WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia created and maintained by regular people like you and me.  Well, me, anyway.

The way it works is that you or I or anyone else who knows about Wikipedia can add to and otherwise edit an article that's in the encyclopedia, or even create a new article.

Yes, you read that right -- you can add an article or edit an existing one right there from your browser and the changes will take place almost instantly, i.e., the encyclopedia will be updated with whatever you did for all to see.

And it's not like no one will see it.  Wikipedia gets over 1,000 page views per day, and that's a lot of hits.  Oh, wait, I made a mistake.  It's not 1,000 hits per day, it's 1,000 per second.  Sorry.

And it's not like Wikipedia is some puny, special-interest oddity.  It's big, really big, and comprehensive, really comprehensive.  By way of comparison, the 2006 print version of the Encyclopædia Britannica (which I discuss here) offers 65,000 articles whereas Wikipedia offers 820,000, or twelve times more.  The Britannica is written by 4,000 contributors, whereas Wikipedia is written or edited by some 40,000 contributors, or ten times more.

And it's not like Wikipedia is all that expensive.  Britannica costs $1,495 whereas Wikipedia is dead-bang free.  Now, to be sure, Britannica is more authoritative, and you can't sell your old Wikipedia on eBay.  But if you take the time to learn a bit about Wikipedia you might discover that it too can be authoritative, and worth a lot to you too.

Not only that, on Wikipedia there are no advertisements.  And you don't even have to register to read or even edit an article.  And if you do register you don't even have to give an e-mail.

Unlike the similar "How Stuff Works" site I also like, Wikipedia seems imbued with an air of communal generosity.  Indeed, the money and other resources to fund Wikipedia come from donations.

Wikipedia is so big that you literally cannot read it all.  You can read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica in your lifetime and have several decades left over for something else.  But the text alone of Wikipedia occupies some 27 gigabytes, which would be like reading Tolstoy's War and Peace 9,000 times.

Said another way, if you could read 3 million bytes a week (roughly the equivalent of five novels), it would take you over 1,200 weeks to finish Wikipedia.  Oh, wait, I made a mistake.  It's not 1,200 weeks, it's 1,200 years.  Sorry.

Except that by the time you read the first page the encyclopedia will have changed several times, mostly for the better.  In the three and a quarter years since July of 2002, Wikipedia had been edited 24,000 times.  Oh, wait, I made another mistake.  It's not 24,000 edits since then, it's an average of 24,000 edits per day.  Sorry.

Wikipedia is an extraordinary use of the Internet.  It's exactly the almost perfect use of collaboration among thousands of people across the globe who can use a computer and a modem to improve collective knowledge.  Wikipedia is an ever-evolving body of information that anyone -- even you, right now -- can try to improve.

Learning all the ins and outs of how Wikipedia works is not easy, because it's so complex.  It has to be complex, because it has to perform so many functions.  It has to provide the informational content, of course, but it also has to test itself to make sure it's not getting things wrong.  It tries to do that by relying on the good intentions and diligent efforts of thousands of volunteers, and you can be one if you care to.

I've done it twice so far, just in playing around with Wikipedia.  You can see the results HERE and HERE (look at the external links at the bottom).

I do not hope to explain Wikipedia in all it complexity here, because it's already explained on the site itself (in hundreds of pages of Help info) as well as on better Web pages than this very one, and on IRC channels devoted to it, and forums and mailing lists and newsgroups.  Learning everything about how Wikipedia works will take you a long time and probably isn't worth it.

Learning the most important parts about Wikipedia is easy and is worth it, even if just so you know what people are talking about when they refer to it.

Imperfect.  Wikipedia is by no means perfect, it never will be, and it might never get better than it is now.

• Because the articles are written and edited by absolutely anyone at all with an Internet connection -- which as I understand it is a number approaching nearly a million of us! -- they are susceptible to a higher degree of error than similar articles written by recognized authorities and edited by professional scholars.
   
• Because Wikipedia can be added to by anyone, articles espousing nonsense or one-sided views or hate or other information inappropriate to a general encyclopedia can and do appear.  Furthermore, rude people have figured out ways to "vandalize" Wikipedia pages.
   
• To its credit, Wikipedia does not censor complaints about itself.  HERE is a Wikipedia page on articles critical of Wikipedia.

Despite its imperfections, Wikipedia is the most impressive first try at creating a free encyclopedia from scratch using the Internet, and you should go there to see how it works (and maybe to look up something).  Enter a term in the search box and see what you get.  Then, wherever you go among the astonishingly large number of articles, try editing one that needs it and see what happens.  Unless you make a change others successfully challenge, it will be added permanently to the encyclopedia for all to see.

OK, I'm convinced.  Take me to WIKIPEDIA so I can check it out.