Wikipedia has been hailed as the most revolutionary aid to the spread of human knowledge since Gutenberg's printing press. In less than a decade it has single-handedly invigorated and torn up the very idea of an 'encyclopedia'. Today Wikipedia is firmly entrenched in the world's top 10 web sites. It has become so popular we casually stumble across its content every day. Type any word into any search engine and more than likely a Wikipedia page will be the first result. It is increasingly cited in the press, books, legal affairs and politics. But whereas the only web brands that consistently rank above it - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - are multi-billion dollar enterprises, each with tens of thousands of employees, Wikipedia has a paid staff of just 10, with an operating budget of little more than $3 million. Instead it depends entirely on a legion of unpaid, often anonymous, volunteers. And, since January 2001, these 'Wikipedians' have created more than 10 million articles, in over 250 lanuguages, adding and updating at 'the speed of news' to create nothing less than a 'continuous working draft of history'. But success hasn't come without controversy and whilst many regard it as a great liberator, others - from universities to the People's Republic of China - see only anarchy and chaos. So now, for the first time, Andrew Lih tells the Wikipedia story. A story which challenges some of our most cherished notions - from neutrality, authority and ownership to civil liberties and the profit motive - and explains how a bunch of geeks built the world's greatest encylopedia. Andrew Lih is an academic who writes and commentates on new media, journalism and technology. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of Hong Kong.

About the Author

Andrew Lih is an academic who writes and commentates on new media, journalism and technology. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of Hong Kong. www.andrewlih.com

Reviews

Since Wikipedia was launched online in 2001 as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," it has blossomed to more than a billion words spread over 10 million articles in 250 languages, including 2.5 million articles in English, according to Wikipedia cofounder Wales in the foreword. Lih, a Beijing-based commentator on new media and technology for NPR and CNN, researched Wikipedia and collaborative journalism as a University of Hong Kong academic, and he has been a participating "Wikipedian" himself for the past five years. He notes the site has "invigorated and disrupted the world of encyclopedias... yet only a fraction of the public who use Wikipedia realize it is entirely created by legions of unpaid and often unidentified volunteers." Other books have surfaced (How Wikipedia Works; Wikinomics), but Lih's authoritative approach covers much more, from the influence of Ayn Rand on Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales and the "burnout and stress" of highly active volunteer editor-writers to controversies, credibility crises and vandalism. Wales's more traditional earlier encyclopedia, the peer-reviewed Nupedia, began to fade after he saw how Ward Cunningham's software invention, Wiki (Hawaiian for "quick"), could generate collaborative editing. Tracing Wikipedia's evolution and expansion to international editions, Lih views the encyclopedia as a "global community of passionate scribes," attributing its success to a policy of openness which is "not so much technical phenomenon as social phenomenon." (Mar.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

"'Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.' Jimmy Wales"

Wikipedia is a revolutionary phenomenon, changing fundamentally the landscape of networked collaboration, e-learning, and, as librarians know all too well, mediated information provision. Depicted here is a Wikipedia insider's narrative of the development of Wikipedia. The reader cannot help but become a Wikipedia enthusiast, rooting for the volunteers and lamenting the often public setbacks. The passion and commitment of the early founders and the continuing skyrocketing success of this resource and community truly inspire in a way few online networked communities can. Beijing-based Lih, who formerly taught at Columbia University's School of Journalism, characterizes this revolution as only partly technological. The real revolution is social-an apt point when one considers the philosophical underpinnings of this resource, the articles' neutral point of view, while remaining a free resource anyone can use and distribute. The manner in which volunteers labor tirelessly to shape and then govern over Wikipedia's success underscores the social attributes of this revolution. For anyone who has ever wondered how and why Wikipedia rivals standard encyclopedic works; recommended for larger public libraries.-Jim Hahn, Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.