Happy 10th birthday, Wikipedia: Thanks for not selling out

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, will celebrate 10 years of operation this weekend. As a Wikipedia enthusiast, it’s hard for me to remember how I looked up basic information before it. Would I really want to look anywhere else to find out how many times Brazil has won the World Cup? Five. Or find out about rise and decline of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company? They’re down to 460 stores from a high of about 16,000 in the 1930s. Thanks to Wikipedia running on smart phones, there’s no need to wait long on wagers over trivia. Why no, I didn’t know that Thurgood Marshall won 29 cases at the U.S. Supreme Court before becoming the first African-American justice.

But Wikipedia has not been without its critics, and for good reason. The website, which is consistently ranked the world’s seventh most popular in the world by measurement of web traffic, is a target for vandalism and the occasional dispute over a contentious issue. Yes, Wikipedia’s articles can be and often are wrong, much in the way that news organizations may miss details or present a point of view in their reporting. The debate over how wrong Wikipedia — including all 3.5 million of its articles in the English language — may or may not be rests on exactly what we English speakers accept as true.

Truth has been an important issue for Wikipedia, leaving it open for the occasional wise crack from comic Stephen Colbert on “truthiness.” Separating fact from opinion is not always easy, and for Wikipedians (the website’s editors), maintenance of a “neutral point of view” is a goal not always achieved. So with that, we must accept that Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it is pretty exciting.

Why do I think so? It goes back to a couple of visitors who came in last year to visit the Rice campus and deliver lectures, Ben Shneiderman and Dale Meyerrose. The pair, while both working in the information technology field (Shneiderman as an academic and Meyerrose a former general now in industry) could not be more different. During the visits, I got plenty of time to talk with them, and in both conversations, we eventually got to the topic of Wikipedia.

Meyerrose, I knew, had been a backer of the Intelligence Community’s (IC) Intellipedia, a project I had watched develop as the State Department began looking at adoption of MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s software platform. Shneiderman had shifted gears in his academic career to advocate for study of “social software,” technology in which interaction is key to function. Both were bullish advocates for Wikipedia, and had shared a quasi-religious experience.

Meyerrose and Shneiderman both attended what may have been the most important intellectual get-together of my professional career, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikimania conference at Harvard Law School in 2006. As I’ve said here before:

This was the time and place where the Wiki movement went huge and global, and also where the IC collectively realized there could be a new and radically different method for collecting, analyzing and disseminating intelligence (although Calvin Andrus had figured this out some time before). The IC went Wiki, and almost overnight, Intellipedia was created. At the same time, the State Department jumped into the Wiki business with both feet as well [with its Diplopedia wiki].

The wiki way of doing things, where many volunteer time and effort, is one of the last decade’s great breakthroughs in technology and social organization. The 2006 Wikimania conference attendees were there for three reasons. Some were unrepentant do-gooders, wanting to change the world. Others were looking to get rich off of Wikipedia. And then there were the government and industry people who had their own designs on using the MediaWiki software, but couldn’t have cared less about Wikipedia. Five years later, nobody’s gotten rich, the government people have made some use of wikis but also must overcome the misplaced stigma produced by the Wikileaks mess, and the idealists, well, they seem to have gotten much of what they wanted.

Viewing Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on The Daily Show the other night, it was difficult to watch Wales’ response to Stewart’s question on how he felt about building an amazingly successful platform, but not having monetized Wikipedia. Obviously it hurts to ask this in the same week when that other piece of social software, Facebook, is valued at $50 billion by Goldman Sachs. Would Jimbo like to be a billionaire? Who wouldn’t? But in not commercializing Wikipedia, he has done the world a service. I am surprised that’s how things turned out, but pleasant surprises do happen every now and again.

Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.