Wikiversary

Sanger, left, and Wales                       internationalnegotiation.org

Here's something that'll make most of us feel old: It was 15 years ago on January 15 that Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded a little online resource called Wikipedia. Maybe you've heard of it. The bane of teachers everywhere (cut & paste, anyone?) and the delight of factophiles the world over, Wikipedia is available in 280 languages and now contains about 35 million articles. From Waluigi to the Saturn V lightning near-disaster and the Euler diagram, Wales and Sanger's brainchild continues to increase in both size and reputation, enduring growing pains and celebrating triumphs along the way: https://espresso.economist.com/b7754ad26ec0370301f9853645d0b20e and http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/on-wikipedias-15th-birthday-ars-shares-the-entries-that-most-fascinate-us/

    The very thing that makes Wikipedia Wikipedia ~ the crowdsourcing ~ is both its weakness and its strength. As he has been wont to do, Stephen Colbert spotlighted that issue when he said, in a 2006 episode of The Colbert Report, "“Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn’t, that’s my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it’s also a fact." Then he invited his audience to prove his point by inserting misinformation into an article on elephants. Jimmy Wales responded by saying that Wikipedia would be changing its emphasis from quantity to quality, a shift that has had its positive and negative consequences: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/at-15-wikipedia-is-finally-finding-its-way-to-the-truth/

   This story of the founding of Wikipedia begins with an intriguing question. "You hire a guy to come up with a project idea. He comes up with an idea. Your resources make the project happen. Who founded the project?": http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1271012-who-founded-wikipedia-these-two-need-to-get-their-story-straight/