It’s all quite meta. From the Wikipedia: The Wikipedia
The Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and was originally intended only to complement the Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia of the more traditional form.
Articles to the site can be added and edited by any user, though certain controversial pages are limited to established users and site administrators.
The Wikipedia was available in 18 different languages by the end of 2001, 161 by the end of 2004 and is now available in 240 languages. The English-language edition has over two million entries, making it the largest encyclopedia ever compiled.
Needless to say, the Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page is rife with information about the Wikipedia. It includes criticisms of the Wikipedia and reports of various studies on the Wikipedia’s reliability.
I happen to think the Wikipedia is our greatest cultural achievement. How crazy is it to think that, when I was growing up, we had to take time out of our regular classes in school to go to the library and learn how to use reference materials? Do kids still have those sessions, or do they just learn how to search the Wikipedia, which takes about 10 seconds?
My parents had a Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia, and we relied on it for nearly everything, even though it was from the early 1980s and perpetually thought the Soviet Union remained intact and the Berlin Wall upright.
We don’t need any of those things anymore, because we have the Wikipedia. And sure, maybe there are some errors, but those real encyclopedias, it turned out, had some errors too. And they didn’t have millions of users policing them all the time and editing out the most egregious of the mistakes.
The Wikipedia does, and it’s pretty damn accurate. I figured this out when I asked a doctor about a prescription medication I was taking and he went to its Wikipedia page to find out more. My wife is in med school now, and everyone there apparently relies on the Wikipedia for everything. At the very least, it can point people to more “legitimate” sources in the citations.
I have an iPhone now, which means I have access to the Wikipedia almost always. This has been, without a doubt, the best part about having an iPhone, and probably the best thing about technology ever. Unless I’m in a subway tunnel, I can get whatever information I want whenever I want it. It’s crazy, and it’s part of the reason the Wikipedia is the best thing humans have created.
In a related story, I co-founded a Taco Bell wiki a while back, and it sits mostly unedited. Get on it, Internet.


This debate, I should mention, almost always features me.