Who Founded Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales incited scrutiny in December 2005, when technology writer Rogers Cadenhead revealed that the Wikipedia head honcho had altered his own biography several times — a practice that is generally frowned upon. Cadenhead wrote on his blog, Workbench, that Wales had made changes to his bio 18 times, including deleting phrases describing former Wikipedia employee Larry Sanger as a co-founder of the site.

Although the current Wikipedia article describing how the site came about flat out says: "Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia," there was a time that Wales felt inclined to downplay Sanger's role in Wikipedia's founding. Called out for his transgressions, Wales said that the changes were necessary to clarify and give a more nuanced description of the roles that each of the men played in creating the site. He contends that the changes had nothing to do with the earlier falling out between the two. In 2002, Sanger resigned from Wikipedia, after repeated disagreements with Wales about Sanger's desire to rid the site of "trolls" and "anarchist types."

Its Ten Millionth Article

In April 2008, Wikipedia announced it had published it's 10 millionth article. The milestone marked years of rapid growth for the website since publishing its one millionth article in September 2004. Adding some nine million article pages in three and a half years was emblematic of the website's expansion not only in the most-popular English edition, which boasts more than 3 million pages alone, but internationally as well. The site now publishes articles in 250 languages. Fittingly then, its one millionth was written in Hungarian about Nicholas Hilliard, a 16th century English goldsmith and painter.

The Fake Death

The problem with having a free encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone is that there is always going to be a few bad apples that mess with that freedom. While the site has done a good job policing itself and inaccuracies are usually corrected within a few days, every now and then a flub or fake news report goes viral. From politicians like the now actually deceased Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd to teen sensation Miley Cyrus, many celebrities have had the unfortunate experience of hearing rather premature reports of their demise. In one instance in March 2007, actor-comedian Sinbad got a call from his daughter making sure he was OK after his Wikipedia page reported he had died of a heart attack. Upon hearing the rumor, Sinbad told the Associated Press, "Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again."

The Birth of Lostpedia and the Rest

Wikipedia overflows with information, but not enough to satisfy fans of ABC's Lost. Enter Lostpedia, which currently has more than 7,000 articles "dedicated" to the popular television show. It's just one of several wikis that Wikipedia hath spawned. Wiktionary, which began in 2002, is run — like Wikipedia — by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is meant to encompass "all words in all languages." Citizendium was created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to be a more "reliable" alternative, while Scholarpedia, whose articles are written by experts and peer-reviewed, has much in common with Wikipedia's short-lived predecessor Nupedia.

Among the questionable parodies of Wikipedia are Uncyclopedia (which is, it gleefully acknowledges, "full of misinformation and utter lies") and the Encyclopedia Dramatica. But perhaps the most amusing alternative wiki may be Conservapedia, which defines itself as "a conservative, family-friendly Wiki encyclopedia" and whose contributor guidelines are cast as "commandments."
Congress Edits Itself

Somebody in Congress did something dishonest? Say it isn't so!

In 2006, Wikipedia discovered that the entries to several prominent U.S. politicians — including Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin — had been altered, apparently from computers within the Capitol. Coleman's staff admitted that it had removed the statement that the Senator had voted with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003, while Harkin's aids said that they'd erased a story about the time he falsely claimed to have flown combat missions in North Vietnam. Joe Biden's representatives also edited his page to remove references to accusations of alleged plagiarism.
Other Congressmen found themselves unwitting victims of Wikipedia harassment. Republican Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma had his page edited to include the false statement that he'd been officially voted "most annoying senator."

History Professor Deemed Security Threat

On Feb. 16, 2007, Taner Akcam, a Turkish history professor at the University of Minnesota, flew to Montreal to deliver a lecture at McGill University on the much disputed Armenian genocide — which some say was a systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, though the Turkish government adamantly refutes it. Because of his controversial stance, Akcam had been the subject of Internet harassment, and his Wikipedia entry was sometimes edited by Turkish nationalists calling him a terrorist. Security officers at the Montreal airport detained Akcam, offering up a printed out copy of his Wikipedia page as reason for their suspicion. The mix-up was quickly sorted out, although Akcam was detained again two days later, when he returned to the U.S.

Editor Found to be a Fraud

In March 2007 the jig was up for 24-year-old Kentucky man Ryan Jordan. For more than a year he had worked as an editor for Wikipedia, making changes and corrections on thousands of articles and serving as an arbitrator on disputes between authors. His Wikipedia profile described him as a professor of religion at a private university. There didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary about his work; no red flags ever came up. But after one Wikipedia user read a 2006 New Yorker profile of Jordan — who only went by the pseudonym Essjay, which the magazine also used — the truth about Jordan's identity began to unravel.

Not only was he not a professor with expertise in theology and canon law, but he also never received a PhD, as he had claimed, and often used a book called Catholicism for Dummies as his editing resource.

Coming Up Against the Great Firewall

Easy access to Wikipedia can't be taken for granted in China, where the online encyclopedia, including the Chinese language version, has often been blocked. Wikipedia will tell you (depending, perhaps, on your location) that the first block came in June 2004, on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Of course, Wikipedia is far from being the only site deemed off-limits in the mainland; the authoritarian Chinese government is notorious for censoring information. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recently told TIME, "It's never the case that we should accept censorship."

Study Finds Wikipedia (Almost) As Accurate as Britannica
In 2005, it finally felt a little better saying you got your information from Wikipedia. In a study in the journal Nature, researchers chose articles from a wide range of topics from both Wikipedia and the knowledge standard-bearer, Encyclopedia Britannica. The experts sent those entries to "relevant" field experts for peer review. The verdict? The journal found eight serious errors in the articles — four from each side. However, they also discovered many more minor factual errors, like omissions and misleading statements — 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica. Even though Britannica pointed to those minor errors as proof it's the more reliable source, Wikipedia took the study as somewhat of a victory after much press criticism over the accuracy of its entries.

Wikimania Meetups Begin

It's a utopian idea to think that Wikipedia is written, edited and maintained by all who use it. But in reality, it's a dedicated (some might say nerdy) group of volunteers who act as the site's caretakers, protecting it from vandals and making sure its entries are as accurate as possible. Thus, they needed a place to convene, discuss and share ideas about all things Wiki. The international meetup, which began in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2005, took what was an unorganized group of volunteers and brought them together in one place each year. The conference now includes hundreds of participants from close to 70 countries around the world and includes speakers, workshops and of course, Jimmy Wales.

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