Chapter 5
Wikipedia had grown fast in two months. Larry motivated people to work on an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, and tried to discourage them from using the project as a platform for debate. The Wiki proved easy to use, unlike the cumbersome software used by Nupedia. The radical collaboration which it enabled made it possible for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, and to avoid the bottleneck of a single author working on a single article. By Thursday, March 22, they had 2,953 Wikipedia pages, of which 1,816 looked relatively substantial.
Although the academic specialists do not buy into the idea of the wiki, it soon attracts interest from the web community, especially when the project is mentioned in the high profile hacker website ‘Slashdot’. In 2001, the cause of ‘free software’ is starting to turn into an international movement. Slashdot is its parish magazine. The Slashdotters are inspired by the success of the open software project Linux, developed on the principle that ‘many eyeballs make all bugs shallow’, and by the collectivist philosophy of Richard Stallman, who once took his ideas to Russia, only to be told “This sounds too much like communism to be successful here”.
Stallman believes that software users must have the freedom to run it and distribute it, or a modified version of it. If you can’t do what you want with the software, the software, not you, is controlling the program. But that is a form of subjugation, and all subjugation is tyrannical, he says. Large corporations such as Microsoft are demonised by the free software movement. If you don’t have the appropriate freedom, says Stallman, “you are being divided and dominated by somebody”.
The newcomers and the academics do not get on. Michael Witbrock is dismissive. “Wikipedia is not dissimilar from a newsgroup circa 1990. Entertaining to spend time contributing to. Containing occasional words of wisdom. And of little lasting value”.
