What your favourite Web sites say about you

By Rory Reid on 10 September 2007, 5:27pm

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WIKIPEDIA
What's the story?
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be edited by anyone. It was developed in January 2001 as a "feeder project" for Nupedia, which was written by highly qualified, expert contributors. Its conceptual origins are disputed (see below) but the main players were Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, his editor-in-chief.

Nupedia's expert editors were reluctant to be associated with user-generated content, so the project was given its own URL (www.wikipedia.com). Like many Web sites, Wikipedia was given prominence after a series of appearances on Slashdot in March 2001. This encouraged many more participants -- the number of articles grew from 1,000 in February 2001 to 40,000 in August 2002. The 2 millionth English language article was posted in September 2007.

Did you know?
Wikipedia is a veritable font of disputed content -- for every user that posts information, there is another to contest its accuracy. Ironically, Wikipedia itself cannot decide who actually founded the company. In 2001, its official personnel page stated that Wales and Sanger were co-founders. Wales, however, has claimed it was he alone who founded Wikipedia. He has told The Boston Globe "it's preposterous" to call Sanger a co-founder. We wonder what the Encyclopaedia Britannica thinks about all this.

What Wikipedia says about you
The average Wikipedia users are university students with too hectic a lifestyle for their own good. The users are in search of a quick fix to their long-standing problem of not doing enough prior research. When all the late nights have taken their toll and essay deadlines loom, they can confidently lean on Wikipedia like a crutch of knowledge.

Occasionally the Wikipedia users are pranksters. When not trying to add themselves to the lexicon, they're modifying entries to gain notoriety. For example, the Wikipedia entry for Windows was once altered to read:

"Win•dows
Noun.
A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. -LW"

In January 2007, Microsoft unsuccessfully offered cash to change certain Wikipedia articles. Unbelievably, the above wasn't one of them.