Wikipedia already has 10,000 articles. Created in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales of Huntsville, Alabama, the application is based on Nupedia, written for him by Larry Sanger starting in 1999. But it didn’t mature until the two discovered Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, web pages that users could edit by clicking directly on the page. The union of these ideas gave birth to a revolutionary innovation: an online encyclopedia that is a triumph of open-ware, shareware, and freeware, which have been a fundamental component of the Internet’s soul. Incredibly, the forces of reason, the “good guys,” triumph, and the encyclopedia adds value to its content every year thanks to voluntary and free peer-to-peer collaboration.
