On Jan 15, 2001, Wikipedia was born.
It was only supposed to be a test. But within a month, there were already 600 entries, which was more than Nupedia had. Within a year, it was 20,000 – to the astonishment of the founders.
Increasingly, Wikipedia entries topped Google search lists for any given subject. People were turning to it for information. It was not always reliable, not always well-written. But it was there, instantly, at the click of a return button.Conventional encyclopaedias could not compete.
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In 2003, Wales founded the Wikimedia Foundation, moving all intellectual property rights and domain names pertaining to Wikipedia to the new foundation, whose purpose is to establish general policy for the encyclopaedia and its sister projects on a donor-funded basis.
The big question then and now is why thousands of authors spend their own time crafting entries which do not bear their own names and which later on may be totally rewritten by someone else – or deleted with a mouse click.
"There is a certain appeal in compiling knowledge without the limitations of copyrights," says Christian Stegbauer, a German sociologist...
http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=57807
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