That is the way that good ideas often blossom: a bumblebee brings half an idea from one realm, and pollinates another fertile realm filled with half-formed innovations. This is why Web tools are valuable, as are lunches at taco stands.
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Cunningham was supportive, indeed delighted when Wales called him up in January 2001 to say he planned to use the wiki software to juice up his encyclopedia project. Cunningham had not sought to patent or copyright either the software or the wiki name, and he was one of those innovators who was happy to see his products become tools that anyone could use or adapt.
At first Wales and Sanger conceived of Wikipedia merely as an adjunct to Nupedia, sort of like a feeder product or farm team. The wiki articles, Sanger assured Nupedia’s expert editors, would be relegated to a separate section of the website and not be listed with the regular Nupedia pages. “If a wiki article got to a high level it could be put into the regular Nupedia editorial process,” he wrote in a post.100 Nevertheless, the Nupedia purists pushed back, insisting that Wikipedia be kept completely segregated, so as not to contaminate the wisdom of the experts. The Nupedia Advisory Board tersely declared on its website, “Please note: the editorial processes and policies of Wikipedia and Nupedia are totally separate; Nupedia editors and peer reviewers do not necessarily endorse the Wikipedia project, and Wikipedia contributors do not necessarily endorse the Nupedia project.”101 Though they didn’t know it, the pedants of the Nupedia priesthood were doing Wikipedia a huge favor by cutting the cord.
Unfettered, Wikipedia took off. It became to Web content what GNU/Linux was to software: a peer-to-peer commons collaboratively created and maintained by volunteers who worked for the civic satisfactions they found. It was a delightful, counterintuitive concept, perfectly suited to the philosophy, attitude, and technology of the Internet. Anyone could edit a page, and the results would show up instantly. You didn’t have to be an expert. You didn’t have to fax in a copy of your diploma. You didn’t have to be authorized by the Powers That Be. You didn’t even have to be registered or use your real name. Sure, that meant vandals could mess up pages. So could idiots or ideologues. But the software kept track of every version. If a bad edit appeared, the community could simply get rid of it by clicking on a “revert” link. “Imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it” is the way the media scholar Clay Shirky explained the process. “The amount of graffiti on such a wall would depend on the commitment of its defenders.”102 In the case of Wikipedia, its defenders were fiercely committed. Wars have been fought with less intensity than the reversion battles on Wikipedia. And somewhat amazingly, the forces of reason regularly triumphed.
One month after Wikipedia’s launch, it had a thousand articles, approximately seventy times the number that Nupedia had after a full year. By September 2001, after eight months in existence, it had ten thousand articles. That month, when the September 11 attacks occurred, Wikipedia showed its nimbleness and usefulness; contributors scrambled to create new pieces on such topics as the World Trade Center and its architect. A year after that, the article total reached forty thousand, more than were in the World Book that Wales’s mother had bought. By March 2003 the number of articles in the English-language edition had reached 100,000, with close to five hundred active editors working almost every day. At that point, Wales decided to shut Nupedia down.
By then Sanger had been gone for a year. Wales had let him go. They had increasingly clashed on fundamental issues, such as Sanger’s desire to give more deference to experts and scholars. In Wales’s view, “people who expect deference because they have a PhD and don’t want to deal with ordinary people tend to be annoying.”103 Sanger felt, to the contrary, that it was the nonacademic masses who tended to be annoying. “As a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise,” he wrote in a New Year’s Eve 2004 manifesto that was one of many attacks he leveled after he left. “A policy that I attempted to institute in Wikipedia’s first year, but for which I did not muster adequate support, was the policy of respecting and deferring politely to experts.” Sanger’s elitism was rejected not only by Wales but by the Wikipedia community. “Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia,” Sanger lamented.104
Sanger turned out to be wrong. The uncredentialed crowd did not run off the experts. Instead the crowd itself became the expert, and the experts became part of the crowd. Early on in Wikipedia’s development, I was researching a book about Albert Einstein and I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on him claimed that he had traveled to Albania in 1935 so that King Zog could help him escape the Nazis by getting him a visa to the United States. This was completely untrue, even though the passage included citations to obscure Albanian websites where this was proudly proclaimed, usually based on some thirdhand series of recollections about what someone’s uncle once said a friend had told him. Using both my real name and a Wikipedia handle, I deleted the assertion from the article, only to watch it reappear. On the discussion page, I provided sources for where Einstein actually was during the time in question (Princeton) and what passport he was using (Swiss). But tenacious Albanian partisans kept reinserting the claim. The Einstein-in-Albania tug-of-war lasted weeks. I became worried that the obstinacy of a few passionate advocates could undermine Wikipedia’s reliance on the wisdom of crowds. But after a while, the edit wars ended, and the article no longer had Einstein going to Albania. At first I didn’t credit that success to the wisdom of crowds, since the push for a fix had come from me and not from the crowd. Then I realized that I, like thousands of others, was in fact a part of the crowd, occasionally adding a tiny bit to its wisdom.
A key principle of Wikipedia was that articles should have a neutral point of view. This succeeded in producing articles that were generally straightforward, even on controversial topics such as global warming and abortion. It also made it easier for people of different viewpoints to collaborate. “Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working together on the same articles,” Sanger explained. “It’s quite remarkable.”105 The community was usually able to use the lodestar of the neutral point of view to create a consensus article offering competing views in a neutral way. It became a model, rarely emulated, of how digital tools can be used to find common ground in a contentious society.
Not only were Wikipedia’s articles created collaboratively by the community; so were its operating practices. Wales fostered a loose system of collective management, in which he played guide and gentle prodder but not boss. There were wiki pages where users could jointly formulate and debate the rules. Through this mechanism, guidelines were evolved to deal with such matters as reversion practices, mediation of disputes, the blocking of individual users, and the elevation of a select few to administrator status. All of these rules grew organically from the community rather than being dictated downward by a central authority. Like the Internet itself, power was distributed. “I can’t imagine who could have written such detailed guidelines other than a bunch of people working together,” Wales reflected. “It’s common in Wikipedia that we’ll come to a solution that’s really well thought out because so many minds have had a crack at improving it.”106
As it grew organically, with both its content and its governance sprouting from its grassroots, Wikipedia was able to spread like kudzu. At the beginning of 2014, there were editions in 287 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Žemaitška. The total number of articles was 30 million, with 4.4 million in the English-language edition. In contrast, the Encyclopedia Britannica, which quit publishing a print edition in 2010, had eighty thousand articles in its electronic edition, less than 2 percent of the number in Wikipedia. “The cumulative effort of Wikipedia’s millions of contributors means you are a click away from figuring out what a myocardial infarction is, or the cause of the Agacher Strip War, or who Spangles Muldoon was,” Clay Shirky has written. “This is an unplanned miracle, like ‘the market’ deciding h
ow much bread goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free.”107 The result has been the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history.
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So why do people contribute? Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler dubbed Wikipedia, along with open-source software and other free collaborative projects, examples of “commons-based peer production.” He explained, “Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.”108 These motivations include the psychological reward of interacting with others and the personal gratification of doing a useful task. We all have our little joys, such as collecting stamps or being a stickler for good grammar, knowing Jeff Torborg’s college batting average or the order of battle at Trafalgar. These all find a home on Wikipedia.
There is something fundamental, almost primordial at work. Some Wikipedians refer to it as “wiki-crack.” It’s the rush of dopamine that seems to hit the brain’s pleasure center when you make a smart edit and it appears instantly in a Wikipedia article. Until recently, being published was a pleasure afforded only to a select few. Most of us in that category can remember the thrill of seeing our words appear in public for the first time. Wikipedia, like blogs, made that treat available to anyone. You didn’t have to be credentialed or anointed by the media elite.
For example, many of Wikipedia’s articles on the British aristocracy were largely written by a user known as Lord Emsworth. They were so insightful about the intricacies of the peerage system that some were featured as the “Article of the Day,” and Lord Emsworth rose to become a Wikipedia administrator. It turned out that Lord Emsworth, a name taken from P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, was actually a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody knows you’re a commoner.109
Connected to that is the even deeper satisfaction that comes from helping to create the information that we use rather than just passively receiving it. “Involvement of people in the information they read,” wrote the Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, “is an important end itself.”110 A Wikipedia that we create in common is more meaningful than would be the same Wikipedia handed to us on a platter. Peer production allows people to be engaged.
Jimmy Wales often repeated a simple, inspiring mission for Wikipedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. But it badly understated what Wikipedia did. It was about more than people being “given” free access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history, to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wales came to realize that. “Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own,” he said. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111
Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” It also harkened back to Ada Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry. When Wales and his new wife had a daughter in 2011, they named her Ada, after Lady Lovelace.112
LARRY PAGE, SERGEY BRIN, AND SEARCH
When Justin Hall created his quirky home page in January 1994, there were only seven hundred websites in the world. By the end of that year there were ten thousand, and by the end of the following year there were 100,000. The combination of personal computers and networks had led to something amazing: anyone could get content from anywhere and distribute their own content everywhere. But for this exploding universe to be useful, it was necessary to find an easy way, a simple human-computer-network interface, that would enable people to find what they needed.
The first attempts to do this were hand-compiled directories. Some were quirky and frivolous, like Hall’s Links from the Underground and Paul Phillips’s Useless Pages. Others were sober and serious, like Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Virtual Library, NCSA’s “What’s New” page, and Tim O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator. Somewhere in between, and taking the concept to a new level, was a site created in early 1994 by two Stanford graduate students that was called, in one of its many early incarnations, Jerry and David’s Guide to the Web.
As they were finishing their doctoral dissertations, Jerry Yang and David Filo would procrastinate by playing fantasy league basketball. “We did everything we could to avoid writing our theses,” Yang recalled.113 Yang spent time devising ways to ferret out player stats from servers that used FTP and Gopher, two protocols for distributing documents on the Internet that were popular before the rise of the Web.
When the Mosaic browser was released, Yang turned his attention to the Web, and he and Filo began compiling by hand an ever-expanding directory of sites. It was organized by categories—such as business, education, entertainment, government—each of which had dozens of subcategories. By the end of 1994, they had renamed their guide to the Web “Yahoo!”
There was one obvious problem: with the number of websites increasing tenfold each year, there was no way to keep a directory updated by hand. Fortunately, there was a tool that was already being used to ferret out information that resided on FTP and Gopher sites. It was called a crawler, because it crawled from server to server on the Internet compiling an index. The two most famous were named, like the comic book couple, Archie (for FTP archives) and Veronica (for Gopher). By 1994 a variety of enterprising engineers were creating crawlers that would serve as search tools for the Web. These included the WWW Wanderer built by Matthew Gray at MIT, WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, AltaVista by Louis Monier at the Digital Equipment Corporation, Lycos by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, OpenText by a team from Canada’s University of Waterloo, and Excite by six friends from Stanford. All of them used link-hopping robots, or bots, that could dart around the Web like a binge drinker on a pub crawl, scarfing up URLs and information about each site. This would then be tagged, indexed, and placed in a database that could be accessed by a query server.
Filo and Yang did not build their own web crawler; instead they decided to license one to add to their home page. Yahoo! continued to emphasize the importance of its directory, which was compiled by humans. When a user typed in a phrase, the Yahoo! computers would see if it related to an entry in the directory, and if so that handcrafted list of sites would pop up. If not, the query would be handed off to the Web-crawling search engine.
The Yahoo! team believed, mistakenly, that most users would navigate the Web by exploring rather than seeking something specific. “The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,” recalled Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!’s first editor in chief, who oversaw a newsroom of more than sixty young editors and directory compilers.114 This reliance on the human factor meant that Yahoo! would be much better than its rivals over the years (and even to the present) in choosing news stories, although not in providing search tools. But there was no way that Srinivasan and her team could keep up with the number of Web pages being created. Despite what she and her colleagues at Yahoo! believed, automated search engines would become the primary method for finding things on the Web, with another pair of Stanford graduate students leading the way.
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Larry P
age was born and bred in the world of computing.115 His father was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Michigan, and his mother taught programming there. In 1979, when Larry was six, his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer, a hobbyist home computer.VI “I remember being really excited that we had a computer, because it was a big deal, and it was probably expensive, kind of like buying a car,” he said.116 Larry soon mastered it and was using it for his schoolwork. “I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document.”117
One of his childhood heroes was Nikola Tesla, the imaginative pioneer of electricity and other inventions who was outmaneuvered in business by Thomas Edison and died in obscurity. When he was twelve, Page read a biography of Tesla and found the story troubling. “He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story,” he said. “He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.”118
Larry’s parents used to take him and his brother, Carl, on long road trips, sometimes to computer conferences. “I think I ended up being in almost every state by the time I left for college,” he observed. One such trip was to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, which was filled with wondrous robots. Because he was under sixteen, Larry was told he couldn’t come in, but his father insisted. “He just basically yelled at them. It’s one of the few times I’d seen him argue.”119