The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, without which we can no longer imagine life, has turned 20.
The world's main online encyclopedia has more than 40 million articles in 301 languages, and it seems to have answers to all questions: how many children Pushkin had, who Maradona scored his first goal against, how the Large Hadron Collider works, and what to see in a neighboring town.
This January, Wikipedia celebrates its 20th anniversary: on January 15, 2001, the website Wikipedia.com was launched. It did not appear out of nowhere; before it, there was the Nupedia project, which also claimed to be a global repository of knowledge. However, Nupedia developed slowly; each article had to go through seven stages of editing and verification before publication. Wikipedia had no such bureaucracy; articles were checked and edited on the fly, and the new encyclopedia began to grow like yeast.
The name "Wikipedia" itself was proposed by Howard Cunningham: not its creator, but the inventor of the wiki software technology, which not only formed the basis of the encyclopedia but is also used in other data storage projects. Cunningham remembered how at Honolulu Airport in Hawaii, a local employee helped him get from one terminal to another on time by bus: "Mister, this bus is wiki-wiki!" In Hawaiian, wiki means "fast" – and in the new encyclopedia, data was also processed "wiki-wiki."
The main feature of Wikipedia is what has been written in its header to this day: "The Free Encyclopedia." "Free" means that anyone can contribute to its development: propose a new article or make edits to existing ones. The encyclopedia is written by the whole world.
Are you an academic in nuclear physics and want to write an article about a little-known elementary particle for the encyclopedia? Please do. Are you a chef and believe that the recipe for Olivier salad mentioned in an encyclopedia article has errors? Make corrections.
Are you an ordinary person but think your grandmother and her life story deserve mention? Write about your grandmother and accompany the article with her photos. Wikipedia is not written by some specialists with diplomas and licenses; anyone can try.
Wikipedia first appeared on a US server and in English. As early as February 2001, it had over a thousand English-language articles. Incidentally, the first non-English articles in Wikipedia were in German: Germany was the first to join the project, and by March 2001, Wikipedia appeared in the German-language space. Then other languages began to participate.
The first article in Russian appeared in May 2001, and a funny thing happened: it was an article "Russia," which initially showed only the phrase "Russia is a great country," and then suddenly a phrase added by some jokers appeared: "Russia is the homeland of elephants" with a hyperlink to a scientific article about mammoths. Only by the end of 2002 did the Russian-language Wikipedia begin to look like a full-fledged part of the global encyclopedia.
Today Wikipedia is twenty years old. The vast majority of internet users refer to it as the primary source of information. But the main thing is not that it has a lot of text, but that anyone can write that text. This is both an advantage and a pitfall for Wikipedia: it is not uncommon to have to edit articles written by not very adequate authors. Those who sincerely believe that the Earth is flat and stands on three whales – and want this great truth to be published in Wikipedia. With such conspiracy theorists, the conversation is short.
But much more complex questions arise regarding serious scientific information: for example, if a scientific article disputes whether one or two chlorine atoms attach to the described molecule – here a professional dispute arises, which those outside the profession are unlikely to notice, but it is necessary for science. And it is good if it arises, otherwise information with errors may be published in the encyclopedia.
Now all articles submitted to Wikipedia are reviewed by specialists who filter out falsehoods – but they also work on a volunteer basis. Therefore, one should not forget that information in Wikipedia may not be entirely plausible. In the scientific community, references to Wikipedia are categorically rejected; in major newspapers and magazines, there have been cases of authors being fired just for citing Wikipedia – it is not considered a reliable source of information.
Wikipedia tries to ensure that everything published in it is true: it tracks who submits article requests, attracts reviewers with academic degrees, and verifies any facts mentioned in articles as much as possible. Nevertheless, conflicts and disputes constantly arise. Sometimes an article about a scientific hypothesis is written by a proponent of one theory, while a proponent of another theory feels offended. This is still a purely scientific dispute.
More often, authors disagree on much more practical issues. Of course, statements like "Author X is a complete idiot" are quickly removed, but insertions with not entirely reliable analytical data can remain online for a long time.
Wikipedia is a rich database, but the reliability of this data should still be checked. Sometimes articles in Wikipedia turn out to be not real data but urban legends. They may be accompanied by photos or videos with captions from unknown sources or no captions at all. So do not believe everything in Wikipedia: it is written by people, and people make mistakes.
And also: do not think that if something is not in Wikipedia, it does not exist at all. Wikipedia is written by people, and they have not yet managed to put everything there. There are still many phenomena in the world that have not yet been described in Wikipedia, and perhaps never will be.