NARRATOR: A history of Wikipedia
in two and a half minutes.
The history of Wikipedia actually begins with this man,
Ward Cunningham,
who in 1994 created a new website model known as a Wiki.
Wikis are websites that allow users
to create an edit information
on the site in real time.
Now, even though Wikis have been around for awhile,
only recently have they been used widely.
Now they're revolutionizing the way people collaborate
and share ideas and information on the internet.
Fast forward the March of 2000,
when these two guys, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
decided that they wanted to create
a free online encyclopedia,
that would rival the likes of Microsoft Encarta
or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wales and Sanger called their project Nupedia,
Nupedia was a for-profit venture
that required its articles to undergo
a strict peer review process,
before being published for public access.
Contributors to Nupedia had to be experts
in their respective fields,
and PhDs were generally preferred.
Unfortunately, in the early 2000s
the internet was experiencing some growing pains,
and many upstart dot-coms were failing.
Nupedia wasn't immune to the online economy,
and its lack of resources, lack of direction
and cumbersome review process,
caused the project to go belly up in 2003,
in its three year existence,
Nupedia produced only 24 articles.
Now around the same time Nupedia started,
Wales and Sanger used Wiki technology
to create Wikipedia.
Wikipedia was launched in January of 2001
and was intended to be a discussion forum
where the public could suggest and edit content
for potential submission to Nupedia.
Now, unlike Nupedia anyone could create, edit and discuss
the content on Wikipedia.
After Nupedia's failure in 2003,
Wales and Sanger looked at Wikipedia,
now in comparison to Nupedia's 24 articles,
Wikipedia had produced a little over 20,000,
surprised by the popularity and success of Wikipedia,
Jimmy Wales decided to abandon Nupedia peer review model
and focus on encouraging the anyone can edit model
on Wikipedia.
Larry Sanger did not approve of this decision
and left the project altogether.
Since 2003, Wikipedia has grown to include
over 10 million articles in 260 languages,
nearly 3 million articles in English alone.
Wikipedia continually ranks
in the top 10 websites on the internet,
in terms of page views,
and its popularity has actually encouraged Google News
to start linking directly to Wikipedia's content
from within it's news articles,
and through it all,
Wikipedia has kept it's anyone can edit mantra.
Wikipedia has had its share of praise and criticism,
triumphs and controversies,
and though the future of the project
may not be completely certain,
one thing is for sure, whether you love it or you hate it,
Wikipedia has drastically affected
how we access and share information on the internet.