Archive for the ‘Wikipedia’ Category

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

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

How Wikipedia is chronicling the Capitol attack in real time – Fast Company

On the afternoon of January 6, as a giant crowd began to swarm the U.S. Capitol, Jason Moore, a 36-year-old digital strategist, was at home in Portland, Oregon, switching between CNN and MSNBC. I try not to get caught up in the sensationalism of cable news, he says, but admits he had to watch. Soon, concern became shock. I could not believe what I was witnessing, and also knew history was being made.

So he got to work. Moore is a veteran editor on Wikipedia, spending hours a day creating, shepherding, and policing articles. He started in 2007, ranging across topics of personal interest like music or architecture, but since early last year hes been focused on the pandemic and political protests. Just after 1:30 p.m. EST, as rioters and police clashed at the bottom of the Capitol steps, he wrote, On January 6, 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., to reject results of the November 2020 presidential election. He appended links to a couple of sources deemed reliable by the communityNPR and The Washington Postclicked save, and notified some other editors about his article. It was tentatively titled January 2021 Donald Trump Rally.

Was this really worthy of its own article, they asked? At that moment, protestersrioterswere battling with police, both sides spraying chemicals. It was hard to tell notability in the moment, Moore wrote under his username, Another Believer. But what were witnessing is unprecedented (like so many things lately).

While riotous, misinformation-fueled mobs were breaking into the buildingforcing lawmakers to evacuate, halting the counting of the Electoral College votes for several hours, and leaving several people deadanother kind of crowd began gathering to build upon Moores first sentence. After a brief trickle, Wikipedia veterans and newcomers quickly piled in, scrambling to add details, citations, and photos. On a popular Facebook group for editors, someone posted a warning to Wikipedians in D.C. who had gone to the scene to take photos: Please please please be safe! Your life is more important than getting the perfect media for Commons.

One admin soon changed the title from Rally to Protest. Another placed edit protections on the page to foil vandals. Debates erupted on the articles Talk page, its public discussion room, as editors wrestled with many of the same hard questions breaking out in newsroom Slack channels across the country. This is no longer just a protest, but what is it?

As facts came in, as editors double-checked and pruned according to Wikipedia standards, the text grew and shrank and grew again, so that only the most relevant verifiable and neutral language remained. Once other editors showed up to contribute, I aided, facilitated, and watched eagerly as the article developed, says Moore.

At the peak of editing, there was a change being saved every 10 seconds, estimates Molly White, a software developer and longtime Wikipedia editor who began working on the article in its earliest minutes. From her desk in Cambridge, Mass., shes been editing the page for hours every day since. It was one of those things where I was shocked and horrified at the news as it was unfolding, she says, and felt like helping with the article was a more productive way to process everything than just doomscrolling.

About 24 hours after the attack began, she and Moore and 406 other volunteers had crafted a detailed, even-keeled account of an event as it was unfolding5,000 words long, with 305 references. Those numbers have since mushroomed, along with page views: 1.8 million and counting.

And that was only the English version: By Thursday morning, there were already articles in more than 40 different languages, including Esperanto.

Theres an old joke about Wikipedias crowdsourced competence: Good thing it works in practice, because it sure doesnt work in theory. Its particularly true, White says, when it comes to hundreds of people all trying to write about a current event in real time, as sources publish conflicting and sometimes inaccurate information.

Still, the articlenow stretching to more than 15,000 words, or 90 printed pagesis far from perfect. Its the product of an editing community that tends to skew largely Western, white and male, with all of its biases and blind spots. Wrestling with those issues and testing each sentence for verifiability and neutrality can spark heated, incessant debateespecially when the facts amount to a reality that quite simply defies comprehension. And from the articles first hours, nothing has been more divisive than the title itself.

As police were finally pushing rioters out of the Capitol, a majority of editors agreed that the second title, 2021 Capitol Hill Protests, had to be changed. But was this a riot, an attack, a siege, a self-coup, an insurrection? The lack of organization seems to have similarities with the Beer Hall Putsch, one editor wrote in the hours after the attack. Someone else insisted on 2021 United States coup dtat attempt, and a few others agreed.

A few editors quoted from Wikipedia policy, WP:TITLE, which says articles should be named based on Recognizability, Naturalness, Precision, Conciseness and Consistency. Others pointed to a Wikipedia essay, WP:COUP, which explicitly says that the word should be avoided in a title unless the term is widely used by reliable sources. That evening, an editor named Spengouli noted, the Associated Press was advising journalists to not refer to the events as a coup, as they do not see the objectives of the invasion as being overthrowing the government.

Another editor chimed in with some alternatives: the New York Times [is] using the words riot and breach as well as storm; CNN is using riot and domestic terror attack; Fox is calling it Capitol riots. (Fox News, Wikipedias current policy advises, is generally reliable for news coverage on topics other than politics and science.)

In the early hours of Thursday, as Senators reconvened to certify the election, a growing crowd on Wikipedia was pushing for insurrection. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had called it a failed insurrection on the floor of the Senate, someone said; soon, others pointed out, NPR and PBS were readily using the term too.

Still, others insisted that per Wikipedia guidance, insurrection is a legal term and should be used only after a ruling by a court or by a successful impeachment vote by the U.S. Senate. As EDG 543, a Chicago-based editor, wrote on Wednesday evening, Biden, Romney, and a CNN opinion piece calling it an insurrection does not make it factual. Someone argued the event didnt meet the definition of insurrection in the Wiktionary, Wikipedias sister dictionary: A violent uprising of part or all of a national population against the government or other authority.

Except, as more details emerged, others said, it pretty much did meet that definition.

Trying to define exactly what something like this is as its happening is probably beyond us.

Trying to define exactly what something like this is as its happening is probably beyond us, Johan Jnsson, who goes by the handle Julle, wrote on Wednesday evening.

Frustration stretched the Talk page longer and longer. Open your eyes! one anonymous editor said. This is an armed white supremacist insurrection by a mob intent on overthrowing the incoming democratically elected government and installing God-Emperor Trump as dictator for life, motherfuckers! Why some of you want this to be titled rally, protest, or peaceful gathering of friends is beyond me.

Lets take a deep breath, wrote DenverCoder9 on Wednesday evening. The best articles are written with a cool head and we should aspire to that standard.

Wikipedia isnt supposed to be a source for breaking newsWikipedians explicitly say that the site is not a newspaper. Another oft-cited community guideline, WP:WINARS, insists, Wikipedia is not a reliable source.

Wikipedia is a work in progress, says Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that operates Wikipedia. And we always say its a perfect place to begin learning, but you definitely shouldnt stop there.

But many of us do: Wikipedia is now considered reliable enough to serve as something like a central clearinghouse for facts online. Google depends on it to build its knowledge graph, while Facebook and YouTube use it to provide users with contextual information around false content.

Wikipedia is now considered reliable enough to serve as something like a central clearinghouse for facts online.

In fact, Wikipedia began honing its ability to quickly make sense of things during its earliest days, in the aftermath of another shocking event. The website was born 20 years ago this month, a spin-off of a project by two entrepreneurs, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Nine months later, a group of terrorists crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center. Someone started a Wikipedia article, and a fledgling, pseudonymous self-built community of editors flooded in. The September 11 attacks were momentous for the site, helping establish and solidify some of its core standards, says Brian Keegan, an assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Those standards include neutrality and verifiability but also those important rules about what Wikipedia is not. (A Wikipedians primary role is as editor, not a compiler or archivist, Animalparty reminded his colleagues on Monday night.) Twenty years later, says Keegan, coverage of breaking news topics like the coronavirus pandemic are still testing the Wikipedia community, and proving its surprising power.

It seems even more contradictory when a bunch of volunteers, in the absence of any sort of centralized editing authority or sort of delegation or coordination, is still able to produce these especially high-quality articles, he says.

As they watched tear gas wafting over the Capitol on TV, White and Moore jumped into ad hoc roles as quasi community organizers, shepherding conversations and handling a growing pile of edit conflicts and requests from users who didnt have permission to edit the page directly. For sensitive pages like this one, admins can switch on additional safeguards that restrict editing to accounts that are more than 30 days old with more than 500 edits, requiring all other edits to be approved.

That didnt stop the typical attempts at vandalism, falsehoods, and disinformation. Mostly there are the anonymous editors who vandalize or otherwise troll pages with high traffic, says Moore, the sorts of bad edits hed seen around COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. But also there are well-meaning people who are genuinely misinformed, and others who introduce bias, purposefully or unknowingly.

Bad behavior doesnt go far here. While social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have lately taken a harder approach to policy violations, for instance by banning Trump and others linked with the Capitol attack, Wikipedia has consistently been swift to close the accounts of bad actors. Theres little appetite for feeding the trolls on the site, says Moore. Theres so much more important work to be done.

On the articles Talk page, editors shared news articles, aired concerns, and hashed out contentious edits, in theory according to the principles of assume good faith and be polite. On Wednesday, one visitor wrote a note of thanks. On Friday, someone who had attended the Trump rally beforehand sought to clarify the size of the crowd: 100s to less than 10,000 inside the Capitol, they wrote, and easily tens to a hundred thousand outside. By Sunday night, the discussion had flowered to more than 70 topics that ranged from formatting problems to questions about law, semantics, and philosophy. The crowd was processing this unthinkable event in open-source code.

The crowd was processing this unthinkable event in open-source code.

With each discussion came more editorial guidance from the sticklers: The names of criminal suspects do not belong in the encyclopedia; only the names of rioters convicted of crimes may be included. George R.R. Martin, a Reddit post, and an on-the-scene Instagram video are not reliable sources; in any case, Wikipedia relies only on secondary sources. Use more neutral, clearer language in general: Words like mob and baseless carry a value judgment; better to stick with rioters and false.

Were the people inside the Capitol best characterized as a mob or rioters? Were some merely protesters? Some editors urged caution with rioters, on the grounds that not all participants were violent. We used the same logic to not call the George Floyd protests the George Floyd riots, because violent rioters do not take away from what peaceful protesters do, Alfred the Lesser wrote on Thursday morning.

What a load of horseshit, wrote SkepticalRaptor, a nine-year Wikipedia veteran, on Sunday. Protestors is a weasel word that makes these treasonous insurrectionists appear to be roughly equivalent to BLM protestors (who actually protested). This story is about the attempted coup and the terrorist infiltration of the Capitol. They werent protestors, they were terrorists. I even think rioters is weasel wording. This seems like whitewashing that wed find in Conservapedia. Disgusting.

The battle over what words to use brought into stark relief a central distinction on Wikipedia: between whats accurate and what fits into an encyclopedia, between whats true and whats verifiable.

Wikipedia is about neutrality, so its very hard when theres no neutral word, DenverCoder9 told me in an email, after they had been furiously editing for spans of hours. You can see the ungodly amount of edits. Ive been editing [on Wikipedia] for a whileat least 20 months and Ive seen nothing like it before.

But tame neutrality or the appearance of neutrality can also be the product of bias or ideology: There may have been a protest, but describing the people raging in and around the Capitol as protesters downplays the violence and vileness, their confused and ugly intent. Call a spade a spade, someone said.

At 3 a.m. on Thursday, after more than 200 editors had weighed in, an admin changed the name of the article to 2021 storming of the United States Capitol. It was a stopgap measure, wrote CaptainEek, not a permanent solution. We say what sources say, and for the moment they seem to say storming,' they wrote.

Whitewashing, said an editor named Albertaont. This isnt some romantic Storming of the Bastille. Many agreed. On Thursday, Joanne Freeman, a professor of American history at Yale, shared her disapproval on Twitter: It romanticizes it. There are plenty of other words: Attacked, Mobbed, Vandalized. Use those instead. Words matter.

So one good idea would be never, ever to call the Sixth of January the Storming of the Capitol.

By Friday, a few editors pointed out, insurrection was one of the most used terms among reliable sources. Soon, Democrats were distributing articles of impeachment based on a charge of incitement of insurrection. A conviction by the Senate could add more credibility to the label.

Anyway, wrote Chronodm, a California-based editor, storming had other problems: Given Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, not to mention QAnons repeated use of storm, I really dont think its a neutral choice. Someone dropped in a link to a New Yorker essay by Jill Lepore, who was also shaken by the Nazi and QAnon links. So one good idea, wrote Lepore, would be never, ever to call the Sixth of January the Storming of the Capitol.'

But Lepore doesnt edit Wikipedia. Other editors insisted that storming was an accurate enough description, and that Wikipedia doesnt bend to Nazis. We really shouldnt consider these fringe groups, DenverCoder9 replied on Friday. They produce so much nonsense you can find an association for every word, even OK. Consider words as meant by the average reader.

Of course, its not always clear how Wikipedias average readers interpret words, or even who those readers are. And just as new details emerge, the use and meaning of words change. The point is that words matter, and so the debates and the edits continue.

Moore, the articles first official author, expects the name to change again too, as media outlets hone in on specific descriptions and words over time, he says. He doesnt have a strong opinion about it. I am confident editors will determine the most appropriate name for the entry based on journalistic secondary coverage, as Wikipedia editors do.

Theres a lot of other work to do, says White: chronicling the injuries and deaths, the litigation, the reactions, the attempts to remove Trump. By Sunday, the article had reached 14,000 words, plus spin-offs, like a timeline of events and a compilation of international reactions. And as time goes on we will also document if and how the incident has established a lasting place in history, White says.

Like us, future historians will study the article to learn about what happened on January 6. And, as Slates Stephen Harrison and others have previously pointed out, if they look at the behind-the-scenes debates over language, at these first (and second and third) drafts of history, they could also see how we processed the event in real time. The articles Talk pages and edit histories could reveal things, says Keegan, that are easily lost in historical accounts that pick up threads with the benefit of hindsight.

What might those historians find? At an extraordinary moment of information collapse, broken trust, and violent tribalism, many different people with good intentions could still agree on the tragic reality of what happenedwhatever we end up calling it.

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How Wikipedia is chronicling the Capitol attack in real time - Fast Company

20 years on, Wikipedia wants more diversity among contributors – The Federal

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20 years on, Wikipedia wants more diversity among contributors - The Federal

Wikipedia at 20: Why it often overlooks stories of women in history – Yahoo News

Less than a third of biographical entries on Wikipedia are about women. aradaphotography/shutterstock.com

Movements like #MeToo have drawn increased attention to the systemic discrimination facing women in a range of professional fields, from Hollywood and journalism to banking and government.

Discrimination is also a problem on user-driven sites like Wikipedia. Wikipedias 20th birthday is on Jan. 15, 2021 and today it is the thirteenth most popular website worldwide. In December 2020, the online encyclopedia had over 22 billion page views.

The volume of traffic on Wikipedias site coupled with its integration into search results and digital assistants like Alexa and Siri makes Wikipedia the predominant source of information on the web. YouTube even started including Wikipedia links below videos on highly contested topics. But studies show that Wikipedia underrepresents content on women.

We are a historian and librarian at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and were taking steps to empower our students and our global community to address issues of gender bias on Wikipedia.

Driven by a cohort of over 33 million volunteer editors, Wikipedias content can change in almost real time. That makes it a prime resource for current events, popular culture, sports and other evolving topics.

But relying on volunteers leads to systemic biases both in content creation and improvement. A 2013 study estimated that women only accounted for 16.1 percent of Wikipedias total editor base. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales believes that number has not changed much since then, despite several organized efforts.

If women dont actively edit Wikipedia at the same rate as men, topics of interest to women are at risk of receiving disproportionately low coverage. One study found that Wikipedias coverage of women was more comprehensive than Encyclopedia Britannica online, but entries on women still constituted less than 30 percent of biographical coverage. Entries on women also more frequently link to entries on men than vice-versa and are more likely to include information on romantic relationships and family roles.

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Whats more, Wikipedias policies state that all content must be attributable to a reliable, published source. Since women throughout history have been less represented in published literature than men, it can be challenging to find reliable published sources on women.

An obituary in a paper of record is often a criterion for inclusion as a biographical entry in Wikipedia. So it should be no surprise that women are underrepresented as subjects in this vast online encyclopedia. As The New York Times itself noted, its obituaries since 1851 have been dominated by white men an oversight the paper now hopes to address through its Overlooked series.

Categorization can also be an issue. In 2013, a New York Times op-ed revealed that some editors had moved womens entries from gender-neutral categories (e.g., American novelists) to gender-focused subcategories (e.g., American women novelists).

Wikipedia is not the only online resource that suffers from such biases. The user-contributed online mapping service OpenStreetMap is also more heavily edited by men. On GitHub, an online development platform, womens contributions have a higher acceptance rate than men, but a study showed that the rate drops noticeably when the contributor could be identified as a woman through their username or profile image.

Gender bias is also an ongoing issue in content development and search algorithms. Google Translate has been shown to overuse masculine pronouns and, for a time, LinkedIn recommended mens names in search results when users searched for a woman.

The solution to systemic biases that plague the web remains unclear. But libraries, museums, individual editors and the Wikimedia Foundation itself continue to make efforts to improve gender representation on sites such as Wikipedia.

Organized edit-a-thons can create a community around editing and developing underrepresented content. Edit-a-thons aim to increase the number of active female editors on Wikipedia, while empowering participants to edit entries on women during the event and into the future.

Our university library at the Rochester Institute of Technology hosts an annual Women on Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in celebration of Womens History Month. The goal is to improve the content on at least 100 women in one afternoon.

For the past six years, students in our schools American Womens and Gender History course have worked to create new or substantially edit existing Wikipedia entries about women. One student created an entry on deaf-blind pioneer Geraldine Lawhorn, while another added roughly 1,500 words to jazz artist Blanche Calloways entry.

This class was supported by the Wikimedia Education Program, which encourages educators and students to contribute to Wikipedia in academic settings.

Through this assignment, students can immediately see how their efforts contribute to the larger conversation around womens history topics. One student said that it was the most meaningful assignment she had as an undergraduate.

Other efforts to address gender bias on Wikipedia include Wikipedias Inspire Campaign; organized editing communities such as Women in Red and Wikipedias Teahouse; and the National Science Foundations Collaborative Research grant.

Wikipedias dependence on volunteer editors has resulted in several systemic issues, but it also offers an opportunity for self-correction. Organized efforts help to give voice to women previously ignored by other resources.

This is an updated version of an article originally published in 2018.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Tamar Carroll, Rochester Institute of Technology and Lara Nicosia, Rochester Institute of Technology.

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Wikipedia at 20: Why it often overlooks stories of women in history - Yahoo News

Read this: An oral history of Wikipedia’s rise to public knowledge dominance – The A.V. Club

Screenshot: Wikipedia (Other)

Much like the internet itself, its somewhat hard to envision a modern world without Wikipedia. Originally seen as an extremely unreliable free-for-all of information both cited and spurious, today it exists as one of the go-to digital spaces for encyclopedic knowledge (and procrastination). While far from perfect, it remains invaluable to millions of armchair scholars, curious minds, and kids trying to weasel their way out of looming essay deadlines. Today, OneZero published a massive oral history of Wikipedia in honor of its 20th anniversary this week, and its nearly as far-reaching and complex as the site itself.

The piece is filled with all kinds of (rigorously fact-checked) info, from the origins of Wikipedias namewiki is the Hawaiian word for quickto the surprisingly nuanced, class-based battle that took place between the open source repository we all know so well and something called Nupedia, which, while far more reliable, operated at a snails pace compared to Wikipedias, well, wiki-ness.

As it turns out, the sites transformational moment was born out of 9/11, of all events. We had been cranking along reasonably well, writing an encyclopedia. It was planets and historical figures and so on, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Walesexplains. And [September 11, 2001] was the first time that the community responded to a news event, doing something that was different from journalism, but complementary. People began responding to the news by filling in the background information.

The rest, they say, is historyhistory that is subject to constant revision, peer-review, and trolling, of course. But, when you think about it, is that really any different from how history was written before Wikipedia came around?Or did we just blow your mind?

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Read this: An oral history of Wikipedia's rise to public knowledge dominance - The A.V. Club