What Is Wikipedia, and What Is It Good For?
There are a lot of bad things said about Wikipedia, the ninth most-visited destination on the internet. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, critics argue, is one that is vulnerable to endless mistakes. Such criticisms have been raised by skeptics since Wikipedia’s creation in 2001. Despite the critics, Wikipedia has grown to include 8.2 million articles in 253 different languages. The English Wikipedia alone includes nearly two million articles, and has a word-length fifteen times that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is the single largest encyclopedia ever assembled, having long since surpassed the Yongle Encyclopedia of 15th century China. The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales known to Wikipedians as “Jimbo” was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute’s Mark Thornton suggested he read “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The essay argues th
