Wikipedia is one of the most important websites on the Internet today, but you might be surprised to learn that it began as a side project of another online encyclopedia. That was called Nupedia, to be a traditional encyclopedia written by experts, free and online, but only one person had final publishing authority and it wasn’t quite taking off. 

As a founder of Nupedia, I led the group to establish a farm team of sorts for future Nupedia articles. We used a new software platform to make collaboration easy – the Wiki, Wikipedia. 

It happened to be the perfect way to write many pages very quickly. Soon enough, Nupedia couldn’t keep up and Wikipedia took center stage. We were creating not just a free content encyclopedia but a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Other language editions appeared quickly, over 270 at last count, and it was soon followed by sister projects like Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikitionary. 

In 2003 I created the Wikimedia Foundation to ensure that Wikipedia could keep up with its own growth. Wikipedia gets almost 400 million visitors every month and the list of sites visited more often is very short and very famous. 

Wikipedia celebrates its 10th anniversary in January, 2011, and in these 10 years has become one of the most popular websites in the world. I still lead the community and the Wikimedia Foundation helps us to make Wikipedia what it is today.

Who does edit Wikipedia? 

Over time, as many as 1.2 million people have contributed to Wikipedia. As of 2010 there’re more than 11 million monthly edits to all Wikipedias in all languages. According to one survey, we have about twice the proportion of PH.Ds compared to the general public. On theEnglish Wikipedia, almost 50% have no religion and 40.6% of French editors claim to believe in Pastafarianism. It would be fair to say that most Wikipedians are not average. 

One reason maybe is that editing a single page is easy but getting heavily involved is harder. The community is defined by more than 200 combined policies, guidelines and essays, to say nothing with the discussions and reviews, committees and notice boards, Wikiprojects and more. All the site content is decided by Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors. The Wikimedia Foundation has no editorial role whatsoever.

The Foundation’s job is to keep the servers running and the lights on. But there is more to it than that. The Foundation is also growing Wikipedia’s presence worldwide:  more data centers to speed up Wikipedia worldwide and even bringing its first office outside of the United States to India. 

Wikipedia is already very popular in the west and in the north. A new challenge is going to be making Wikipedia available to the developing world as well. The Foundation is a charity and runs entirely on donations – some from corporations and institutions, but the vast majority from its millions of editors and readers.

It’s incredible what has been accomplished already. But Wikipedia is far from done.

As any reader knows some articles are very good but some are not. Wikipedia still needs a lot of work. Yet this is a new challenge – not just building an encyclopedia from scratch, but making it better, more accurate, more citations. Not just broad, but deep. There’s never been anything like Wikipedia before and its future horizon is very, very long. As Wikipedia enters its second decade, it’s up to all of us to make sure it gets even better.