How 20 years ago a system of human knowledge appeared, about which science fiction writers wrote: The history of Wikipedia

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

To bring together all human knowledge, to make it quick and easy to access it, to open the way to an infinite amount of information for anyone living on the planet - science fiction writers and dreamers have written about this before. "Wikipedia" appeared because it was waited too long and long. And the other day the world encyclopedia celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

"General creativity"?

It seemed once a utopia - to create such a mechanism for accumulating knowledge, a contribution to which any person can make, just like anyone has the right to get the necessary information from some common information resource. The Big Academic Machine from Sergei Snegov's 1966 novel People Like Gods can be considered the literary prototype of Wikipedia.

Something similar was described by the Strugatskys when they told about the "World of Noon" - it was the Big Planetary Informatory. In reality, the largest encyclopedia was created at the beginning of the 15th century in China under Emperor Yongle. It included the contents of all the books in the imperial library, including works of art, and was organized by topic-category. Then, to create this gigantic collection, about twenty thousand books were written with a total volume of half a million pages. Yongle's creation held the title of the largest encyclopedia in history for six hundred years, until it lost the palm to Wikipedia. It happened in 2007.

Attempts to create the same Informatory, a repository of knowledge, were also made in the 20th century. And in March 2000, businessman Jimmy Wales launched an online encyclopedia project, which was created by experts and went through several stages of peer review. It was Nupedia, the immediate predecessor of the future Wikipedia. Wales hired graduate philosopher Larry Sanger as editor.

The case, however, was progressing extremely slowly - only two articles were written in a few months, a little more than ten in a year. But Wales came up with the idea to organize the filling of the encyclopedia in a different way, by the forces of the users themselves. Strictly speaking, it would be more of a reference site where people could change the content of the article pages themselves, as well as add new information. This approach worked almost immediately. The official date for the creation of Wikipedia was January 15, 2001. By the end of 2001, the site already contained over twenty thousand articles. The site did not remain only in English for a long time, soon after the launch a German section was opened, followed by Catalan, French and others. Wikipedia was published in Russian in May 2001.

Who writes Wikipedia?

The creators of Wikipedia - Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger - have developed a number of principles on which the work of the world encyclopedia is based. These are verifiability, neutral point of view, lack of censorship. Wikipedia articles do not claim to be true - but the information they contain must be independently verified. It is forbidden to publish your own ideas and theories, "original research".

Any user can write and edit Wikipedia articles - the exception applies only to the category of pages that are especially susceptible to vandalism and abuse, those are edited only by administrators or a special category of contributors. It is possible to create and edit Wikipedia anonymously - by the way, according to research, users who wish to remain incognito participate in the creation of Wikipedia no less conscientiously than those who work under their own name and have already earned some reputation in this field. Other studies show that very often edits come from commercial corporations or government agencies. It is no wonder - "Wikipedia" can be called one of the most important and influential information resources in the world.

By the way, the name - "Wikipedia" - was born from the combination of the word "wiki" - this is the name of the software that was used to create the site, and, of course, the second part of the word "encyclopedia". The name Wikipedia was suggested by Larry Sanger. The family of related wiki projects includes "Wiktionary", "Wikiquote", "Wikisklad" and other Internet resources. The company owns Wikipedia and its derivative sites, the Wikimedia Foundation.

What strikes and annoys "Wikipedia"

There is hardly a single Internet user in the modern world who has never come across a global electronic library. That is why the descriptions of "Wikipedia" abound with amazing numbers and records. At the moment, it contains more than three hundred language sections, among them there are those written in artificial languages - Esperanto and Ido. The total number of articles is over forty million. But the point is not only in quantitative indicators - it is important that Wikipedia has turned out to be firmly embedded in modern reality, it reflects the state of human society and, in a sense, determines its further informational life.

Despite the fact that the texts from Wikipedia have nothing to do with scientific literature or any expert opinions, it is tempting to refer to this electronic encyclopedia when writing a variety of materials. The thing is that the information existing in Wikipedia is recognized by the majority of users - which, of course, is still not tantamount to its truth. However, the very principles on which the existence of Wikipedia is based are relentlessly criticized. This project is often denied the very claim to the title of an encyclopedia, noting that the rule of anti-elitism, disregard for the opinion of professionals affects the reliability of the texts - they contain a huge number of inaccuracies and errors.

The rejection of censorship is met with resistance from some states, which are trying to either correct the texts that are "wrong" from their point of view, or even stop users from accessing Wikipedia on their territory. Turkey, China, Uzbekistan, Iran, Tunisia, Thailand blocked this Internet resource for different periods and on different scales. In Russia, an attempt to block Wikipedia by court order was made in August 2015. Nevertheless, the universal reference site continues to develop, and its creators continue to gain recognition. Jimmy Wales was awarded the Niels Bohr Gold Medal in 2013 for "making a dream as old as human intelligence and the collection of the Library of Alexandria." philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam, who predicted the modern principles of education 500 years ago.