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The father of the wiki is Ward Cunningham, a programmer who created the WikiWikiWeb in 1995. The name came from his honeymoon in Hawaii, where you catch the "wiki wiki" (a Hawaiian term for "quick") bus from the airport. The WikiWikiWeb was an online help manual for all kinds of software, written a little bit at a time by hundreds of people around the world. Users of any given product, Cunningham knew, were like the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant. Their knowledge was far greater than the sum of its parts—greater than even the product's creator—if only you could piece it together in the right way. "Wikis favor the author who isn't skilled enough to see the whole," he says.
Meanwhile, as the WikiWikiWeb was chugging along happily in semi-obscurity, Wales was looking for a way to combine his life's two major hobbies. As a home-schooled child growing up in Huntsville, Ala., he loved to spend his free hours getting lost in Britannica or the World Book. Then there was the Internet, which Wales stumbled across in college as early as 1989. "I met all these great people online," he says, "and we were all discussing things on mailing lists no one ever looks at. I thought, Why not use the smarts of my friends and build something more long lasting, more fun?"
Ah, fun. Spend enough time talking to Wales—a confessed "pathological optimist"—and you'll believe his life has been one long laugh riot. Options and futures trading, which Wales did in Chicago for much of the 1990s, was "fun and cool." Quitting his job and moving to San Diego to start an Internet company? Delightful. Paying the mortgage purely from investments, even to this day? Fantastic. Spending two years trying to start an online encyclopedia called Nupedia yet getting no further than the first 12 articles? Not a lot of fun, actually.
Nupedia's problem was that it was a centralized, top-down system. The software had seven laborious stages of fact checking and peer review. Then Wales discovered wikis, and the pathological optimist had his eureka moment. His new goal was to create a free encyclopedia for all, in their own language, written by anyone. It took Wikipedia just two weeks to grow larger than its predecessor.
Four years later, Wikipedia is the cumulative work of 16,000 pairs of hands, the bulk of it done by a hard-core group of about 1,000 volunteers. Its 500,000 entries in English alone make it far larger than the 65,000-article 2005 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wales' nonprofit Wikimedia foundation pays just one employee, who keeps the servers ticking. The foundation survives on donations and Wales' modest fortune. "This is a softball league for geeks," he says. "And there are more geeks out there than anyone suspected."
Naturally, there are also a lot of idiots, vandals and fanatics, who take advantage of Wikipedia's open system to deface, delete or push one-sided views. Sometimes extreme action has to be taken. For example, Wales locked the entries on John Kerry and George W. Bush for most of 2004. But for the most part, the geeks have a huge advantage: they care more. Wikipedia lets you put your favorite articles on a watch list and notifies you if anyone else adds to or changes them. According to an M.I.T. study, an obscenity randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in 1.7 min., on average. Vandals might as well be spray-painting walls with disappearing ink.