Opinion: Happy birthday, Wikipedia

What is extraordinary about this free encyclopedia, which contains more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages, is that it is written, edited and self-regulated almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. […] More than any other major global site, Wikipedia still breathes the utopian idealism of the Internet’s heroic early days. Wikipedians, as they style themselves, are men and women with a mission. That mission, upon which they boldly go, is summed up in this almost Lennonist (that’s John, not Vladimir) sentence from the man they all refer to as Jimmy: ‘Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.’

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance. The larval encyclopedia Reagle has recreated wouldn’t have been worth translating, or even preserving. But the process and ruleset that allowed contributors to explore and document their passions, to improve each other’s efforts, to debate editorial decisions within the platform and to roll back errors and vandalism have allowed for constructive, collaborative effort that has, over time, created profoundly content. Wikipedia’s victory was getting the rules -- and importantly, the rules for making rules -- right, and trusting that the process would lead to substance. The project is far from perfect -- it’s incomplete, inaccurate in places, subject to the systemic biases that come from participation of some authors and not others. But it’s also one of the wonders of the world, and something anyone who studies sociology, politics, or organizational theory should look upon with utter fascination.

It simply is, an omnipresent fact of modern living, like Facebook or Betty White. The accuracy debate is the most important but in some ways less interesting discussion about Wikipedia’s impact. What’s most revealing might be not the vastness of the articles and the things they get wrong, but rather how they reveal what things we care about, and how humanity is both better and dumber than you ever would have expected.