Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, always loved to read. When he was three, his mother bought him a World Book Encyclopedia. Wales spent hours leafing through its pages and learning new things. He discovered that the book wasn’t perfect because a lot of important information was missing from its articles. So, he began pasting stickers provided by the publisher on the pages to update the encyclopedia.
As a young adult, Wales found a new passion, the internet. In 2000, he launched a free online encyclopedia called Nupedia. Users could write articles and experts would proofread them. This process was not entirely satisfactory because it was too slow, with only 21 articles published during the first year. Afterwards, Wales found out about the wiki software. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “quick.” The software offered a new model for editing documents online. Thousands of people could work on an article at the same time.
Some experts at Nupedia objected to amateurs editing their articles. So, Wales started a separate website, Wikipedia, to test the idea. It was launched in 2001 and worked remarkably well. Before long, Wikipedia became much more popular than Nupedia, which was shut down in 2003.
