Ten Years of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is turning 10 tomorrow. It's hard to imagine the web without it, despite the criticism and the controversy, it could be argued that Wikipedia's impact on the world's access to knowledge is only comparable to that of the (rest of the) internet as a whole.

The site is celebrating its tenth birthday in a fitting way, with parties all over the world organized by Wikipedia contributors. At this point, there are 416 events you can attend all in many of the world's countries.

Wikipedia is now one of the most visited sites on the planet, with over 400 million readers each month. This on a very thin budget, for a site its size, of just $20 million and no other revenue apart from donations.

Over the past decade, users have contributed millions of articles and made countless more edits, corrections and additions. There are over 3.5 million articles in English alone and over one million articles in both French and German. There are also articles in hundreds of languages, some with very little other representation online.

But that's hardly enough believes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The site has set for itself the most ambitions goals yet, it wants to have one billion visitors each month by 2015. An 150 percent increase in traffic in four years is no mean feat when you're one of the top 10 websites already.

To put that in perspective, today only Google can approach that figure, but is still below it. Microsoft and Yahoo both have several hundreds of millions of visitors. Facebook is said to be getting about 600 million each month.

Wales wants more contributors as well, this has been a problem for several years now. With so many articles already created and a core set of editors that have years of experience and may not be too forgiving of beginners, many users aren't very inclined to start writing a new entry or edit an existing one.

Wikipedia knows this as well and it is working on simpler tools to enable more people to contribute. A better WYSIWYG editor is top on the list of things to add, Wikipedia's mark-up may not be hugely complex for the more tech savvy, but it can be daunting for regular folks.

It remains to be seen whether Wikipedia can attract a lot more people than it already has, both visitors and editors, but it's also hard to imagine the site going away or fading in interest any time soon.