I say it again: “I LOVE WIKIPEDIA”

In case you don’t know wikipedia, check it out  >  www.wikipedia.org

And see what wikipedia has to say about wikipedia ;  )  >  wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

I must admit that i have been a real fan of the idea when it came up in the early 2000s.
The idea of a global knowledge base, something like a universal encyclopedia of human knowledge that is collaborated and edited collectively.
That was a pretty utopian idea in my view. 
Something like the collective mind of humanity externalized on the world wide web.
And for free for all to see!
How cool of an idea is that!

Never would i have anticipated that it would really take off and become what it is today, 20 years later.

And still now, if i want to know something about something i don’t know, first thing i do is to turn to wikipedia to see what other people have found out about it.

When many people work together not for the profit but for a greater good, awesome things can happen:

Here is an excerpt of an article from axios.com another great website for people who like to have relatively unbiased news about the world, celebrating WIKIPEDIA 😆 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WIKIPEDIA!!!

What began as a free alternative to World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica has become one of the biggest repositories of basic information and a testament to the power of the open web.

Why it matters: Almost no one has a traditional set of encyclopedias anymore. As Wikipedia turns 20 today, it’s worth taking a look at the rise of the massive site and the impact it has had.

Flashback: Wikipedia debuted on Jan. 15, 2001, as the brainchild of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, who gave the site its name, a portmanteau of wiki — derived from the Hawaiian for “quick” and then already in use to refer to a family of user-editable websites — and encyclopedia.

By the numbers:

• Wikipedia is among the top 15 sites on the internet.
• There are 55 million articles, across 300 languages.
• More than 280,000 volunteers help add to the site and keep it updated.
• Wikipedia is edited 350 times per minute and read more than 8000 times a second. 
• Wikipedia is accessed by 1.5 billion unique devices every month and read more than 15 billion times every month. 
• Roughly 89% of articles on Wikipedia are in languages other than English. 
• Most vandalism (edits that do not meet Wikipedia’s reliability and neutrality standards) is addressed within five minutes on Wikipedia. 
• Wikipedia is supported by nearly 7 million donors, with the average donation being about $15.

Between the lines: 

In a world where basic facts are often the subject of partisan disagreement, Wikipedia has emerged as the rare site that is widely trusted across ideological lines and is also a go-to for populating information panels on Google and other major search and portal sites.

“We’re about building a shared understanding of the world together,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on a conference call with journalists. “We want to bring everyone together for a thoughtful discussion and debate, to understand the world, to learn before having an opinion. And we know how to have difficult conversations on hard topics.”

Yes, but: 

Wikipedia has plenty of notable weak spots, including the lack of diversity among those who edit pages.

That translates to a fair amount of blind spots, especially for people of color, trans people and those from other underrepresented groups.
And, while generally a reliable source of information on many topics, it can be unreliable at any given moment on any topic. Its strongest virtue — that anyone can edit it — can also be its biggest weakness.