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
