It's a miracle that Wikipedia exists

The existence of Wikipedia is a miracle
In the past two years, the connotation of the word "feelings" may have changed in the minds of Chinese people; this is mostly due to the hijacking of this once beautiful word by some commercial structures in the marketing process . But if the two words "feelings" and "Wikipedia" are linked together, maybe people will still accept it with sincerity, put away the spectator-like ridicule and sarcasm, and return to their inner understanding of true feelings. Calling and awe.
Wikipedia, the world’s largest not-for-profit website, has been accompanying the development of the entire Internet for 15 years. During this period, many Internet-related companies have either risen to become giants, or declined and closed down, experiencing vicissitudes of life, prosperity and decline; but Wikipedia has increasingly become an indispensable existence for the entire Internet. To borrow a sentence I saw before: The existence of Wikipedia itself is a miracle.
Why is the existence of Wikipedia a miracle?
From .Com to .Org. According to Alexa's latest data, the Wikipedia website (domain name www.wikipedia.org) ranks 7th among all websites in the world, and its ranking is higher in the United States, at 6th. For comparison, in the data released by Alexa, the domain name suffixes of the other six websites ranked before Wikipedia are all .com; in this way, the .org suffix of the Wikipedia website appears to be more unique and meaningful. Extraordinary.
It’s just that when the Wikipedia website was launched on January 15, 2001 and met the world for the first time, it had a .com commercial domain name suffix. The reason is simple. In fact, in the original plan of founder Jimmy Wales, he intended to make money through Wikipedia.
Indeed, Wales has a great love for encyclopedias; he grew up looking at his parents' labeled encyclopedias. During his graduate school period, he was also very interested in the booming open source software systems at the time. These all contributed to Wales's fascination with the concept of "free online encyclopedias that anyone could edit" during the Internet wave at the beginning of this century.
But it is undeniable that Wales still had the intention to make money from Wikipedia when he founded it: after all, although the online encyclopedia is free, as long as Wales is willing, he still has more than a hundred other ways to make huge profits from it. of wealth.
By the way, it is worth mentioning that before founding Wikipedia in 2001, Wales also participated in the creation of a search engine called Bomis in 1996. One of the characteristics of Bomis is that it launched a blog "full of photos of various naked women and porn stars" - although this was something Wales later avoided, it is undeniable that Wales used the money earned from Bomis to Maintain the operations of Wikipedia and its predecessor Nupedia.
With its free and open features, Wikipedia has unsurprisingly gained great popularity. By the end of 2001, Wikipedia had more than 20,000 entries and 18 language versions. However, in this rapid development state, Wikipedia, whose domain name suffix is ​​still .com, has differences in its future development direction.
The reason for this disagreement is based on the inherent product attributes of Wikipedia. From the perspective of platform construction, founder Wales conceived and built Wikipedia and provided indispensable financial support for its development; however, from the perspective of platform development, the content value of Wikipedia comes almost entirely from volunteers from all over the world. those.
So in February 2002, when Spanish Wikipedia users were worried that "Wikipedia pages may include commercial advertisements" and "Spanish users will gradually lose control of their own language version of Wikipedia", they re-created the so-called "freedom" "Encyclopedia", the development of Wikipedia as a whole was actually facing an extremely important hurdle: whether to move towards commercialization.
However, the concerns of Spanish Wikipedia users have also spread to other non-English language versions. Wikipedia volunteers from all over the world are worried and discussing the prospects and future of Wikipedia - this is natural for Wales. It's a huge pressure. Finally, in August 2002, Wales announced that he would no longer run commercial ads on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia also changed the website's URL domain name from "wikipedia.com" to "wikipedia.org" with the top-level domain of .org.
In addition, in order to solve the funding problem, on June 20, 2003, Wales announced the establishment of a separate Wikimedia Foundation for the Wikipedia project. At the same time, the servers originally placed under the names of Wales and Bomis were also handed over to the Wikimedia Foundation for use. As a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation can obtain funds through donations to sustain its own development.
"Wiki" as a concept. I don’t know what kind of mood Wales had when he made the important decision of “not publishing commercial advertisements on Wikipedia”; even when we speculate with malicious intent, maybe Wales was very unwilling to do so. But in any case, looking back today, Wales made perhaps the wisest decision in his life. His name is firmly engraved in Wikipedia's history.
Wiki, that is, wiki, was originally just the name of a technology. This word comes from the Hawaiian "wee kee wee kee", which is pronounced the same as wiki and means "hurry up". At a technical level, wiki refers to a hypertext system that allows everyone in a specific group to browse, create, and modify text, effectively controls and manages different versions of the system, and retains all modification records.
Although Wikipedia is based on wiki technology, the Wikimedia Foundation obviously does not limit its focus to encyclopedia content. Perhaps in its view, not only encyclopedias, but also a variety of content including dictionaries, books, and news can be edited socially using wiki technology. And given that Wikipedia has achieved great success in group co-editing, and the Wikimedia Foundation has received sufficient operating funds through donations, Wiki seems to have transcended the scope of a technical name and become an operating model.
The characteristics of this model are: building a platform for non-profit purposes, using the power of everyone to provide corresponding content for the platform, and finally raising funds from the public through high-quality content to maintain its own operations. Wikipedia is the best example of this model, and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are extensions of this example.
Analyzed from a sociological perspective, the model represented by "Wiki" actually extracts two groups from the entire human race. One is to contribute content to the platform through collaborative editing, and the other is to provide funds through donations. Support the normal operation of the platform; and under the asymmetric cooperation of these two groups, the beneficiaries are the broadest entire human group. In a sense, this should be the most ideal and sentimental way of operating content since the birth of the Internet; but from a practical perspective, only Wikipedia has successfully achieved this.
Of course, the influence of "Wiki" is not only reflected within the Wikimedia Foundation; the well-known "WikiLeaks" conceptually inherits Wikipedia's operating model. WikiLeaks also claims to be a non-profit organization; on the one hand, it relies on users to provide some secret information, and on the other hand, it also raises funds from outside to maintain operations. Although WikiLeaks' fame is largely due to its touching on politically sensitive points in various countries around the world, it has to be admitted that the word "Wiki" is also one of the important reasons why it has attracted so much attention.
But in fact, WikiLeaks has no actual connection with the Wikimedia Foundation. If we insist on saying that there is some connection between the two, we can only say that it is the inheritance and development of concepts.
In addition, based on the huge influence of "Wiki", Don Tapscott, a new economist known as the "Father of the Digital Economy", also wrote a business book called "Wikinomics". The book once again emphasizes the huge energy of large-scale collaboration in the Internet era and the huge business value brought by this energy.
However, it is slightly ironic that Wikipedia, which was the first to implement the concept of "Wiki", did not embark on a commercial path, and its founder, Wales, did not obtain huge wealth from this. Of course, he gained respect.
Summary
Now the development of Wikipedia has entered a more complex stage. And as its influence increases, the development of Wikipedia has also encountered many problems: the editor staff has decreased and there is a gender imbalance, the content has been maliciously tampered with or destroyed, and the amount of donations has not been used effectively... As an open and free Encyclopedia, people have the right to question and make corresponding criticisms; this also reflects people's expectations for Wikipedia as a beautiful thing from another perspective. As the saying goes, deep love brings deep responsibility.
However, what is gratifying is that under the entry "Wikipedia", we can still clearly see all the doubts and criticisms about itself - this shows that Wikipedia still has free and open attributes.
One more thing: when we type wikipedia.com in the address bar of the browser and press the Enter key, it will still stubbornly jump to wikipedia.org - this is also a gratifying and beautiful symbol.
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The above has introduced that the existence of Wikipedia is a miracle, including various aspects. I hope it will be helpful to friends who are interested in PHP tutorials.