Can you remember the first time you used Wikipedia? Having so much information hosted in one place was incredible, and it seemed wholly impossible for all of it to be accurate. The past six years have seen Wikipedia blossom from a small collection of articles into a nexus of many related services that support dozens of languages-and today, most of the articles require sources before they’re taken seriously and are flagged when content legitimacy is in question.
The parent company of this information sensation is the Wikimedia Foundation, which recently held a fundraiser through the many Wiki projects. The major appeal behind this cash drive is that everything tied to Wikipedia-the encyclopedia, thesaurus (Wikisaurus), dictionary (Wiktionary), news page (Wikinews) and so many more-is nonprofit, and all donations to the company are tax-deductible. The fundraiser wasn’t formal or centered on any particular event, though it was heavily advertised on the many Wikis.
The fundraiser started in the first week of December and ended last week, intending to break the million-dollar mark within a month. Sure enough, the big “Donate here” banners caught Wiki some serious coin. There was a live list of donors posted during the drive, and 900 people contributed on the heaviest donation day. That’s more than 37 people donating per hour. Apparently, there was some truth to Wiki’s claims that they’re more popular than the BBC, Amazon.com and even eBay.
There’s been a lot of folk asking where the term “wiki” came from. The most popular answer is that wiki wiki is a term in Hawaiian vernacular meaning “to go fast.” Jimmy Wales, chairman emeritus to the Wikimedia Foundation, is quoted as saying that he wanted to place the sum of all human knowledge in front of anyone with an internet connection and make all of that knowledge quickly and easily accessible. The story goes that he heard the term while vacationing in Hawaii and named the original Wikipedia service WikiWikiWeb to reflect the speed and ease he thought the term implied. He incorporated a system of user-based editing, and voil퀌�, Wikipedia was born.
It hasn’t all been cream and sugar, however. College students across the nation have begun to hear from professors that using Wikipedia as a source is unacceptable, a sentiment often included in syllabi. With the emergence of over 1.5 million articles in the English section alone, it’s hard to keep each fact in line and every source verified. There are plenty of administrators and moderators who proof every article posted-as well as a good-faith system among browsing/editing users-but some errors fall through the cracks. As it stands, there are few professors willing to substitute academic journals and trips to the library for information from Wikipedia, no matter how convenient the wide world of Wiki may be.
Wikimedia’s founders had more in mind than saving students time when they began, however. Two of the newer Wiki’s include Wikiquote and the Wikimedia Commons (more commonly Wikicommons, no pun intended). Wikiquote is a collection of sourced quotations from celebrities, politicians, socialites and anyone else who has said something worth typing down. There are also Wikiquote pages dedicated to movie and TV-show dialogues and even the occasional play manuscript. The Wikicommons is an online pavilion for hosting multimedia of any kind, so long as no copyrights are infringed upon and a moderator board has approved the image, sound bite or video clip.
The money that Wikimedia recently raised will fund extended research programs, the constantly growing need for more server space and the operational costs of each Wiki project as they continue to expand. They’ve kept awfully mum about what comes next-some have speculated that there’s no ground left to cover. Give it a little time, and when the next big thing happens to the internet, rest assured that all of the Wikis will update wiki wiki.