To Celebrate Wikipedia’s 20th Birthday, Try Editing It

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

To Celebrate Wikipedia's 20th Birthday, Try Editing It:

At a Monday press conference commemorating Wikipedia's 20th birthday, Jimmy Wales joked, We were never as bad as they thought we were, and we're not as good as they think we are." Then again, the recent spike in praise for Wikipedia is enough to make any internet encyclopedia editor blush. The Economist is celebrating the occasion with threearticlesarguing that the site is the rare early internet project that exceeded expectations, characterizing it as the dream that worked." In recent years, journalists have also described Wikipedia as the last best place on the internet," a ray of light," the internet's good grown-up," and the good cop" in the fight against internet misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories. As Katherine Maher, CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation observed at the press conference, perhaps Wikipedia's core values are back in fashion.

[...] Each month the Wikipedia service is accessed by 1.5 billion unique devices from around the world. During that same period, a small minority of those users-some 280,000 editors-take the time to contribute to Wikipedia. According to Kevin Li, one of Wikipedia's volunteer administrators and a junior at Stanford, the website's biggest challenge is a declining supply of edit hours to continue the time-consuming work of maintaining an encyclopedia with such a massive readership. Essentially, Wikipedia needs more volunteers to help keep the archive up to date.

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