After Google, Wikipedia might be the single most powerful new influence on
how we as a culture organize, disseminate, and access information. For
millions of Web-connected citizens, the online encyclopedia is the place of
first resort for looking up everything from Shirley Sherrod to sickle-cell
anemia. There's no question about its scope or popularity: It has 3.3
million articles in English alone (compare that to the roughly 120,000
articles in the online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and attracts
nearly 78 million visitors each month. There's also no question that it's an
astonishing triumph of open-source development: The entire colossus was
built by a bunch of largely anonymous and entirely unpaid contributors.
There is, however, a great deal of argument—and consternation—about the
accuracy of Wikipedia entries. (A headline in the Onion made the point
nicely: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.") That's
why I went looking for Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia along with
Jimmy Wales, then quit the project over disputes about its governance and
the quality and credibility of its content. Sanger is also a trained
philosopher with a focus on epistemology—the study of knowledge—which made
him an attractive person to talk to about how technology is changing what we
know, what we think we know, and how we think we know it. After leaving
Wikipedia, Sanger founded Citizendium, a rival online encyclopedia, and now
spends most of his time on WatchKnow, a nonprofit organization that uses
wiki principles to organize and rate nearly 20,000 educational videos for
kids.