Wikipedia: of the people, by the people and for the people

Image credit: royblumenthal on flickr; CC-BY-SA

“Wikipedia is a contract… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.“

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and development. The dynamism of the Internet as a medium, and the radical changes that it has undergone in the past few years bear testimony to the significance of these elements in the life of individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. The internet has two arresting features: internationalism and populism. The reach of the internet is indisputably wide and it has become a democratic tool for the common man to make his voice heard on a platform of equity.

The speed at which content is being added and published on the internet is simply astounding. The volume on the internet is tripling every six months. By 2010, new content on the internet would double every 72 hours, statisticians say. “Web 2.0″ might have been the buzzword of 2007, but it is only a sign of things to come. The web is moulding itself to the needs and demands of it’s audience and millions of users worldwide are contributing to the ever-increasing web of user-generated content.

At the same time, there are forces working in the opposite direction trying to clamp down the freedom that technology bestows upon it’s users. An invigorated copyright regime has recognised the potential of this technology and has lobbied for greater restrictions on various forms of creativity. Copyrights are accorded automatically and imposed on other individuals severely restricting their abilities to use, modify and distribute the content. We are living in the times of the “license raj” or “permission culture” as Professor Lawrence Lessig put it. Wikipedia has brought tidings of change.

Wikipedia was formally launched in 2001, as a complement to an expert-driven and peer-reviewed encyclopedia project called “Nupedia“. This compendium allowed internet users to edit it’s content and to alter it in a manner they thought fit. It quickly overtook its sister-project to become one of the world’s most popular websites and an exhaustive repository of organised knowledge. The number of articles on the English project currently stands above 2.1 million and counting; the number is 7.5 million articles across projects in 250 languages. The Wikimedia Foundation was officially constituted in 2003 as a non-profit charitable organisation to support the online encyclopedia along with other educational projects. The foundation’s by-laws declare the statement of purpose of collecting and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

The Wikimedia Foundation has endeavoured to provide free-licensed text on it’s projects, which in substance means that the content available on Wikipedia is free-for-use for anyone and everyone, for purposes commercial or non-commercial under the conditions of copyleft. The Foundation’s stated goal is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.

What drives the tens of thousands of users who persevere to add and maintain content on the website? The Wikipedia community has volunteer contributors from all over the world, who collaborate to maintain the website without any kind of remuneration. This has already been subjected to copious amounts of research and deliberations among anthropologists and sociologists around the world. The encyclopedia is like a microcosm, the community working behind the scenes – self-sustained, vibrant and diverse. People contribute for the joy of contributing, underscoring the human quality of communion.

Wikipedia has become a popular source of information for students, teachers and adults across the world. It is a way forward, and a tool for mass education. There are students in Africa and Asia who do not have access to premium and restricted academic databases, for them Wikipedia spells hope and confidence. John Stuart Mill, the champion of human expression and liberty had said, “If human life is to be made tolerable, information must be centralised and power disseminated.” In the short span of it’s existence, Wikipedia has become an oasis in the sea of anarchy. Information is the currency of democracies, Thomas Jefferson said. Education has changed lives and Wikipedia has, in its own way, contributed to bringing that change to the lives of those who are not as privileged as we are.

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. When you contribute to Wikipedia, you become de facto teacher to thousands, if not millions of people.

You can help the Wikimedia Foundation change the world by making your valuable donations here. If you are unable help us monetarily, please create an account and contribute to humanity!