This Week In Retro: Wikipedia [2001] (Patreon)

January 15, 2001: The Greatest/Worst Website in the World Debuts [citation needed]

by Diamond Feit

As my journey forward through time continues unabated, I find myself increasingly aware of my unique place in history. I grew up with computers at an early age, but the internet wasn’t unavailable to me until I was a high school graduate; the internet as we know it didn't arrive until I was well into adulthood. So while there are millions of adults who remember the pre-internet world, a good portion of them are elderly and view the entire concept of computers with confusion or suspicion. However, I belong to a generation that was raised computer-savvy, only to witness that technology become integrated into our every waking moment. Some people call Americans my age the "Oregon Trail generation", but I prefer Generation-X, thank you.

Similarly, as a person who started using email and the web in 1994, I can remember how the internet was seen before January 15, 2001, when Wikipedia first launched. And I have subsequently seen, firsthand, how that innovation changed the entire way we view information.

Wikipedia, in case you're new to this planet, is the online "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", according to its front page. It is the "wisdom of crowds" incarnate, as every single page on its many, many servers around the world was both user-generated and user-edited. These articles run the gamut from… well, everything. Anything. You, sitting there, reading/listening to this column, could go to Wikipedia right this second and create a brand new article about absolutely any topic real or imagined. Granted, if that article is a collection of profanity or nonsense, it won't exist for long, but the entirety of Wikipedia's knowledge started in such a manner; someone decided "this should be on Wikipedia", and thus it was.

This isn't how things used to be. Pre-web, most people had to physically go to the library to look something up, with an encyclopedia being the first stop as a compendium of "important" knowledge—although encyclopedias were themselves limited by the fact that they tended to stick to scholarly or historical topics. A kid looking to read about the presidents of the United States for a school report was the target audience for encyclopedias; kids curious about James Bond films or old Star Trek episodes would be less satisfied.

However, even after libraries integrated computers into their systems and the internet had made clear the fact that it was here to stay, traditional encyclopedias remained a go-to resource for general knowledge on unfamiliar subjects by virtue of their ease-of-use. The World Wide Web did open the doors to people sharing their collective knowledge with one another, but that information was fragmented and split across a thousand different sources. This led to the rise of search engines, which made the scattered clusters of information easier to index if no easier to digest. Worse, since every page was maintained individually, every source had to be viewed with extreme caution. Skepticism is a healthy virtue, of course, but the need for constant vigilance in order to sort fact from fiction when browsing a dozen different websites becomes exhausting.

Wikipedia changed everything. On a superficial level, it felt like a breath of fresh air to open a web page in the early 2000s and not be subjected to a dozen pop-up ads, embedded audio, or cumbersome introduction animations. Wikipedia has always been mercifully easy on the eyes and ears; black text on a white background with colored text only for links, and thumbnails for all media that lets the reader opt-in to loading any massive files. Remember, in 2001, it was still common for internet users to be reliant on modems with limited bandwidth, which meant even a modest-sized image could take minutes to appear on screen.

Beyond its aesthetics, Wikipedia's simplicity and open format encourage users not only to read but also to contribute as well. With two clicks, anyone reading any article can amend or correct items as they see fit: A boon to those of us who find typos or careless errors an irritant. Changes are saved in seconds and become visible immediately. These days, whenever a person of note passes away, diligent users convert the verbs in their biography into past tense instantly.

In the early 2000s, when I was but a humble postal worker/amateur blogger, Wikipedia was magical. Not only did it provide a basic overview of current events (the front page is updated constantly with breaking news), but by virtue of its openness a slew of early contributors were, shall we say, "early adopters" (you know, nerds) who added as much content on their hobbies as they did on historical matters.

I followed their lead and became a dedicated Wikipedian myself for a few years, creating articles on topics like manga artist Hirohiko Araki (relatively unknown in the English-speaking world at the time) and by contributing photos to existing articles from my trip to Japan. As of this writing, my poorly cropped digital photo of Miho Hatori performing in New York City is still the default photo on her article in numerous languages, including Japanese.

To even a casual user of the web, the launch and subsequent growth of Wikipedia has had a tremendous impact. Type any string of characters into the search engine of your choice; the top result will very likely be an article on Wikipedia. Many topics such as famous people or films will, when googled, return a basic selection of facts from Wikipedia with only a casual reference to its source relegated to the right side of the page. It is, at this point, a presumption that a Google user just wants what information Wikipedia has first and foremost, with possible additional resources listed below just in case.

While I firmly believe in the ideas behind Wikipedia, its de facto status as an information hub is not without its issues (were this column an article on Wikipedia itself, this would be where the "Controversies" section would go). The site prides itself on maintaining "neutrality" despite such a stance being literally and figuratively impossible—in the current political climate, I would also describe such a position as "dangerous." Wikipedians' maxim of "assume good faith" is an earnest one, but in the face of hate speech and threats of violence, not every issue can be handled "objectively."

By allowing anyone and everyone to edit its content, Wikipedia must always be read with a critical eye. As much attention and care that are paid by other Wikipedians to fact-checking, the site is too large and moves too fast to realistically expect 100% blunder-free results. The longer something is written on Wikipedia, the more people will accept it as truth. Stephen Colbert coined a term for this: "Wikiality," and while he did so in jest, one only has to look at the speed of misinformation during the ongoing pandemic to see how real (and, again, dangerous) lies can be.

There's also the matter that Wikipedia's most active editors are overwhelmingly male, which is a problem unto itself... a problem made worse when one steps back to see how the site has noticeably fewer articles about women than men. The high bar for establishing "notability," the invisible standard all subjects must exceed for meriting their own article, has meant that many biographies of women are rejected outright.

Whatever its flaws, the nature of Wikipedia makes it eternally malleable. The Wikipedia I contributed to 16 years ago is completely different than the one I see today, and who knows what the site may look like 16 years from now. The fact that Wikipedia is willing to host multiple pages dedicated to highlighting its own shortcomings is a breath of fresh air in our current climate of "deny everything," and I view it as a sign that change is inevitable.

Certainly this very column could not exist without Wikipedia, for there is no better hub of information on video game release dates. Even when information is spotty, Wikipedia provides a ballpark figure to start with, and subsequent searches can then be narrowed down for more detail. The international, multilingual nature of Wikipedia also makes it easy to check information in other regions to see if the dates agree. Of course, sometimes Google returns a random date in bold letters atop the results page which most people just accept as fact… and I have but one guess as to where that date came from (Stephen Colbert, probably)

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.