The Wikipedia Revolution

How a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia

With more than 30 million individual articles on everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is one of the top 10 most visited sites on the web. Andrew Lih, an academic and Wikipedia editor tells the story of how it all happened — from the first glimmer of an idea to the global phenomenon.

The book traces what enabled the creation of Wikipedia, starting with the Internet culture that inspired the hacker ethos, USENET, and the free software movement. It would be Apple’s forgotten HyperCard project that inspired Ward Cunningham to create the wiki, which became the savior of the original Nupedia encyclopedia started by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. Read about the fascinating community that gathered online to create an encyclopedia in over 200 languages on every topic known to mankind.