"Wikipedia will be 25 years old in January. Jimmy Wales's daughter will be 25 and three weeks. It's not a coincidence: on Boxing Day 2000 Wales's then wife, Christine, gave birth to a baby girl, but it quickly became clear that something wasn't right. She had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid, resulting in a life-threatening condition called meconium aspiration syndrome. An experimental treatment was available at the hospital near where they lived in San Diego. Did they want to try it?"
"At the time, Wales was a former trader and internet entrepreneur in his mid-30s. He had co-founded a guy-oriented search engine called Bomis, but his real passion was encyclopedias. The money from Bomis had allowed him to found Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts but it was proving slow to get off the ground. The laborious process of peer review meant that it only managed to generate 21 articles in its first year (among them Donegal fiddle tradition and polymerase chain reaction)."
"Suddenly, Wales needed information, and fast. But as he searched for meconium on the wider web, desperate to make a better-informed decision about his daughter's health, all he found was a mixture of first-hand accounts from strangers he had no way of evaluating and highly technical scientific papers he couldn't understand. It was like sifting through the debris of a bombed-out library, he remembers. Ultimately, he and his then wife decided to trust the doctors and go with the new treatment."
On Boxing Day 2000 a baby girl was born with meconium aspiration syndrome after breathing contaminated amniotic fluid, and doctors offered an experimental treatment. Jimmy Wales had co-founded Bomis and used its proceeds to launch Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia written by experts, but peer review produced only 21 articles in its first year. Searching the wider web for accessible, reliable medical information returned unverifiable personal accounts and technical papers he could not understand. That experience motivated a different approach: an open, editable encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wikipedia grew rapidly: about 25,000 English entries by 2002, 1 million by 2006 and more than 7 million now; the digital Encyclopedia Britannica has 100,000 entries.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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