Wikipedia is perhaps the last remaining vestige of the Internet we thought we’d build, two and a half decades ago. It was born of the same stuff that fueled open-source software and freeware, open access to knowledge and a democratization of data. This was part of the Internet that was supposed to make the world a fairer and more knowledgeable place, narrowing the gap between the haves and have nots. It was an “information superhighway” that would connect the global village and, according to the McGraw-Hill Computer Desktop Encyclopedia of 2001, “help all citizens regardless of their income level.”

We know better now. But despite the Internet’s hard pivot towards capitalism, Wikipedia is still around. It just celebrated its 25^th birthday a few weeks ago. According to Wikipedia itself, there are 18 edits to its content every second from Wikipedians from all over the world. There are versions in over 300 different languages, and all of this receives 10,000 page views every second. There are over 7 million articles in the English version, and 500 new articles are added per day. In the last 25 years, almost 12 million users have edited the English Wikipedia at least once.

This was not what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger envisioned in 2001, when they started Wikipedia. It was just supposed to be a collaborative sandbox that would allow for editing and drafting of articles which would then be included in their other project, Nupedia. Nupedia was more centrally controlled and structured. This side project used the wiki platform developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” and Cunningham thought it had a little more panache than just calling his platform something like “Quickweb.”

The concept behind wikis is all about creating and empowering collaborative communities, opening the platform up to anyone who wanted to contribute. Wales and Sanger believed this would be a perfect way to quickly draft new entries at scale, but they still envisioned themselves and a team of editors as the gatekeepers who would control what would show up in Nupedia. But the pace of contribution soon outstripped the ability of Nupedia’s editorial team to keep up. The decision was made completely open the doors to contribution and make Wikipedia the end destination.

This completely open concept was a preview of what was to come. It may have been the one of the first times we saw what would become a common theme: a web-based platform unleashing the potential of a latent market by connecting an open community of suppliers (in this case, editors and contributors) and an audience of consumers at scale. It would be repeated by Uber, AirBnB and others.

The difference with Wikipedia was that – in this case – no one was making any money. The information was free. As a comparison, the competitor, the online version of Encyclopedia Brittanica, charged a yearly subscription of $50.

This upset of the information market didn’t go down well with everyone. This was especially true for academics and researchers. Students were warned not to use Wikipedia as a source. It was roundly criticized for its open nature and lack of peer review. To this day, much of the academic community still looks down its nose at Wikipedia, even though at least one academic study has shown that Wikipedia’s accuracy is on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica and far outstrips it terms of the number of entries and the sheer breadth of content. This ongoing hostility towards Wikipedia is unfortunate, because the very same audience that sneers at it could be its most valuable contributors, especially in their own areas of expertise.

Of course, part of this lingering resentment could come in part due to the glacially-slow resistance to change from academic publishers, many of whom are still clinging to exorbitant subscription models. These publishers are resisting to the bitter end writer and iconoclast Stewart Brand’s feeling that “information wants to be free.”

Despite all this, Wikipedia has not only survived but thrived. It is still very much a part of the online information ecosystem, 25 years after its birth. And yes, it might be an anachronistic and naïve throwback to a more idealistic time, but it has proven at least one maxim of the open-source community. Eric. S. Raymond, in his seminal and prescient essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called this maxim Linus’s Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. The law states, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”  

Or, to paraphrase, “Given enough eyeballs, most Wikipedia entries are mostly accurate.”