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For those who have not looked at Encyclopædia Britannica recently, you should know it is hopelessly incomplete. It does not have an article on dwarf tossing, the micronation of Sealand, or the execution method of crushing by elephant. While dwarf tossing may be something you could go your whole life without considering, your printed version of Britannica will also have nothing about Hurricane Katrina, the proposed Iraqi constitution, or the funeral of Peter Jennings.

You can only find those entries in one encyclopedia: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia launched in 2001, which has already become the largest, most wide-ranging, and most untamed reference work in history.

Who created this project? The answer is everybody who has ever logged in and edited an article. Wikipedia is written and edited entirely by tens of thousands of volunteers to share their knowledge and expertise. While many prefer to casually and anonymously correct errors or add tidbits, others spend hours a day writing and editing articles or organizing the site.

The project was the idea of Jimmy Wales, a thirty-nine-year-old native of Alabama, who abandoned his Ph.D. studies to become a successful options trader in Chicago. He started an irreverent web portal called Bomis, and an earlier, traditional-style reference called Nupedia complete with lengthy review stages and required editing credentials. Getting less than a stellar response to Nupedia, Wales decided to create a more usage-based encyclopedia with "wiki" software, which allows anyone reading a website to edit it. ("Wiki" was taken from the Hawaiian word "wiki wiki", meaning "quick" or "informal".)

Less than five years later, Wikipedia's English edition contains more than 730,000 entries (compared with only 120,000 in the Encyclopædia Britannica). In total, Wikipedia's world-wide community has written over 2 million articles in 187 different languages. Wales and the core Wikipedia community set up the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikipedia and its related projects. The foundation is "politically neutral," Wales says. "But on a deeper level, there is something profoundly political about what we’re saying – which is that everybody should have access to information."

Wiki Inside

In addition to the basics, Wikipedia contains articles about the most obscure subjects, important topics in history and biography dropped from modern encyclopedias. Is is also the home for definitive writings with extensive references, found nowhere else on the internet, on subjects like Thomas Jefferson, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, or the Democratic Labour Party of Trinidad and Tobago.

Critiques of Wikipedia range wildly, from claims of not enough top-down control to make articles "authoritative" and "reliable", to claims of too much top-down control to give the encyclopedia the benefit of such a wide editing base. Although Wikipedia purports itself to be largely self-monitoring, almost all "vandalism" is controlled by a few dozen of its most active administrators, which naturally leads to accusations of conflicts of interest amongst editors. Since all revisions are saved in each article's history, however, administrator corruption is easily spotted and communicated.

Wikipedia is a reflection of the subjects that people care about and what the general consensus of those subjects are. For users, it is a tool that monitors the general usage and feelings of terms, something unavailable in any other single resource. For editors, it is a chance to co-author something greater than they could write on their own. The idea of co-authorship has become so powerful, in fact, that individual authorship may take a backseat in the future. If this article were written in ten years, it might not have a byline.