Posted on by Thorsten Reimnitz

The Emissary

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Wikipedia – (Listeni/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or Listeni/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by thenon-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Editors are expected to follow the website rules.[6]Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites[5] and constitutes the Internet‘s largest and most popular general reference work.[7][8][9]

The History of Wikipedia formally began with the launch of Wikipedia on Monday 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; however, its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this. The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993,[2] but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source or freemium)[3] was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.[4]

Crucially, Stallman’s concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This “massively multiplayer” characteristic was in stark contrast to contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and even Bomis‘sNupedia, which was Wikipedia’s direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham.[5] Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. In practice, Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.

 

And this all happened through the inspiration of science. May the light of science burn on and bring brightness to darker places.

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For the making of this articles I have used two Wikipedia entries:

Texts are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.