What is Wikipedia?

I remember my early computing days in 1996, spending time watching the sparse multimedia content in Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia, Encarta. It was an interesting--albeit initially underwhelming--departure from the book-form encyclopedias.

Encarta is still around, but another form of encyclopedia has emerged. Wikipedia is a free, web-based, multilingual encyclopedia written by anybody and everybody who wants to contribute. Need to know about the American Civil War? Visit Wikipedia's article about it. Don't like the wording of the article? Change it. That's right--you can edit the encyclopedia. Today. This minute. My description was rather brief; if you want to know more about it, read Wikipedia's article about itself.

This approach has three significant advantages over other types of encyclopedias:

1. Vast amount of content. Wikipedia taps the Internet community for content; can you imagine a faster way to create new articles and add to existing ones?
2. Low cost. The Internet community is cheap labor. There are still costs associated with maintaining a web site on this scale, so Wikipedia still needs donations. But for now, the encyclopedia is free.
3. Up-to-the-minute content. The Indianapolis Colts beat the Denver Broncos a few hours ago. Somebody has already noted that on Wikipedia, and has written a summary of the game. Yes, I picked a frivolous example; but the point is, with billions of potential authors, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia that can be up-to-date on virtually any topic that people care about.

There are some disadvantages too. For one thing, there's nothing stopping your 8-year-old from "editing" the aforementioned article about the Civil War. Also, popular opinion doesn't necessarily reflect reality. In short, Wikipedia isn't guaranteed to be accurate.

You can read plenty of opinions about Wikipedia, and the purpose of this post is not to exhaust the arguments or convince you that Wikipedia is better than all the other encyclopedias. Just keep this in your back pocket for the next time that you need free information about--virtually anything.