How old is internet wiki

This software had first been released in , however, it took two events to cause an explosion in popularity and the eventual replacement of Gopher. On the thirtieth of April CERN released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain, so anyone could use or build upon the software without charge. Then, later in the same year, the NCSA released a program that was a combined web browser and Gopher client, called Mosaic.

This was originally only available on Unix machines and in source code form, but in December Mosaic provided a new version with installers for both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.

Mosaic rapidly increased in popularity, and with it the Web. The number of available web browsers increased dramatically, many created by research projects at universities and corporations, such as Telenor a Norwegian communications company , which created the first version of the Opera browser in The popularisation of the web brought commercial interests.

Version 1. Spyglass Inc. A rapid escalation soon followed, with Netscape and Microsoft each trying to get a competitive edge in terms of the features they support in order to attract developers. This has since become known as the browser wars. Opera maintained a small but steady presence throughout this period, and tried to innovate and support web standards as well as possible in these times.

During the browser wars, Microsoft and Netscape focused on implementing new features rather than on fixing problems with the features they already supported, and adding proprietary features and creating features that were in direct competition with existing features in the other browser, but implemented in an incompatible way.

Developers at the time were forced to deal with ever increasing levels of confusion when trying to build web sites, sometimes to the extent of building two different but effectively duplicate sites for the two main browsers, and other times just choosing to support only one browser and block others from using their sites. This was a terrible way of working, and the inevitable backlash from developers was not far away. However, the W3C did not and still do not enforce their recommendations.

Manufacturers only had to conform to the W3C documents if they wished to label their products as W3C-compliant. In practice, this was not a valuable selling point as almost all users of the web did not know, nor probably care, who the W3C were this is still the case, to a large extent. Consequently, the browser wars of the nineties continued unabated. In , the browser market was dominated by Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.

A beta version of Internet Explorer 5 was then released, and it implemented a new and proprietary dynamic HTML, which meant that professional web developers needed to know five different ways of writing JavaScript. As a result, a group of professional web developers and designers banded together. The idea was that by calling the W3C documents standards rather than recommendations, they might be able to convince Microsoft and Netscape to support them.

The early method of spreading the call to action was to use a traditional advertising technique called a roadblock, where a company would take out an advert on all broadcast channels at the same time, so no matter how a viewer would flick between channels, they would get exactly the same message.

The WaSP published an article simultaneously on various web development focused sites including builder. Another technique the WaSP used was to ridicule the companies involved with the W3C and other standards bodies that focused more on creating new, often self-serving, features rather than working to get the basic existing standards supported correctly in their products to start with this includes some browser companies that shall remain nameless here.

This doesn't mean that the WaSP ridiculed the W3C themselves, rather they ridiculed the companies that became W3C members and then misbehaved. The W3C has a few full time staff, but most of the people who work on the standards are volunteers from member companies, eg Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla, Apple, Google, IBM and Adobe, to name a few of the bigger ones.

This was a very important milestone, it being the default browser installed with the Mac OS at the time, and having a reasonable level of support for the W3C recommendations too.

Along with Opera's decent level of support for CSS and HTML, it contributed to a general positive movement, where web developers and designers finally felt comfortable designing sites using web standards, as they knew they would work to a reasonable level across multiple browsers. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research. The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label.

Anyone can check out those citations to learn more about a subject, or verify that those sources actually say what a particular Wikipedia entry claims they do—that is, if you can find those sources.

It's easy enough when the sources are online. But many Wikipedia articles rely on good old-fashioned books. The entry on Martin Luther King Jr. Until recently, if you wanted to verify that those books say what the article says they say, or if you just wanted to read the cited material, you'd need to track down a copy of the book.

Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive , you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library.

Some groups of authors and publishers have challenged the archive's practice of allowing users to borrow unauthorized scanned books. So far the Internet Archive has turned , references in Wikipedia entries in various languages into direct links to 50, books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public.

The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published. If successful, the Internet Archive's project would be a boon to students, journalists, or anyone who wants to check the references of a Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors' passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan.

At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving. One challenge in seeing Wikipedia clearly is that the favored point of comparison for the site is still, in , Encyclopedia Britannica.

Not even the online Britannica , which is still kicking, but the print version, which ceased publication in If you encountered the words Encyclopedia Britannica recently, they were likely in a discussion about Wikipedia. But when did you last see a physical copy of these books? After months of reading about Wikipedia, which meant reading about Britannica , I finally saw the paper encyclopedia in person.

It was on the sidewalk, being thrown away. The 24 burgundy-bound volumes had been stacked with care, looking regal before their garbage-truck funeral. Today, they are so unsalable that thrift stores refuse them as donations.

Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. But for most people who were alive in the earliest days of the internet, an encyclopedia was a book, plain and simple. Back then, it made sense to pit Wikipedia and Britannica against each other.

It made sense to highlight Britannica 's strengths—its rigorous editing and fact-checking procedures; its roster of illustrious contributors, including three US presidents and a host of Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, novelists, and inventors—and to question whether amateurs on the internet could create a product even half as good.

Wikipedia was an unknown quantity; the name for what it did, crowdsourcing, didn't even exist until , when two WIRED editors coined the word. That same year, the journal Nature released the first major head-to-head comparison study.

It revealed that, for articles on science, at least, the two resources were nearly comparable: Britannica averaged three minor mistakes per entry, while Wikipedia averaged four. The more revisions a Wikipedia article had, the more neutral it became. But some important differences don't readily show up in quantitative, side-by-side comparisons.

For instance, there's the fact that people tend to read Wikipedia daily, whereas Britannica had the quality of fine china, as much a display object as a reference work. The edition I encountered by the roadside was in suspiciously good shape. Although the covers were a little wilted, the spines were uncracked and the pages immaculate—telltale signs of 50 years of infrequent use.

And as I learned when I retrieved as many volumes as I could carry home, the contents are an antidote for anyone waxing nostalgic. I found the articles in my '65 Britannica mostly high quality and high minded, but the tone of breezy acumen could become imprecise. You can pretty much forget about television. Lord Byron, meanwhile, commands four whole pages. This conservative tendency wasn't limited to Britannica. Growing up, I remember reading the entry on dating in a hand-me-down World Book and being baffled by its emphasis on sharing milkshakes.

The worthies who wrote these entries, moreover, didn't come cheap. According to an article in The Atlantic from , Britannica contributors earned 10 cents per word, on average—about 50 cents in today's money. Sometimes they got a full encyclopedia set as a bonus. They apparently didn't show much gratitude for this compensation; the editors complained of missed deadlines, petulant behavior, lazy mistakes, and outright bias.

There was another seldom remembered limitation to these gospel tomes: They were, in a way, shrinking. The total length of paper encyclopedias remained relatively finite, but the number of facts in the universe kept growing, leading to attrition and abbreviation.

It was a zero-sum game in which adding new articles meant deleting or curtailing incumbent information. Even the most noteworthy were not immune; between and , Bach's Britannica entry shrank by two pages.

By the time the internet came into being, a limitless encyclopedia was not just a natural idea but an obvious one. Yet there was still a sense—even among the pioneers of the web—that, although the substrate was new, the top-down, expert-driven Britannica model should remain in place. In , 10 months before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger cofounded Wikipedia, the pair started a site called Nupedia, planning to source articles from noted scholars and put them through seven rounds of editorial oversight.

But the site never got off the ground; after a year, there were fewer than two dozen entries. They assumed nothing good would come of it, but within a year Wikipedia had 20, articles. By the time Nupedia's servers went down a year later, the original site had become a husk, and the seed it carried had grown beyond any expectation. The same year, another influential Wikipedia editor, Eugene Izhikevich, launched Scholarpedia, an invitation-only, peer-reviewed online encyclopedia with a focus on the sciences.

Citizendium struggled to attract both funding and contributors and is now moribund; Scholarpedia, which started out with less lofty ambitions, has fewer than 2, articles. But more notable was why these sites languished. They came up against a simple and apparently insoluble problem, the same one that Nupedia encountered and Wikipedia surmounted: Most experts do not want to contribute to a free online encyclopedia.

This barrier to entry exists even in places where there are many experts and large volumes of material to draw from. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, is the subject of tens of thousands of books.