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Wikipedia has become a source of reliable information for millions and in an Internet awash with unreliable sourcing, it has become a public good.

Journalism it has been said is the first draft of history, and if you want to find out more about how that popular expression came about, Wikipedia is the first entry that will give you further information.

In many ways, Wikipedia has also become the first draft of history. Its online community of unpaid editors keep it updated just as quick as, if not quicker than, journalists can get their stories out.

As the online encyclopedia turns 20 years old this month, its difficult to imagine that somehow the free service continues. It has now become an almost indispensable tool for researchers, students and journalists in addition to other passing users.

Teachers and university professors in the past would often warn or even chastise their students that they could not rely on Wikipedia. Its sources were shoddy or unreliable. It couldnt be fact-checked they bemoaned. And worse, how could lay, anonymous people, be trusted to write about history, politics, science, medicine, movies and so much more.

Yet now, perhaps secretly, there is likely not one teacher or professor that wouldnt use the site to look up cursory information, they may be even contributors.

Wikipedia even hosts a page Wikipedia is not a reliable source, where the page seeks to address its critics stating that because the site is a volunteer-run project there are bound to be mistakes and that it should not be considered a definitive source in and of itself.

Arguably any encyclopedia is a living and evolving body of information and by and large Wikipedia has been a reliable first point of contact.

It is not just in the realm of generalised information that Wikipedia has made its presence felt. Specialised areas of information like medicine have become a useful source of information with its pages viewed billions of times.

In a study looking at Wikipedia's influence in medicine, junior doctors in the US were found to use the site because of its convenience and access to information that was considered to be better and more up-to-date than what might be available in handbooks and textbooks.

Another study by the American university of MIT said, "Our research shows that scientists are using Wikipedia and that it is influencing how they write about the science that they are doing. Wikipedia isn't just a record of what's going on in science, it's actually helping to shape science."

More broadly Wikipedias rate of accuracy has been evaluated as being comparatively similar to Britannica, the most famous book-based encyclopedia.

So how does Wikipedia work?

As the fourth most visited website globally it is a surprisingly slim operation. Less than 450 people are officially employed by Wikipedia. Its the army of volunteers that makes the operation viable.

Anyone with an Internet connection can open an account and begin editing. But its not always as simple as that.

The length of time someone has been editing creates a system of reward and prominence amongst the online editorial Wikipedia community.

Over the years a 200,000 strong community of editors and ad-hoc contributors have grown to become the guardians of this publicly available repository of information.

Now the site boasts millions of pages in 300 languages and is accessed by more than a billion people every month.

The online encyclopedia has been called the last best place on the Internet, and given the polarisation and disinformation that has swamped vast areas of the web the site has withstood the test of time.

Its supposed weakness, that anyone could edit it, has become its enduring strength and those people now jealously guard it.

Source: TRT World

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How Wikipedia shaped the Internet in the last 20 years - TRT World

Twenty years ago today, a tech startup called Nupedia launched a side project. The company had been hard at work producing a free online encyclopaedia, but it was slow going: its strict editing process, comprehensive peer review and focus on expert authors meant it finished only 21 articles in its first year.

The side project would do away with all of that. Instead, anyone would be able to write and edit articles. Nupedias founders were split over whether the trade-off more content with a lower barrier to entry was worth it, but by the end of its first year, the side project had amassed articles on more than 18,000 topics. Nupedia, by the time it shut in 2003, had finished just 25.

That side project, Wikipedia, now has more than 55m articles across 300 languages. With 1.7bn unique visitors a month, it is the 13th most popular website on the internet, according to Amazons monitoring site, Alexa Internet, and the only one in the top 50 to be run on an entirely non-commercial basis (bbc.co.uk just outranks it among UK users).

The encyclopaedias foundational model attracted criticism from day one. Without experts writers or professional editors, many wondered, how could it ensure accuracy? By 2006, as the site celebrated its fifth anniversary, it was the subject of mockery in the mainstream press. One article cited the encyclopaedias claim that David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century to highlight a comedy of errors.

Even in 2006, that particular piece of vandalism was fixed within 11 minutes. These days, Wikipedia has a few more tools to prevent such abuse. The article about Beckham is one of many that is semi-protected, a status that prevents unregistered users from editing it a concession to the reality that not everyone on the internet is interested in contributing to a collective endeavour.

But as the site continues to flourish even as the online environment has transformed, it raises a different set of questions from those of its early doubters. Wikipedia, as one joke goes, works in practice, which is good, because it definitely doesnt work in theory. Why has the site succeeded in building a positive online community where so many others have failed?

Jimmy Wales, its co-founder, cites two things as making the key difference. First, everyone knows what an encyclopedia is. If I say encyclopedia article about the Eiffel Tower, we all know what that should be, so if we set out to write that, we know where we are going and what it should be like. Second, we never regarded Wikipedia as a wide-open free speech forum, its a project to build an encyclopedia. So we try to avoid (as much as we can, we are humans) the typical round and round flame wars of social media.

Wikipedia has issues in the same way that any large institution has issues, but its undoubtedly a remarkable achievement, says Abigail Brady, a long-term editor on the site. In some ways its a relic it dates from a pre-social media era of the web where idealistic attempts to create large collaborative works were just starting.

I think the key to its long-term success has been its lack of commercialisation. Jimmy Wales made a decision that Wikipedia should be non-profit very early on, and stuck to it. There are no ads (beyond the odd pledge drive), and no sense that your labour is being farmed by a company too cheapskate to actually pay people to do data entry. It is a genuine collaborative project.

As Wikipedia has grown, it has moved beyond simple encyclopaedia-style articles. The communitys best points are now visible at times of great upheaval, when collaborative editing allows hundreds of people to work on pulling together an authoritative overview of breaking news events before the events have even finished.

At 6.34pm UK time on 6 January this year, one Wikipedia editor, with the username Another Believer, decided that events in Washington looked important enough to warrant an article. Tentatively titled January 2021 Donald Trump rally, the initial entry was brief: On 6 January 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Washington DC to reject results of the November 2020 presidential election.

One minute later, the Guardians live blog reported: House offices evacuated as Trump supporters storm Capitol barriers. Over the next half-hour, Another Believer continued to update their article alone. Slowly, other administrators began to join in, and the article became the sites key focus for those documenting the rapidly evolving events in Washington. By midnight UK time, the article was 3,000 words long, with a further 3,000 words of footnotes, and a debate was raging over whether to rename it from its latest title, 2021 United States Capitol protests, to its current headline, 2021 storming of the United States Capitol.

The collaborative encyclopaedia still has many barriers to overcome, from an ever-present funding crisis, only partially solved by its donation-driven revenue model, to its undesired role as a silent battlefield for professionally run influence campaigns to rehabilitate reputations, or excise controversy from the internet. And it still faces the same pressures that more conventional reference sources do, as it struggles to represent the history of the world with less of a focus on the white, male wealthy figures who make up so much of recorded history.

But 20 years on, it is difficult to deny that Wikipedia has proved the naysayers wrong. Whether it is the last gasp of a vision of the internet that has all but died out, or a shining beacon lighting the way to a better future, remains to be seen.

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Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future? - The Guardian

Twenty years ago this Friday, January 15, the internet changed forever. Wikipedia went live, gifting the world with a cavern of endless information, both helpful and potentially questionable. The ease with which you can look up Hannibals Retreat is matched only by the ease with which you can look up what happened in the season premiere of Hannibaland you have Wikipedia to thank for that.

In the past 20 years, Wikipedia has been a shorthand source for facts both useful and uselessbut its also been an incredible outlet for time-wasting, for clicking from page to page until youre in so deep you can hardly remember where you started. Sometimes you return from those journeys with nothing, but other times, you come back with something youll never forget. To celebrate the birthday of Wikipedia, The Ringer recounts those glorious wormholes.

Route: The Challenge (TV Series) The Real World MTV List of Programs Broadcast by MTV List of Programs Broadcast by MTV, Former Programming Two-A-Days Two-A-Days, Rush Propst Controversy

Its not hard to get lost on Wikipediadazed, bored, link-hopping with hardly a thought. But then once in awhile, you land on something that snaps you back to life. Thats what happened when I found myself scrolling through the page for MTVs high school football reality show, Two-A-Days. (You remember Two-A-Days, right? That show where every guy had that swoopy haircut?) Nothing about the actual show is illuminated by the entry, but then you get to the section about the guy who coached the team Two-A-Days focused on, Rush Propst. Let me just drop this in: On October 30, 2007, Propst resigned from the head coaching position of Hoover High School effective at the end of the season, while admitting to extramarital affairs and living a double life. Propst revealed he was married to two women and had children with both.

What thewhy wasnt this the show?! Or better yet, why doesnt MTV stop playing Ridiculousness all day and start production on a fictionalized version of this story?! Its like Friday Night Lights if Coach Taylor were an antihero. Anyways, thanks for the pick-me-up, Wikipedia. Andrew Gruttadaro

Route: New York Mets Fred Wilpon Samuel Israel III Faked Death and Ponzi Scheme (separate tabs) Lawrence Joseph Bader

Fans (and enemies!) of the New York Mets will be unsurprised to learn that the rich tapestry of Wikipedia directory pages for both People Who Faked Their Own Death and Pyramid and Ponzi Schemes can be found only a few clicks away from the franchises main page. When the former team owners were revealed to have (knowingly?) gotten got by Bernie Madoffs infamous fraud back in 2008, it wasnt even the first time theyd been associated with a pyramid scheme. And the other instance might have been even stranger: Three years after Samuel Israel IIIs hedge fund, Bayouwhich the Madoffs had invested withwas indicted for fraud in 2005, Israel failed to show up for his prison sentence, faked his death with the help of a line from the TV show M*A*S*H, and was ultimately tracked down by the Feds at a campground.

Israels Wikipedia page links to both of the aforementioned directories, each of which could keep a person clicking all day long (and has!) but the one that stood out to me most was this story of Lawrence Joseph Bader, a father of three (with one more on the way) who disappeared during a fishing trip on Lake Erie in 1957, showed up four days later in Omaha as a man named Fritz Johnson, and then kinda went buck wild: He sat on a flagpole to raise money for polio research; he became a bartender, radio announcer, and TV sports director; he drove a hearse around town; he wore an eyepatch; he traipsed around at archery tournaments. Don Draper could never. Lets go Mets! Katie Baker

Route: Prometheus (2012 film) Prometheus (Greek Mythology) Prometheus, Myths and Legends

This past summer, I wrote about Michael Cavic, a man who lost one of the closest and most controversial swim races in Olympic history to one of the greatest Olympians of all time. During a rather broad conversation, Cavic mentioned that hes a fan of the movie Prometheus and tried to connect some of the underlying thematic elements of the film to his life. I was confusedI had not seen the movie and had no intention to (aliens and alien-related pop culture arent my thing), but I needed a primer on the picture. Wikipedia to the rescue. With apologies to Ridley Scott, I abandoned that page pretty quickly and found myself indulging in a Greek mythology refresher thats been overdue since collegeincluding and especially the origins of the world and humanity. TL;DR, Prometheus created man from clay and stole fire and gave it to the people. And whoa boy, were the other gods pissed about that. Especially Zeus. At the main mans direction, Prometheus suffered all kinds of grisly torture as punishment, including having his liver eaten by an eagle, only for it to grow back the next day, only to have it eaten by an eagle AGAIN. And on and on it went for a while, because if theres one thing the gods do not condone, its a fire heist. Anyway, remember to thank Prometheuss liver next time you cook dinner. John Gonzalez

Route: Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit Ryan Toby City High

Whenever Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit comes on cable, I do what any right-minded person doesI google why Hollywood failed to deliver a third installment. Thankfully, Disney has changed their mind about this matter, but I would like to discuss a particular internet journey I took because of this query. One day, after I found myself clapping on my couch to the Oh Happy Day choir scene for the 876th time, I decided to find out what happened to the actor who played Ahmal. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would unearth something so spectacular: Allow me to introduce Ryan Tobys page.

Before the Killers graced us with the anthem of the decade, Mr. Brightside, there was an impeccable track released in 2001 called What Would You Do? Its a perfect song; if youre of a certain age, I guarantee youre singing the hook right now. And, well, Im ecstatic to report that one of the people responsible for that song was Ryan Toby, who made up one-third of City High, the R&B trio who performed that song. My life changed that day, and it changed because of one website. If you want to be somebody, if you want to go somewhere, you better wake up and use Wikipedia. Bridget Geerlings

Route: List of 1960s Musical Artists Carlos Santana Santana (Band) Santana (Band), Timeline

As a devotee of dad rockor granddad rock, depending on ones frame of referencewho listens to a lot of music made by bands that broke up long ago, I have a soft spot for zombie bands that outlived their life expectancy and continue to tour or record. Im talking about gray-bearded bands that have soldiered on for decades despite departures and deaths, their ever-shifting formations often winnowed to one founding member (at most) who carries on their legacy and retains the legal rights to their name. These groups are like the Lazarus taxa of the entertainment industry, and its difficult to document their histories from original lineups to current incarnations. Fortunately, a fossil record exists: Industrious editors on Wikipedia have preserved some of their rosters and timelines in graphical form; the sprawling displays are something to behold. REO Speedwagon. Steppenwolf. The Temptations. The Beach Boys. The Flying Burrito Brothers. Earth, Wind & Fire. And maybe the most voluminous of all: a scrollable, color-coded roll call of the almost 70 past or present members of Santana, ranging from drummers or bassists who came and went in one year to the 55-year tenure of Carlos Santana himself. This is information, but its also art. Now I just need enough wall space to turn some of these suckers into framed prints and hang them in my home. Ben Lindbergh

Route: Sir Arthur Currie Battle of the Somme Mines on the First Day of the Somme Largest Artificial Nonnuclear Explosions N1 Rocket Sea Dragon (rocket) (separate tab)

Years ago, I was listening to the World War I series of Dan Carlins Hardcore History when further reading about a Canadian general mentioned therein led to underground explosives at a battle he was involved in, which led to one of the best pages on all of Wikipedia: Largest Artificial Nonnuclear Explosions. Every single one of these is worth reading about, and my love for this page has surfaced on The Ringer in articles about Texas City and For All Mankind. The N1 is one of the most powerful rockets ever devised, but would have been dwarfed by NASAs proposed Sea Dragon, a vehicle so massive it could have been launched only by floating it in the middle of the ocean because no facility on Earth could accommodate it. (Here it is depicted in a post-credits sequence in For All Mankind.) My point is: All Wikipedia wormholes lead to giant rockets and/or giant explosions. Michael Baumann

Route: Action Park Action Park, Factors Contributing to the Parks Safety Record Action Park, Fatalities

What begins as a romp through Americas most infamous amusement park eventually turns terrifying. Theres a breakdown of the places ugly safety record, which notes that minors were allowed to operate rides and that accidents were often not reported. Then, gulp, theres a chronological list of the six fatalities that occurred at the park.

Unsurprisingly, Im one of many whos fallen into the Action Park wormhole. The Wiki page was featured on Longform.org; Johnny Knoxville even starred in a movie called Action Point thats loosely based on the place, and there have now been documentaries made about the long-shuttered New Jersey destination.

Growing up in New England, I sadly never got to visit the dangerous Action Park. But its Wiki entry is so extensive that I feel like I have. Alan Siegel

Route: Who the hell even knows?

Im sure (Im not sure) that theres a perfectly reasonable path of clicks that first led me to the List of Unusual Deaths. Ive long since forgotten it, but I keep the list bookmarked for the simple reason that there is no better source of endless Wikipedia wormholes. With entries spanning from the present all the way back to 620 B.C.E, theres plenty thats unusual: The deaths include everything from a fatal blow from a falling tortoise to a deadly toothpick-swallowing to one unlucky teenagers demise after, and I quote, a circus clown swung him around by his heels. Nearly every entry offers a handful of links to additional pagesabout the dearly departed, the palace intrigue, the poison, or, um, death by sawing. Pour one out for those taken too soon, and may your journeys through the lists many burrows carry you safely to your destination. Claire McNear

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What Is the Weirdest Wikipedia Wormhole Youve Fallen Into? - The Ringer

First, the details you probably know: Wikipedia is 20 years old and was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It hosts 55 million articles; 6.2 million of those in English, the rest in overlapping editions across 300 languages. Globally, 280,000 editors work with bots to create and edit the information on the site. On January 12, 2021, just after 1am, Wikipedia made its billionth edit.

In theory, Wikipedia sounds like a disaster. Its a global, volunteer-driven, open source, real-time compendium, created to record the sum of human knowledge, keep revisions transparent, and offer all content to readers free.

And yet, despite early mistrust, its managed to thrive and stay neutral at a time when platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are struggling to retain credibility.

At 20, theres more than articles on the site. You can look for free-to-use images and media files on Wikimedia Commons, access open-learning courses on Wikiversity, check out the species record on Wikispecies, and head to Wikivoyage for travel advisories.

Wikipedia is the 13th most-visited space on the web, according to data put out by The Economist this year. The site updates at a rate of 1.9 edits per second.

It accepts no advertising. No pop-ups, sponsored posts, or commercial videos. This is because the site is hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, funded primarily through crowdsourced donations. Millions of people donated a total of $122 milllion to it in 2019.

In 2007, the English-language edition of Wikipedia surpassed the Ming Dynastys Yongle Encyclopaedia, compiled in 1408, to become the largest reference compendium ever assembled. English Wikipedia consisted of two million articles at the time.

It has 5.5 million articles in Cebuano, the second most common language on the site after English. Its spoken largely in southern Philippines.

In 2015, an art project in New York City saw 106 volumes of English Wikipedia printed by Michael Mandiberg, as Print Wikipedia. It was an effort to represent how information gathering has evolved, and how it can never be contained or updated in books anymore.

Wikipedias even made it off the planet. In April 2019, it travelled 384,400km, when an Israeli lander made it to the surface of the Moon, carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia of the time, engraved on nickel plates. The craft crash landed, but experts say the plates survived.

DID YOU KNOW?

84,000: is the number of articles on the site created or improved via Art + Feminism edit-a-thons globally. The volunteer-led events aim to right Wikipedias strong white-male bias in article selection and research.

1,800: is the number of Hindi articles Raju Jangid, a 22-year-old carpenter from Jodhpur, has single-handedly contributed to the site. He also edited 57,000 pages on Wikipedia, working from his phones keypad, one keystroke at a time, until Wikipedia gifted him a laptop and an internet connection in 2016.

19: is the age of one contributor who had written nearly half the Scots Wikipedia articles until last year. It emerged that the young man had no knowledge of Scots he was from North Carolina in the US and has just been sprinkling Scots words and truncations into regular articles. Its impossible to catch pranksters early on in such a large-format, publicly edited site. The page has this disclaimer: Followin recent revelations, Scots Wikipedia is presently reviewin its airticles for muckle leid inaccuracies.

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Wikipedia at 20: The internets go-to reference site, by the numbers - Hindustan Times

Wikipedia turns 20 today. Over those two decades, it has become one of the most beloved places on the internet, and to this day remains one of the mediums most visionary and overwhelmingly successful projects. Its got everything the internet was intended to be (the free exchange of information, user moderation, a simple, intuitive interface) without all the nasty stuff its become (data mining, privacy invasion, targeted advertising).

And while the site has become a legitimately reputable source for cursory research or fact-checking on, well, anything, its primary use for most visitors is something altogether more trivial. You know what were talking about: whether it was a form of procrastination, a way to cope with insomnia or just something to do to alleviate boredom, weve all fallen down down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Maybe you started out reading the plot summary of a horror movie youre too scared to actually watch and then kept clicking on links and eventually found yourself reading up on the origins of the chicken gun. Perhaps you pulled up the entry on the 25th Amendment this week to brush up on all the potential scenarios being discussed by politicos, got sucked in and wound up perusing the page titled Dumb Laws.

Whatever bizarre, obscure or simply entertaining entries youve found yourself poring over lately, you know how much of a time-suck it can be to aimlessly browse the online encyclopedia. And so does Depths of Wikipedia, a popular Instagram account launched last spring by University of Michigan undergraduate Annie Rauwerda. The page highlights all the funniest, weirdest Wikipedia entries and posts screenshots of them, saving you the time of searching for them on your own. In less than a year, the account has amassed nearly 100,000 followers, and though its a lighthearted endeavor, Rauwerda has also used it to highlight why Wikipedias such an important resource, hosting an edit-a-thon earlier this month.

We caught up with Rauwerda to find out more about what inspired her to create the account, how she manages to track down the craziest entries, and more.

InsideHook: What inspired you to create the Depths of Wikipedia account?

Annie Rauwerda: I was making a collage of Wikipedia excerpts for my friends zine in late April of 2020, got the idea of posting weird Wikipedia screenshots on Instagram, and was surprised that it hadnt already been done. The success of accounts posting pictures of amusing text (like @nytcookingcomments and @freemovieideas) made me think it could get big. Initially, my most ambitious goal was 10,000 followers, so its cool that its approaching 100,000 already!

How do you find all the crazy or funny Wikipedia entries you post on the account? Do you have a process for looking for them, or do you just stumble upon them?

Sometimes I find content in the wild, but the majority of posts are either from DM submissions or Twitter. Theres also the holy grailList of Unusual Articles, which is great if Im in a rut.

Tell me a little about yourself. What do you do outside of managing the account?

Im an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying Neuroscience. Because my classes are all online, I moved to New York City in August, where I have a part-time job tutoring elementary schoolers. I spend most of my time studying, but I also really like exploring New York by bike, listening to audiobooks, and doing both at the same time. Im a Pilates instructor, and before the March shutdown, I was teaching a couple of classes a week. Id love to eventually find a career working at the intersection of science, education and the internet.

How much time do you spend on Wikipedia generally?

I feel like Im on Wikipedia constantly, though if you totaled up the time, it would probably only average to about an hour a day. Wikipedia lends itself well to weird rabbit holes, obviously, but I also really love that the main page links articles that give context to current events. Since getting more involved as an editor, Ive enjoyed the interactions Ive had while working on articles.

Do you have any personal favorite Wikipedia entries?

The one that inspired me to start the account is this photo of a cow captioned A healthy cow lying on her side is not immobilized; she can rise whenever she chooses. It really epitomizes my early quarantine mindset.

Another favorite is this perfectly passive-aggressive excerpt from the page Popemobile.

I know you did a Virtual Edit-a-thon earlier this month. What can you tell me about that? What made you want to do it, and how did it go?

Yes! I love the way Wikipedia democratizes education and Im glad I was able to give back. Wikimedia NYC and I have been in contact for a few months and they provided both instruction and volunteers to answer questions. Overall, it was a great success: we had 107 editors, 211 articles edited or created, and 251 references added. Those edits have been viewed over 500,000 times already. Its still so inspiring to me that everyone has access as well as an opportunity to contribute to the vault of human knowledge.

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How One Instagram Account Finds the Weirdest Stuff on Wikipedia - InsideHook