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  • The Big Issue

    Twenty years of Wikipedia

    Jan 18, 2021 5 minutes

    Overview

    Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia, which is how Wikipedia is described on the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia. The English-language version contains 6,227,517 articles, which were viewed 269 billion times last year. As it marks its 20th anniversary, The Big Issue speaks to co-founder and frontman Jimmy Wales, and Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher to find out about the challenges that come with controlling the biggest source of information on the planet in a time of fake news and dangerous views.

    History

    On January 15 2000, tech pioneers brimmed with optimism about the potential of the information age, including 34-year-old Alabama-born Jimmy Wales. He had a vision at once simple and preposterously ambitious: “To create a free, high-quality encyclopedia in all the languages of the world.”

    “That was a really big idea back then and it’s still a really big idea today,” Wales, now living in London,

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