Lih Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution

Hyperion, 2008. — 246 p. — ISBN 9781401393878, 1098765432.- How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia
Imagine a world in which every single person on the
planet is given free access to the sum of allhuman
knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.
—Jimmy WalesIn August 2005, at a modest youth hostel in Frankfurt, Germany, hundreds ofwriters, students, computer hackers, and ordinary Internet users from aroundthe world gathered on the grounds of Haus der Jugend on the bank of the River Main. Few had ever met in person, and most didn’t even know one another’s realname. What they did know was that they had collaborated with one another over
the Internet, across different time zones and continents, toward the same goal:creating an encyclopedia. They knew one another mostly by their cryptic Internetpersonas — Anthere, Cimon Avaro on a Pogostick, Eclecticology — usernames thatprojected a quirkier side to an online community that focused on a rather academic
task.There was a curious diversity—they came from different locations, age
groups, and educational backgrounds—but they all referred to themselves withthe same label: Wikipedians. They were there face-to-face for the first-ever Wikimania conference, bound by a common passion to give away their labor,knowledge, and know-how.In the hostel’s courtyard, over cold beer and cold cuts, they swapped passionatestories. Each person inevitably followed Hello with a description of theeureka moment when that person stumbled upon Wikipedia and became an addict.
Before long, laptops filled up the outdoor patio as users enthusiastically
shared their favorite articles and obsessions. Previously used to editing alone intheir homes, Wikipedians found themselves next to others who had the same strange obsessions.Foreword by Jimmy Wales
The WIKI phenomenon
History
A Nupedia
What Is an Encyclopedia?
Alabama Rising
The Mother of All Directories
RMS
Linux on the Scene
Remember DMOZ
The Nupedia Idea
Nupedia’s Rules
The Nupedians
WIKI origins
Ward’s Start
HyperCard’s Inspirations
A Web Browser
Viola
HyperCard Revisited
WIKI introduced
Slashdotting
Contributing the Meaning of Everything
The GFDL
UseMod Grows
Give Me More Space
Server Load
Community at work (the Piranha effect)
Usenet’s Legacy
Lessons from Usenet
Growth
How Wikipedia Works
Urban Jungle
Signaling One Another
Then Came the Bots
Lots of Red Dots
Peer Production
Dot Map Obsession
Essays, Guidelines, and Policy
Fix It Yourself
What to Include
Gaming the Vote
Small Ball
Gdansk/Danzig Wars
WIKIPEDIA goes international
To Split or Not to Split
Spanish Wikipedia Fork
Making It Multilingual
Encoding Language
A Colossal Waste of Space
Japanese Wikipedia
German Wikipedia
Chinese Wikipedia
Serbian Wikipedia and Kazakh Wikipedia
African Languages
The Numbers Game
Trolls, Vandals, and Sock
Puppets, oh my 1
Vandals and Sock Puppets
Jimbo Doesn’t Scale
Crisis of community
Criticisms
The Seigenthaler Incident
The Essjay Controversy
WIKIPEDIA makes waves
JewWatch
Microsoft Encarta’s Experiment
Wikitorials
Nature Study
Britannica Goes Free and Collaborative
Digital Universe and Citizendium
The Future
To the Afterword
Afterword
NotesAbout the Author