The Wikipedia Revolution, Andrew Lih
The Wikipedia Revolution, Andrew Lih
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The Wikipedia Revolution
How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

Author: Andrew Lih

Narrator: Lloyd James

Unabridged: 9 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/20/2009


Synopsis

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." —Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia

With more than 2,000,000 individual articles on everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is the number-eight site on the World Wide Web. Created (and corrected) by anyone with access to a computer, this impressive assemblage of knowledge is growing at an astonishing rate of more than 30,000,000 words a month. Now, for the first time, a Wikipedia insider tells the story of how it all happened—from the first glimmer of an idea to the global phenomenon it's become.

Andrew Lih has been an administrator (a trusted user who is granted access to technical features) at Wikipedia for more than four years, as well as a regular host of the weekly Wikipedia podcast. In The Wikipedia Revolution, he details the site's inception in 2001, its evolution, and its remarkable growth, while also explaining its larger cultural repercussions. Wikipedia is not just a Web site; it's a global community of contributors who have banded together out of a shared passion for making knowledge free.

The Wikipedia Revolution features a foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and an afterword that is itself a Wikipedia creation.

About Andrew Lih

Andrew Lih spent ten years as an academic in new media and journalism at Columbia University and Hong Kong University. He has been an administrator at Wikipedia for over four years and a commentator on new media, technology, and journalism issues on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. Lih is based in Beijing.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Marty on February 27, 2013

This was a could-not-put-down book for me that I read in 2-3 days (very fast for me). I was fascinated by the saga of how Wikipedia came about and how they assembled a virtual an army of volunteers to create a user-built encyclopedia of over 4 million articles. While the book is written by an inside......more

Goodreads review by Laurie on January 10, 2019

A must read for anyone who is going to teach a class about Wikipedia. A detailed history of the first 10 years......more

Goodreads review by Maurício on June 08, 2018

Wikipedia's history is full of turning points and, as you can imagine, surprising events. Jimmy Wales tried to remove Jerry Sanger's contributions to founding the site, developed a side business as a for profit wiki using mediawiki's software for pop culture that wouldn't fit on wikipedia and went t......more

Goodreads review by Paige on June 21, 2009

Andrew Lih writes for the non-techie, giving a clear overview of how Wikipedia works and how it got started. If you want to focus on the mechanics of Wikipedia - how edit wars are resolved and how vandalism is deterred - you could start reading about halfway through the book. However, I found the ea......more

Goodreads review by Victor on September 25, 2021

I love how this book touches open source philosophy, and talks about the cultural aspects of wikipedia, not just the product and events.......more