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Wikipedia’s first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world’s most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to an nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world’s most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia’s first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal. The contributors consider Wikipedia’s history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it.

Wikipedia --- History. --- Computers / Internet / User-generated Content --- Language Arts & Disciplines / Library & Information Science / Digital & Online Resources --- Computers / Internet --- Computers --- Automatic computers --- Automatic data processors --- Computer hardware --- Computing machines (Computers) --- Electronic brains --- Electronic calculating-machines --- Electronic computers --- Hardware, Computer --- Computer systems --- Cybernetics --- Machine theory --- Calculators --- Cyberspace --- Wikipedia. --- Computers. --- Internet. --- User-generated Content. --- Language Arts. --- Electronic information resources. --- Library science.