The+Wikipedia+Foundation

=The Wikipedia Foundation= toc

History of Wikipedia
The idea of an online, free repository of all of human knowledge was put forth by many different thinkers when the internet was first coming online. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, proposed a free version of this encyclopedia in 1999. It wasn't until 2000, however, that the project which gave rise to Wikipedia came online.

Wikipedia actually started out as a feeder project for a closed, for-profit online encyclopedia called Nupedia. The site's founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, originally wanted to create an encyclopedia that would be more traditional and would only accept content from recognized "experts" in the field. Wikipedia was formed as a way to quickly gather draft articles that could be edited and refined before being accepted into the "real" encyclopedia. The main difference between the two sites was that Wikipedia allowed anyone to edit any of the articles and create new articles freely while Nupedia remained restricted.

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Wikipedia's popularity quickly outstripped that of its parent site. By 2003, Nupedia was out of business and Wikipedia was well on its way to becoming the largest collection of communal knowledge that has ever been assembled in one place, online or off.

Today, Wikipedia contains over 20 million articles (Wikipedia, 2011) that were all written, edited, and maintained by members of the online community. Its success is an example of the viability of non-monetary spaces that value sharing and community over profit and extraction of resources.

How Wikipedia Exemplifies the Commons
The contributors, editors, and readers of Wikipedia are members of a virtual community. They interact with each other through the medium of the software, but they still bring their knowledge and culture with them in the same way they would in a physical space. The idea that anyone can create, contribute to, or edit an article on Wikipedia is what separates it from other, more closed texts. Furthermore, access to Wikipedia and its community is completely free to the members of the community. The site runs on the good will and freely given effort of its community members.

Wikipedia is also a fascinating record of the cultural norms and accepted "truths" of our society. This is both a benefit and a drawback of the site. Wikipedia doesn't cherish the tribal, "low-tier" knowledge of tradition and cultural history. Instead, it reinforces the "high-tier", more accepted knowledge in an effort to appear accurate and reliable. Wikipedia is so often derided for potential inaccuracies and untrustworthiness that it is only natural for it to try very hard, maybe too hard, to communicate only the "truth" of the majority opinion on any topic. Nevertheless, those truths emerge from a communal consensus as opposed to an executive decision, making them an interesting record of the values, truths, and norms of the community that created the articles on the site.

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Wikipedia and Education
Wikipedia is almost always painted as the villain or "bad boy" of references and students are warned against relying on the information found on the site. This way of thinking is a reflection of the misconception that information found in books must somehow be better because our "betters" have reviewed it and deemed it worthy of publication. This hegemonic view of truth is deeply ingrained in the educational system and Wikipedia challenges many of these underlying assumptions. Several studies have been performed to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia as compared with traditional encyclopedias and most have found that Wikipedia contains a similar number of errors as traditional print media.

Using Wikipedia in the classroom provides an interesting opportunity to talk about the different types of knowledge recognized by our society.