A few days after September 11, 2001, as lawmakers were approving a declaration to use military force and people downtown were picking through the rubble, someone in Brooklyn stared into their computer screen at the history they and some strangers were making.
“I’m a little worn out now, as I’ve spent the last 12 hours straight on this site, so I’ll try to keep this brief,” The Cunctator, as the volunteer editor called themselves, wrote to whomever was out there. “I think that the page September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack could be one of the great accomplishments of Wikipedia, if everyone gets involved.”
Wikipedia.org had only been launched nine months earlier by a digital ad entrepreneur named Jimmy Wales and a graduate student in philosophy named Larry Sanger. By July, hundreds of visitors were arriving a day, many brought by links that appeared in the results of a new, fast-growing search engine called Google. Many articles were short, amateurish, questionable. But…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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