Wikimedia Foundation, that has several ongoing ‘online collaborative projects’ like the Wikipedia, organizes a yearly fest of wiki-inclined Internet geeks called Wikimania. This year the event just concluded in Taipei, Taiwan from 3-5 Aug.
Wikimania started in 2005 in Germany. The second edition took place in US. For the third conference there were willing hosts like London, Turin and Alexandria, but Taipei got the nod to hold it. The bidding for hosting the 2008 event is currently on.
I’ve been reading the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ interview that appeared in today’s New York Times’ net edition.
2-3 interesting points emerge from it. Wikipedia already has nearly 2 million topics in English and there is still no sign of its abating. By the way, it has about 7.9 million articles in 253 languages including Bengali (see the article on Kolkata in Bengali).
The reason why Wikipedia is growing and will continue to grow is because it is being increasingly seen as a giant global encyclopedia. In the interview Jimmy gives the example of a Polish participant who carried a book of biographies of 20,000 notable Polish people to last year’s Wikimania.
The man randomly selected 100 personalities from the exhaustive volume, and on checking it was found that less than 2% of them found mention in the English Wikipedia.
The other reason of Wikipedia’s overwhelming relevance arises from the fact that its volunteering editors constantly upgrade the information already there. For example, as Jimmy says, the article on Julius Caesar would have been edited several times in the past week.
This explains that as their evaluation changes over time even the historical figures and events long past are still edited. Isn’t that the reason why history as a subject is considered as being under constant evolution?
The Wikipedia site is one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide. This is not surprising given that starting from a school goer doing her project work to an Internet researcher attending to a complex financial analysis, the journey for seeking information ends at Wikipedia.
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