Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great

As you read and idly edit Wikipedia, at some point, you may ask yourself: "Just why is Wikipedia so great? What accounts for its overwhelming splendidness?" In order to answer this question, users have written some explanations and arguments on this page.

• Wikipedia articles are extremely easy to edit. Anyone can click the "edit" link and edit an article. Peer review per se is not necessary and is actually a bit of a pain to deal with. We prefer (in most cases) that people just go in and make changes they deem necessary. This is very efficient; our efforts seem more constructive than those on similar projects (not to mention any names).

• Wikipedia has almost no bureaucracy; one might say it has none at all. But it isn't just the "Wild West." There are social pressures and community norms, but perhaps that by itself doesn't constitute bureaucracy, because anybody can just go in and make any changes they feel like making. And other people generally like it when they do. So there aren't bottlenecks; anyone can come in and make progress on the project at any time. The project is self-policing. Editorial oversight is more or less continuous with writing, which seems, again, very efficient. :-)

• On Wikipedia, there are no required topics and no one making assignments. That means that anyone can find part of the encyclopedia they're interested in, and add to it immediately (if they can do better than what's already there--but at this stage, there are necessarily very many gaps in our coverage of the universe!). This increases motivation and keeps things fun.

• Wikipedia is open content, released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Knowing this encourages people to contribute; they know it's a public project that everyone can use.

• Articles seem to be getting steadily more polished. Articles seem to have a tendency to get gradually better and better, particularly if there is one person working on an article with reasonable regularity (in that case, others have a tendency to help). There are some articles we can all point to that started out life mediocre at best and are now at least somewhat better than mediocre. Now suppose this project lasts for many years and attracts many more people, as seems perfectly reasonable to assume. Then how could articles not be burnished into a scintillating luster?

• Wikipedia seems to attract highly intelligent, articulate people with a little (or a lot of) time on their hands. Moreover, there are some experts at work here. Over time, the huge amount of solid work done by hobbyists and dilettantes can (and no doubt will) be hugely improved upon by experts. This both makes Wikipedia a pleasant intellectual community (or so it seems to some) and gives us some confidence that the quality of Wikipedia articles will, in time, if not yet, be high.

• Wikipedia is growing at a dizzying rate. Wikipedia produced articles at more than 1,300 per month (measured March 31, 2001; if you count only "substantial" articles, it was closer to 850 per month). This rate of growth has been progressively increasing: as of October 2002, the growth rate now exceeds 250 articles per day on a regular basis. And the word is only slowly getting out about Wikipedia.

• We have a slowly-growing source of traffic--and therefore more contributors, and therefore (very possibly, anyway) an increasing rate of article-writing--from Google and Google-using search engines like Yahoo! and Netscape. The greater the number of Wikipedia articles, the greater the number of people will link to us, and therefore the higher the rankings (and numbers of listings) we'll have on Google. Hence, on Wikipedia "the rich (will) get richer"; or "if we build it, they will come" and in greater and greater numbers.

• Our likelihood of success seems alarmingly high. January 23, 2003 we reached 100,000 articles. Indeed, it's also far from impossible that we could have 1,000,000 articles someday (Everything2 recently announced they had 1,000,000 nodes); there are, surely, 1,000,000 topics of discussion in existence, and if Wikipedia hits it big, or even simply continues on as it has been, which seems plausible, then they might all be covered...eventually. It also seems rather likely that there will always be a lot of mediocre stuff. But it's possible--how likely we'd be able to tell after more months of experience--that articles would just gradually improve until they were polished to a Nupedia polish. We've already seen many instances of this.

• Wiki is very fertile soil. Think about it. (An apt metaphor we can credit to Jimbo Wales.)

• Wikipedia is not paper (http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wiki_is_not_paper), and that's a good thing.

• Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, repeatedly mentions in his book "Weaving the Web", that the web has grown into a medium that is much easier to read than to edit. He envisaged the web would be much more of a collaborative medium than it currently is, and that the browser should also function as an editor. Wiki based sites are hopefully much closer to his vision.

See also Why Wikipedia is not so great, Replies to common objections.