim that regular editors are abandoning the site due to apathy or internal politics. Where does that leave “the sum of all human knowledge”?

Why Wikipedia Took Off

Beyond the appealing idea of a corroboratively edited encyclopedia, a key aspect of Wikipedia’s exponential growth is the software that runs the site. The specific wiki behind the scenes is MediaWiki, which is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and has seen continual improvements over time to keep editing simple while also supporting the terabytes of data and millions of hits the site gets each day. The ability to quickly edit a whole article or just a section without having any coding skills opened up the editing process to a wide swath of people. Novices to web content certainly benefited, as did casual users who didn’t necessarily have the time or inclination to make big edits.

Beyond making editing easy, the MediaWiki software also simplifies the task of controlling and monitoring the site. It logs edits, collects IP addresses, facilitates users who work in group projects to keep track of their pet topics, and makes it easy to flag, change, or tag questionable content. The software keeps a record of every edit and discussion on the site, making Wikipedia an extremely transparent encyclopedia project (if you know how to use it).

As easy as MediaWiki now is to negotiate, the Wikimedia Foundation continues to advance its development in order to make it even simpler and more accessible. However, this simplicity and ease of use has its drawbacks, according to Wikipedia’s detractors. After all, if just anyone can come in and edit, how can the site possibly be reliable?