Wiki-mania
“I’ve seen things like this happen once or twice before,” observed Mitch Kapor, software pioneer and head of the Open Source Foundation. “We’re at the Big Bang of the next information revolution.”
Ground Zero, at least last week, was Frankfurt, Germany, site of Wikimania, the first global gathering of the self-styled ‘wikipedians’ who collectively are well on their way to the goal of providing free online encyclopedias in every language on earth.
Created at virtually no cost by citizen-volunteers working collectively and using an innovative new tool called a wiki, which enables anyone to write and edit on a web page, the wikipedia site has experienced explosive growth in the past two years and now ranks among the top 50 most-visited websites in the world, according to alexa.com.
If it were a commercial venture, that means the valuation of the site would now be in excess of half a billion dollars, according to some estimates. But commerce doesn’t enter into the wikipedia equation–in fact it’s almost universally considered anathema among this crowd, whose most commonly articulated statement of ethos is “Free as in speech–not as in beer!”
Kapor was joined by hundreds of other enthusiasts from fifty-two countries at Wikimania, including such legends and luminaries as the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman (of GNU fame) and Ward Cunningham, the brilliant developer who created the first “writeable web page” program a decade ago and named it after Hawaii’s Wiki-Wiki quick transports. “I was going to call it Quickweb,” Cunningham explained in an interview. “And then I remembered these buses I took during a trip to Hawaii and I thought, ‘That’s cooler!’”
For years, Cunningham ran his own, semi-private closed wiki as a communications tool for a small community of software developers. Then he received a query from an Internet entrepreneur he didn’t know named Jimbo Wales, asking if his tool could be used to create a free online encyclopedia.
“Yes,” Cunningham responded. “But then it wouldn’t be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki.”
