''The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia'' is a 2009
popular history
Popular history is a broad genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. The term is used in contradistinction to professio ...
book by
new media
New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...
researcher and writer
Andrew Lih
Andrew Lih (; born 1968)[Andrew Lih]
" Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
(in English).Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...
, Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...
and Ward Cunningham, to brief accounts of infamous events in Wikipedia's history such as the Essjay controversy
The Essjay controversy was an incident in which Ryan Jordan, a Wikipedia editor who went by the username "Essjay", falsely presented himself as a university professor of religion from 2005 to 2007, during which time he was elected to top position ...
and the Seigenthaler incident
In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney ...
.
Lih describes the importance of early influences on Wikipedia including Usenet
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
, HyperCard
HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...
, Slashdot
''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evalu ...
, and MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia. According to founder Sunir Shah, it ran on "a hacked-up version of UseModWiki". In April 2013, after several spam attacks and a period of downtime, the sit ...
. He also explores the cultural differences found within sister projects such as the German Wikipedia, the Chinese Wikipedia, and the Japanese Wikipedia. The book also covers the Citizendium
Citizendium ( ; "the citizens' compendium of everything") is an English-language wiki-based free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
It was first announced in September 2006 as a fork of the Engli ...
project, originally a fork of Wikipedia by co-founder Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...
.
There is a foreword by Wales, and an afterword partially created by volunteers through an online wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
detailing the problems and opportunities of Wikipedia's future.
Points
Since its founding, Wikipedia grew quickly. More than half of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google.The English edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the big leagues.
Lih explains thatWikipedia became an instant phenomenon because of both supply and demand. . . . Balanced and reliable content is a rare commodity, in high demand. The Internet has a deep supply of volunteers willing to share a deep pool of knowledge, but they are widely dispersed geographically and logistically. Provide an online agora for these two elements to come together, and you have Wikipedia.
Founder Wales has said that, "We make the Internet not suck."
Reception
According to ''The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'', Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the ''Yongle Encyclopedia
The ''Yongle Encyclopedia'' () or ''Yongle Dadian'' () is a largely-lost Chinese ''leishu'' encyclopedia commissioned by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty in 1403 and completed by 1408. It comprised 22,937 manuscript rolls or chapters, in 1 ...
''. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.
''The Wall Street Journal'' also says Lih's book is somewhat like Wikipedia itself.The Telegraph
''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include:
Australia
* ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...
'' said that the author "conveys a vivid sense of Wikipedian
The Wikipedia community, collectively known colloquially as Wikipedians, is an informal community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an '' Oxford Diction ...
talent and provides a useful primer on the computing culture that gave it birth."
Publication
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