So How Did Wikipedia Started ?

You might have known very well about Wikipedia at your finger-tips but do you know the guy behind the creation of the world's largest encyclopedia?

Let me start off with an introduction about Wikipedia first. It is indeed amazing that Wikipedia even exists at all since it is a free open platform, created by volunteers around the world who are willing to volunteer their time and knowledge to write articles for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has emerged as the world's largest encyclopedia, beating its competitor - Britannica and has become one of the most visited sites on the Web, attracting 684 million visitors yearly! It's current alexa ranking hovers at 8.


Currently, Wikipedia includes over 10 million articles in 250 languages and it is said that there are more than 75,000 active contributors helping Wikipedia fulfil the community's goal of providing every person in the world with a high-quality encyclopedia in their native language.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing," says Wales.


How Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia?

42-year-old Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is a famous Alabama-born Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001.

Jimmy went to a one-room elementary school run by his mother and grandmother. Its curriculum was freewheeling, leaving him with plenty of time to learn from sets of encyclopedia. It was a random type of education which he loved. The same principle is now reflected in Wikipedia, which Jimmy started in 2001. The online encyclopedia is free for all to browse, post and edit.

Later in life, so goes the entry in Wikipedia, he earned two finance degrees from Auburn University and the University of Alabama. In 1994, he joined futures and options trading from Chicago Options Associates as research director. Speculating on Internet rates and foreign currencies earned him a small fortune, which later financed his entrepreneurial endeavours.

Jimmy first ventured into the world of encyclopedic content in 1998, when he established Nupedia with former employee Larry Sanger. Like Wikipedia, Nupedia allowed anyone to submit articles and content. The difference is that Nupedia was a centralized, top-down hierarchy: paid academics and topic experts followed a laborious seven-step process to review and approve content.

One year and $120,000 into the project, Nupedia had only published 24 articles, and Jimmy decided to scrap it. So together with its editor-in-chieft, Larry Sanger, he launched a second version of Nupedia, called Wikipedia, in 2001.

The site, based on Wiki - a tool that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser - allows anyone to contribute or modify the content. This time, the idea worked.

To some it remains a mystery why people volunteer to peer produce Wikipedia. Jimmy just shrugs, "Why do people play softball? It's fun, it's a social activity." Wikipedia also attracts a lot of subject matter experts. They're passionate about their topics, and they want the world to know about it. Then there's the charitable mission. "We are gathering together to build this resource that will be made available to all the people of the world for free," says Jimmy. "That's a goal that people can get behind.

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