Wikipedia turns 10

Wikipedia, the online reference tool that allowed countless students to avoid the library, turns 10 years old. Today, and throughout the year, the world will be celebrating with 414 events.

As of today, Wikipedia is the fifth largest Internet commodity with 410 million unique visitors per month. It features some 17 million articles in 270 languages.

But how did it start? In 2001 founder Jimmy Wales said: “The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch. Some people think that this may be a hopeless endeavor and that the result will necessarily suck. We aren't so sure. So let's get to work!”

The hope of Jimmy and his colleagues was to tap into the collective wisdom of humanity, by allowing anyone to contribute and to edit articles, and over time add up to the most complete, impartial and accurate information source around. Good thinking.

Of course there’s a dedicated Facebook page where you can check events close to you, and a LinkedIn group, Wikiversary. There’s an interesting video by Jimmy Wales here.

So what's the plan for the next 10 years?

In a conference call with journalists earlier this week, Jimmy Wales and Executive Director Sue Gardner said the goal is to expand the breadth of topics and diversity of voices on the site.

In 2011 and beyond, they want to reach out to more women, older people, experts in the arts and humanities and less-represented geographic areas such as South America.

Well done and good luck.