Larry Sanger

“ Another area in which one might well think that Wikipedia is of importance is as an online, collaborative project. I say this because it tests and demonstrates the viability of completely wide-open, collaborative writing, made possible only by the Internet, and implemented perhaps for the first time by wiki software. The Web is of course an amazing medium, permitting the extremely rapid propogation of and interlinking between documents, and thereby providing a lot of new ways to learn, discuss, and collaborate. ”

“ First of all, Wikipedia's contributors--called Wikipedians--understand that their efforts will be freely distributable forever. That is, I think, one of the main incentives they have to participate. If the organizers of the project were instead to claim the content for themselves, and not release it freely, the participants would have the sense that they were merely working for someone else's gain. But since the content is free, contributors instead have the sense that they are working for the benefit of a worldwide audience. ”

“ Actually, there is a bit of a tension between the facts that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia project and that it is a wiki. When people arrive at the website and see that they can edit any page, and that there is little central oversight, it is immediately evident that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia only because we decided to make it one. ”

“ But over time, articles improve considerably, and a number of our articles are nearly as good as anything you'll find in any encyclopedia. That's because the core group of our contributors includes quite a few Ph.D.'s, professors, professionals, and top-flight students. So I would say that a better way to estimate the reliability of Wikipedia, than simply to say that it permits cranks and vandals to contribute, is to observe that the articles that are now part of Wikipedia have been created by a general public under the general guidance of some very smart, articulate people. ”

“ In academia, we learn, one way or another, that the reputation of an author is very important for determining credibility, and reputation is determined to a great extent by such things as faculty appointments and by publications. Given that, how can we respect the credibility of a project to which any anonymous user can drop any string of characters onto a Wikipedia page? There are a lot of other, closely related objections. If anyone can contribute, how do we know that what we're reading hasn't been written by a crank, a mediocre student, or someone with an ax to grind? ”

“ For all we know, maybe no open content encyclopedia will ever develop into anything that can compete with Britannica, for reasons that we can see now only murkily. But if they have anything to worry about, it is the fact, as I explained earlier, that, since it is open content, Wikipedia is quite naturally an institution--meaning that we have the advantage of time. ”

“ Of course, there are a number of books and articles that have been released under an open content license, which you can read, for example, at Andamooka.org; but very many of those books are, again, aimed at programmers. Like the Internet as a whole, both wiki and the open content concept have started out being of interest mainly to programmers; but, if it succeeds rather better than it has done so far, I think Wikipedia will help to make the wiki concept and the open content concept popular among a much broader audience. ”

“ First, Wikipedia is a WikiWiki. What exactly does that mean? I am told that the word, "WikiWiki," or just "wiki" for short, comes from a Hawaiian word for "quick." Now, there's some disagreement about what constitutes a wiki, but basically it's a software application that allows people to collaborate on the writing of an entire website, without any central editorial mechanism necessary. Participants just go in and edit any page they want, whenever they want, working at their own pace. ”

“ But those older wikis have been mainly of interest and of use to computer programmers; being an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a much broader appeal. I think Wikipedia has proven and will continue to prove to the general online public, in a way that the other wikis could not, that online collaborative writing in a radically open context is a viable option. I think that as Wikipedia becomes better known and as it grows, it will be pointed to as an example of how and why open, collaborative writing can produce useful content. ”

“ Basically, the reason that wikis work as well as they do is that people feel free to add content to them. Now, in organizing the English language Wikipedia project, I think we've discovered that a wiki can be guided to satisfy certain basic policy constraints. ”

“ The second reason it's important that Wikipedia is open content is that this helps to make the project an institution that can take on a life of its own. If, for whatever reason, the organizers can no longer support the project--we definitely don't expect that to happen, by the way--then others can pick up where we left off, if necessary. ”

“ To take that question seriously--"What about in ten or twenty years?"--requires that we assume that the project is going to exist in ten or twenty years. Few things in this life are certain, but we can rest a lot more assured that Wikipedia will still exist in ten or twenty years precisely because it is open content. A lot of people care about this project, and the license guarantees that it will stay free to continue to develop. ”

“ We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of traffic. All the while, no doubt in part due to links to our articles from Google, an increasing number of other websites link to Wikipedia, increasing the standing of Wikipedia pages in Google results. ”

“ So it's not just nonsensical to suggest that we might ask people who are writing in other languages to translate a longer, English language article on a subject, if such an article exists in English. We could ask people working on the French language wiki, for example, to do that ”