Wikipedia, the collaborative multilingual encyclopedia, was born on January 15, 2001. The term wiki means quick in Hawaiian, and in informatics, it was adopted to describe a technology for creating collaborative websites. The term wiki was joined to the word encyclopedia to form Wikipedia, so the term means fast culture.
The Wikipedia project was launched as a complement to Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project written by experts. In 2003, the Nupedia project was closed and its contents absorbed into Wikipedia.
The purpose of Wikipedia was from the beginning to create a universal encyclopedia in as many languages as possible, written entirely by volunteers whose contents were freely available. Initially, the license was the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). In 2009, the Creative Commons cc-by-sa version 3.0 license was adopted following a referendum, which saw more than 75% of voters approve the change.
In 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and other projects created over the years, was created.
The development of Wikipedia has been enormous, and now it includes millions of articles in 262 languages. The servers that host Wikipedia use open source software only, in line with the principles of the project. The hardware is maintained through the donations that anyone can make to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Over time, the philosophy of Wikipedia has received some criticism because of the fact that anyone can write what they want, leaving open the possibility to have contents that are inaccurate, if not wrong or even falsified. It’s true that you can come across information that isn’t accurate; it’s also true that anyone can correct it. Even the most prestigious classical encyclopaedias may contain inaccuracies: how many publishers release corrected updates for free?
More complicated is the problem of historical events or news that can be seen and described according to various points of view, sometimes completely contradictory, perhaps for ideological reasons.
The principle of Wikipedia is that continuous article correction and refinement must lead to an increasing precision, but how do you reconcile different points of view?
Freedom also means being free to express your views, but we must also have a critical awareness in evaluating the views expressed.
Ideally, whoever writes an article on Wikipedia should be aware that people with different points of view will read it, so they should try to avoid mere propaganda. Whoever reads a Wikipedia article that expresses a certain point of view could benefit from discovering a point of view different from the ones they know.
In a critical assessment of an article, we may not agree with a point of view, but if it’s expressed by rational arguments, our evaluation is certainly different from that of an article that tries to make propaganda. A meeting between various points of view with greater mutual respect could be the next frontier for Wikipedia, a goal that could hopefully be reached by its twentieth birthday.
