SAN FRANCISCO — Wikipedia, the online reference tool that's allowed countless students to avoid the library, turns 10 today.

The free collaborative encyclopedia's growth during the last decade into the fifth-most visited Internet site in the world indicates how much more it's become than that.

Wikipedia, run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation of San Francisco, has matured into the closest thing to a global corpus of all human knowledge (other than, perhaps, the somewhat less tidily organized Internet itself).

“It compiles almost everything, and the thing that's really interesting about Wikipedia now is it can influence the world it seeks to document,” said Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.” “It's not just this passive thing that sits on the shelves.”

In November, nearly 411 million people around the globe visited Wikimedia sites, up 18 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore Inc. Wikipedia features some 17 million articles in 270 languages.

Business Channel

Now Playing:
  • Now Playing
    Millennials Rejoice, These Avocados Have Less FatFortuneTime
  • Event-Driven Funds Are Struggling, Here's WhyWochit
  • 10 things we no longer do because of technologyWibbitz
  • Audi's new rent-a-car service expandsWochit
  • Check Out Aston Martin’s New Luxury Sports ConvertibleFortuneTime
  • Wells Fargo Signals Upcoming Profit DifficultiesWochit
  • Apple CEO Tim Cook Reflects On Some Lessons From Steve JobsWochit
  • Tesla To Recall 11,000 Model X SUVsWochit
  • Don't Call "Unicorn Sleep" a Bed-in-a-BoxCheddar
  • Urban Outfitters Announces 20% Off Beauty ProductsWochit

And all before reaching its teens.

From the early days, the hope of Wikipedia's founders had been that tapping into the collective wisdom of humanity, by allowing anyone to contribute and to edit articles, would over time add up to the most complete, impartial and accurate information source around.

Zealots and pranksters have done their level best to undermine the theory over the years, inserting everything from subtly misleading shadings to egregious falsehoods. But several studies have concluded that Wikipedia's overall accuracy nearly matches that of print encyclopedias, including a 2005 report in the journal Nature that found it just shy of the standard bearer, the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which disputed the results).

As of May 2010, 42 percent of all U.S. adults (or 53 percent of adult Internet users) used Wikipedia to look up information, an increase from 25 percent in February 2007, according to a Pew survey. That makes it more popular than instant messaging. For Internet users with at least a college degree, the number jumps to 69 percent.

Yet another hint of Wikipedia's influence are the more than 400 events (and counting, as of press time) scheduled to celebrate its 10th anniversary today around the globe.

So what's the plan for the next 10 years?

In a conference call with journalists earlier this week, co-founder Jimmy Wales and Executive Director Sue Gardner said the goal is to expand the breadth of topics and diversity of voices on the site.

In 2011 and beyond, they want to reach out to more women, older people, experts in the arts and humanities and less-represented geographic areas such as South America.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Wikipedia-marks-10th-anniversary-957654.php
www.mysanantonio.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-43
222984
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GADV5TNRQFGU3WURRZOSBOOSGHF3YMX2
<urn:uuid:67cff0f4-456a-41d6-8e5b-ed980ae1018d>
2017-10-17T15:31:49Z
151.101.32.204
text/html
sha1:3NYYZPBHNFDZ3SKXT3245VPPSHUFM6JX
<urn:uuid:93cd5d36-ead0-41f1-ae0a-87d41a59f595>
http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/Wikipedia-marks-10th-anniversary-957654.php
response
<urn:uuid:c15c263d-e8e6-40fb-a583-3de6b1a7d746>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-232-145-162.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-43
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf