The Wikipedia Project

World of Knowledge

Author(s):

The free encyclopedia project, Wikipedia,has compiled no fewer than a million entries in less than four years. And the quality of the entries even surprises experts. But what is Wikipedia and how can you use it? We’ll tell you about the exciting Wikipedia project,and we’ll show you how you can contribute.

We cannot stop business from restricting the information it makes available; what we can do is provide an alternative. We need to launch a movement to develop a universal free encyclopedia,” said Richard Stallman in 1999, in an essay on a free encyclopedia [1]. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger Florida talked about the design and launched the Nupedia project in the year 2000. The idea was to allow anyone to submit entries that would then go through a sophisticated editorial process. But the project failed with just a handfull of articles finding their way into the encyclopedia.