There have been no shortage of insane, over ambitious ideas on the internet. Most of them never make it further than the pub they are conceived in. Some generate hype but quickly fall flat on their face. Others survive, but prove to be minnows rather than the giants they set out to be. However, every so often, one sneaks through.
Wikipedia is one of the rare ones that made it. Even by the admission of its founder, the 38-year-old technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, it was a "completely insane idea": a free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to and anyone can edit. There is no editor, no army of proof readers and fact checkers; in fact, no full-time staff at all. It is, in other words, about as far from the traditional idea of an encyclopedia as you can get.
There are dozens of reasons why it shouldn't work, and it is still far from perfect, but in less than four years, it has grown to have more than 1 million entries written in 100 languages from Albanian to Zulu.
To put Wikipedia's achievements in numerical context, at the same time it was celebrating the publishing of its one millionth entry (a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag) in less than four years, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography launched its latest edition. It had taken 12 years to complete, yet contained a comparatively tiddly 55,000 biographies. It also cost some ￡25m to create. Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around ￡300,000.
The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day.
But numbers mean nothing if the quality is no good. And this is where the arguments start.
"Theoretically, it's a lovely idea," says librarian and internet consultant Philip Bradley, "but practically, I wouldn't use it; and I'm not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."
Wales responds by acknowledging that Wikipedia's model leaves it anything but error free (something they make clear on the site) but he also points to an article in a German technology magazine this month, which compares Wikipedia with two established, traditional digital encyclopedias: Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta. All three were tested on breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content. Wikipedia won hands down.
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