Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Years of Crowd-Sourced Smarts

Let's take a journey to a distant time where knowledge was hard to come by: the year 2000.

Back then, if you wanted to find out the gross domestic product of Belarus or the wingspan of a B-10 bomber, your best bet was to head to a library and dig out a specialist book. Should you need quick access to a more arcane piece of trivia -- a treatise on the art of chicken hypnosis, for example -- well, you'd probably just have to stay ignorant.

Today you can grab all of that information by simply tapping in a few keywords at Wikipedia.org. The user-generated encyclopedia, which celebrates its 10th anniversary on Saturday, now hosts more than 22 million articles in more than 270 languages on everything from aardvarks to zebus. And every day that remarkable repository grows bigger, with thousands of people editing entries and contributing new ones. Their only reward is the pleasure and pride they gain from improving and topping up this trove of knowledge.

As well as filling its pages, Wikipedia's generous users also pay its bills. Running the world's fifth-most popular website -- some 440 million people head to Wikipedia each month -- is an expensive business, and visitors to the site were recently greeted with a somber photo of co-founder Jimmy Wales making a plea for donations. The campaign was widely mocked, but it worked. In just 50 days, 500,000 people handed over a total of $16 million, enough to keep the site running through 2011.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, says users and editors are happy to contribute because they feel like its owners.

"It's the people's encyclopedia," she said during a press call Wednesday. "They use it and build it. People have a very deep and abiding affection for it."

And the fact that so many people are willing to give up their time and cash for an online educational project like Wikipedia is cited by some Internet intellectuals -- such as Clay Shirky, author of "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age" -- as proof that the Web can bring out the best in humanity.

But if Wikipedia is evidence of the noblest aspects of the Internet, it also showcases the dangers of relying on a crowd of online amateurs. The site is frequently mocked for its accuracy; in 2006, satirical newspaper The Onion ran the headline "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence." Most errors are relatively harmless -- a celebrity's age recorded incorrectly, for instance -- and are quickly weeded out by volunteer editors.

But some more malicious falsehoods can stick around for longer. In 2005, John Seigenthaler Sr., assistant to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early '60s and later a founding editor of USA Today, was targeted by Wikipedia vandals. They created a false biography on the site in which Seigenthaler was accused of being a suspect in Kennedy's assassination. It remained unedited for 132 days.

And just this week, the Wikipedia entry for "blood libel" was hacked so a photo of Sarah Palin appeared under the phrase "anti-Semitism." Administrators took the image down within minutes.

Larry Sanger, who co-founded the site but resigned in 2002, told AOL News that errors and abuse will continue so long as Wikipedia entirely relies on the crowd to create and review entries.

"Wikipedia could benefit from having experts on board to approve or endorse articles as more or less mistake-free, and address content disputes, which can go on and on," he said. "But I don't believe Wikipedia will ever have any special role for experts, as resistance in the community is just too great."

Wikipedians' hostility to specialists and experts dates to its earliest days, explains Sanger, who also came up with site's name. (A "wiki" -- Hawaiian for quick -- is a piece of software that makes it easy for users to write, edit and interlink Web pages on a single shared document.) When the site was launched on Jan. 15, 2001, Sanger published a "rules to consider" page that explained how users might behave on this revolutionary open encyclopedia. The first entry was "ignore all rules."

Sanger says he wrote that dictum with his tongue firmly in cheek. "The idea was simply to encourage people to be bold and take risks in a project whose shape we didn't really grasp at the time," he says. "But it was turned around to mean something like 'Wikipedia is an anarchy.' That caused problems later on, in my opinion."

The Wikipedia co-founder tried to overcome these issues with the launch in 2007 of his own wiki-based rival, Citizendium.org, which has a panel of expert editors -- including engineers, academics and museum curators -- who approve entries. That system might lead to more accurate entries, but it massively slows down the harvesting of knowledge. Today Citizendium has 15,453 articles, less than a tenth of a percent of the total on Wikipedia.

Of course, it's easy to overstate the number of errors that make it into Wikipedia. A 2005 study in the journal Nature found that, on average, a Wikipedia article contains almost the same number of mistakes as an entry in that most revered of research tomes, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Britannica has objected to the study, calling its methodology "fatally flawed.")

But Wikipedia faces problems alien to Britannica. The 243-year-old encyclopedia has never had to worry that a rogue editor might insert rude comments about a politician or falsely claim that a movie star had died. And once a mistake has been fixed in Britannica, it stays permanently corrected.

Wales, now chairman emeritus of the Wikipedia foundation and head of the for-profit firm Wikia Inc., says his site is constantly developing new tools to ferret out errors.

"There's always an effort to improve and increase the quality of Wikipedia, from grass-roots community initiatives to software that gives the community more control over assessments of quality," he told the news conference Wednesday.

In the ongoing battle against mistakes, the site has also locked some entries so they can't be edited, and boosted the editorial power of its most seasoned volunteers, who can now approve or dismiss the contributions of newer members.

The problem with this approach, says Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, is that the established "Wikipedia community tends to be highly xenophobic" toward new members. One study by researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center examined the number of times editorial changes were subsequently reversed, and found that roughly a quarter of edits made by infrequent contributors were undone in 2008. That compares with less than 2 percent of those posted by the most active editors.

This inability to make an impact has led many neophytes, and some veterans, to give up editing altogether. According to The Economist, the number of regular contributors to Wikipedia's English-language site dropped from a peak of around 54,000 in March 2007 to 35,000 last September.

Goldman told AOL News he has noticed that many pages now appear to be "static, as no one is investing in them. They're frozen in time." He adds that "there are a very small number of entries that are regularly updated" -- such as those on geeky subjects like "Star Trek" or the mishaps of certain Hollywood starlets -- "but a large number that are unlikely to get a whole lot of love in the future."

Wikipedia is now attempting to boost the amount of entries on some less popular topics by linking up with 16 U.S. universities and asking students to write or amend entries on public-policy-related articles. The site is also reaching out to possible contributors in developing nations like India -- where it will open a small office this year -- and Brazil.

But as Wikipedia asks more experts and academics to get involved, and hampers the ability of some users to add information to the site, Goldman says there's a risk that the online encyclopedia will "lose something core to its identity." Look on Wikipedia's home page, he points out, and you'll see that the site describes itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The fact that they're not letting anybody edit means their tag line is incorrect."

That doesn't mean Wikipedia is a failure as an encyclopedia. Goldman -- who uses the site several times a day -- notes that most people find it entirely logical that Wikipedia would want to differentiate between trusted and untrusted editors. "Wikipedia's original organization, where everyone could do everything they wanted, wasn't sustainable," he said, "and we've seen increasing signs that Wikipedia has come to that realization."

Wikipedia may be celebrating only its 10th birthday, but it's already wise beyond its years.