In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, the people’s encyclopedia stands out – a huge collective endeavour giving everyone free access to the sum of human knowledge. But with Elon Musk branding it ‘Wokipedia’ and AI looming large, can it survive?
Wikipedia will be 25 years old in January. Jimmy Wales’s daughter will be 25 and three weeks. It’s not a coincidence: on Boxing Day 2000 Wales’s then wife, Christine, gave birth to a baby girl, but it quickly became clear that something wasn’t right. She had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid, resulting in a life-threatening condition called meconium aspiration syndrome. An experimental treatment was available at the hospital near where they lived in San Diego. Did they want to try it?
At the time, Wales was a former trader and internet entrepreneur in his mid-30s. He had co-founded a “guy-oriented search engine” called Bomis, but his real passion was encyclopedias. The money from Bomis had allowed him to found Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts – but it was proving slow to get off the ground. The laborious process of peer review meant that it only managed to generate 21 articles in its first year (among them “Donegal fiddle tradition” and “polymerase chain reaction”).
