Wikipedia @ 25: Knowledge is Human

Earlier this month the open knowledge community celebrated a big milestone as Wikipedia turned 25! I blogged about it on the Reclaim Blog, and had the pleasure of joining a lovely line up to celebrate:

It was inspiring to have a conversation about open knowledge, particularly in an age of information abundance (read Dave Cormier’s book on that subject in case you haven’t yet!) . Incidentally, the book’s subtitle, “The Community is the Curriculum” would have made an excellent theme for the live stream, as we mainly talked about people and community.

Communities that support the creation, sharing and storing of open knowledge. Communities that add, edit, and provide governance for open knowledge (“Wikipedia contains over 65 million articles across over 300 languages”). Communities that are underrepresented, or don’t have a voice in open knowledge projects, and communities that build open knowledge creation on the kind of open source software and infrastructure that Reclaim has long championed.

We also shared our personal experiences of how we encountered Wikipedia and its sister projects in our own education, at work, for research, as parents and professionals. It was surprising to me, someone who has had little formal involvement with Wikipedia itself, how much each of is had to contribute, from using it day to day for looking things up, hobbies or research, to using it as a tool in the classroom, to teach digital skills and literacy or for institutional initiatives.

Our stories, our activities, form only a very small part of the overall engagement and use with this incredible platform: “Wikipedia is viewed more than 15 billion times every month.”.

These statistics shared by Wikipedia as part of the celebration are all incredible. The one that made me pause most however is this one: “Wikipedia is edited 342 times per minute.”.

That means that whilst I was writing this blog post, over 4,000 edits have been made. And whilst you have been reading this, hundreds more have been added. There’s another one. And another 10. And another 100.

Our conversation on the stream, and I hope you’ll watch the recording if you missed it live, was an opportunities to tell stories and share perspectives about our journeys from a world in which Wikipedia didn’t exist, to one in which we can’t really imagine life without it. It made me reflect on how it became what it is today: a project in which thousands of editors participate in every minute of the day, producing this source of open knowledge.

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia! Here’s to the next 25 years of human knowledge in the open!