Wikipedia is 10 years old this weekend, says Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian. And it's worth taking a fresh look at how this unique organization has developed. Had Jimmy Wales, the site's founder, chosen to "commercialize the enterprise," he would be a billionaire like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. But instead he made Wikipedia a "not-for-profit foundation" with the "utopian goal" of giving the people of Earth free access to the entirety of all human knowledge. And the result of Wales' efforts — still "the fifth most visited site on the internet" — is an achievement all the more notable for the era into which it was born. Here, an excerpt:
Wikipedia has been remarkably free of the kind of downward spirals of abuse famously captured by Godwin's Law... which states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Partly this is because an encylopedia deals in facts, but it is also because dedicated Wikipedians spend a huge amount of time defending standards of civility against waves of attempted vandalism...
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