Wiki Wednesday

 

Launched on this day in 2001!

Jimmy Wales and Lawrence Sanger first failed with Nupedia in 2000, which only allowed peer-reviewed and edited content written by experts.  With Wiki being open to anyone, they found success.

Within a year, they had 20,000 articles in 18 languages.

There were questions of reliability, of course, and I remember being told to use it as a source for a school paper would be detrimental.  But I've mostly found that people want to adhere to the principal of an accurate, online encyclopedia.

A 2005 investigation by Nature magazine found that scientific entries came close to those of Encyclopedia Britannica.