The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

Andrew Lih

Hyperion Books, 2009 - Business & Economics - 246 pages

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Jimmy Wales

With more than 2,000,000 individual articles on everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is the #8 site on the World Wide Web. Created (and corrected) by anyone with access to a computer, this impressive assemblage of knowledge is growing at an astonishing rate of more than 30,000,000 words a month. Now for the first time, a Wikipedia insider tells the story of how it all happened--from the first glimmer of an idea to the global phenomenon it's become.

Andrew Lih has been an administrator (a trusted user who is granted access to technical features) at Wikipedia for more than four years, as well as a regular host of the weekly Wikipedia podcast. In The Wikipedia Revolution, he details the site's inception in 2001, its evolution, and its remarkable growth, while also explaining its larger cultural repercussions. Wikipedia is not just a website; it's a global community of contributors who have banded together out of a shared passion for making knowledge free.

Featuring a Foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and an Afterword that is itself a Wikipedia creation.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - lkernagh - LibraryThing

If you are like me, you have your web browser homepage set at the Google homepage and 8 times out of 10, when you do a Google search for something, a Wikipedia article is one of the top hits in the ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - vpfluke - LibraryThing

I rather enjoyed this story of the development of Wikipedia. In some areas, such as entertainment, is the best and easiest resource to use for up-to-date information. As a collaborative effort, the ...

About the author

Andrew Lih was an academic for ten years at Columbia University and Hong Kong University in new media and journalism. He has also worked as a software engineer, entrepreneur, new media researcher, and writer. Lih has been involved with Wikipedia since 2003, helps plan the annual Wikimania conference, and frequently acts as a spokesman for Wikipedia in Asia. He has been a commentator on new media, technology and journalism issues on CNN, BBC radio, MSNBC and NPR.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
• Author: Andrew Lih
• Contributors: Andrew Lih, Jimmy Wales
• Publisher: Hyperion Books, 2009
• ISBN: 1401303714, 9781401303716
• Length: 246 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / General; Computers / Internet / User-Generated Content; Computers / Web / General; Technology & Engineering / History