Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a 53-year-old British-Nigerian human-rights activist and, it’s fair to say, a person of some note. She’s co-founder of the African Women’s Development Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting women’s rights throughout the continent. It’s not a huge charity, having distributed $26 million since 2001, but it does important work. In 2013, Leymah Gbowee, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, credited the AWDF with helping to end the Liberian civil war. But until recently, Adeleye-Fayemi didn’t exist on Wikipedia, which meant that as far as many people were concerned, she didn’t exist at all.
The online encyclopedia, founded in 2001 and now published in 295 languages, includes about 40 million articles, all of them free. The site is a source of first resort for students writing term papers, for anyone who makes a bar bet, and—though they’ll deny it to their graves—for Bloomberg Businessweek writers who want to double-check how to spell the names of, say, recent Nobel Peace Prize winners. “It’s a first draft of history,” says Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and a longtime donor to Wikipedia who gave $1 million to the website’s new endowment fund in June. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, also is a Wikipedia donor.) Newmark was initially taken by the project’s similarity to Isaac Asimov’s fictional Encyclopedia Galactica. “For a nerd like me,” he says, “it was obvious how important it would be in our world.”
