Three Very Different Design Paths

Joseph Reagle’s work on Wikipedia and its predecessors opened my eyes to a fascinating history. I’m delighted he has provided this account of the origin of the most interesting digital object since the Web itself. —Jonathan Grudin

Wikipedia: The Happy Accident
Joseph Reagle

joseph.nyu@reagle.org | New York University

[1] Jimmy Wales. Hi... nupedia-l. Mar. 11, 2000. <http:// web.archive.org/ web/20010506015648/ http://www.nupedia. com/pipermail/ nupedia-l/2000- March/ 000009.html>

“Wikipedia was an accident.” I sometimes offer this (admittedly) exaggerated claim in response to those who confuse Wikipedia’s current success with its uncertain origins. At the start, it was but the most recent contender in an age-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia: a dream that the latest technology would provide universal access to world knowledge. Jimmy Wales’s and Larry Sanger’s first attempt at what would eventually become Wikipedia, the wiki-based encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” was neither of these things. So, by saying that Wikipedia was an accident, I don’t mean it was unwelcome—far from it—but that it was a fortuitous turn of events unforeseen by even its founders. Moreover, it was evidence of contingency’s role in technological innovation.

[ 2] Diderot, D. “The Encyclopedia (1755)”. In Rameau’s Nephew, and Other Works, edited by Jacques Barzun and Ralph Henry Bowen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001, 277, 283.

May + June 2009

[ 3] Wells, H.G. World Brain. London: Methuen, 1938, 49, 54.

lead to the realization of this universal vision is seen in the works of a seminal “documentalist” and of a famous author: Paul Otlet’s “Universal Bibliographic Repertory” and H. G. Wells’s World Brain. They expected the novel technologies of the index card, loose-leaf binder, and microfilm to facilitate radically accessible information that also bridged the distance between people.

Given advances in technology and the insecurity of the interwar period, Wells believed that intellectual resources were squandered, that “we live in a world of unused and misapplied knowledge and skill” and “professional men of intelligence have great offerings but do not form a coherent body that can be brought to general affairs.” He hoped that a world encyclopedia could “solve the problem of that jig-saw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding.” Given the advances in “ micro-photog-raphy,” Wells felt “the time is close at hand when a student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in exact replica.” And much like one of Wikipedia’s greatest strengths, it need not limit itself as a “row of volumes printed and published once and for all” but could instead be “a sort of mental clearing-house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified, and compared” in “continual correspondence” with all that was happening in the world [ 3]. Yet it was not until the wiki that this vision came to be even partially realized.

interactions

The Vision

In March 2000, Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia and its Nupedia progenitor, sent his first message to the Nupedia e-mail list: “My dream is that someday this encyclopedia will be available for just the cost of printing to schoolhouses across the world, including ‘3rd world’ countries that won’t be able to afford widespread internet access for years. How many African villages can afford a set of Britannicas? I suppose not many.”[1] In this statement one can find a particular type of enlightened aspiration: A universal encyclopedic vision of increased information access and goodwill. For example, Denis Diderot, editor of the famous French Encyclopédie, wrote that a society of men bound together in a “feeling of mutual good will” to “collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the earth, to make known its general structure to men among whom we live, and to transmit it to those who will come after us.” [ 2] At the beginning of the 20th century, the hope that modern information technology might finally

The Web

To understand the success of Wikipedia as the most credible realization of the universal encyclopedic vision, one must also understand a failing of

Photograph by Loungerie