\n\nDoes anyone have any good resources about\u00a0\u201cwhy Wikipedia worked?\u201d
What I mean is \u2013 there was this time early on when almost everyone, including me, treated Wikipedia as both (1) completely untrustworthy and (2) not at all comprehensive. \u00a0This made sense, since it was just a collection of words put together by god-knows-who, covering only the topics that god-knows-who felt like writing about for god-knows-what-reason. \u00a0But these days, it\u2019s treated as a useful first place to look for information about almost anything.
I\u2019m not so confused about how (1) changed, because Wikipedia has various ways of resisting vandalism and of getting dedicated teams to creating articles deliberately. \u00a0It\u2019s not actually just like reading bathroom graffiti, which is how we used to think about it back in the day.
But (2) still baffles me. \u00a0How did Wikipedia get to be a real encyclopedia, indeed possibly the most encyclopedic\u00a0encyclopedia ever created? \u00a0Everyone knows about\u00a0\u201cfancruft,\u201d and I\u2019ve seen complaints that the overall content is skewed toward the interests of techies with lots of free time. \u00a0But that skew is far, far less pronounced than I ever would have imagined at the outset. \u00a0Even if Wikipedia doesn\u2019t literally cover everything, it feels\u00a0like it does. \u00a0You can look up things too boring, too esoteric, too wonkish, too trivial, too down-to-earth, too\u00a0\u201cacademic specialists only\u201d \u2013 too anything \u2013\u00a0for any other encyclopedic effort to cover, and there it is, on Wikipedia, presented in a careful formal voice, as if you\u2019d just dispatched a personal research assistant to report on it for you.
What confuses me is why volunteers created this thing. \u00a0I can see people wanting to work on Wikipedia articles about personal areas of interest. \u00a0But if that were the only motivation, I can\u2019t imagine it being nearly as comprehensive as it is, particularly about things few people care about. \u00a0What motivated people to make it so comprehensive, and why did they succeed? \u00a0Is there any way we could have predicted this in the early days? \u00a0Can we recreate this success with other projects?
Don’t have an answer but might be worthwhile to consider its contemporaries that didn’t work, or at least to the same extent \u2013 the user-edited encyclopedias h2g2 and Everything2. I was on E2 for a while and you’d think it would have the edge, being run and promoed by the guys at Slashdot, the then-HQ of techies with too much time on their hands.
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