Wikipedia: 10 Years and Counting

- Wittenborg 2nd year student reports -

It is the 4^th most visited site in the world. It makes the lives of billions of people easier and more enlightened. Recently the largest online encyclopedia in the world celebrated its 10 year anniversary. Wittenborg student Gregoris Pavlidis felt like it was his duty to visit ‘dear educator’ Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia (wiki is Hawaiian for ‘fast’ whereas pedia is Greek for ‘education’, thus combined: fast education!) currently has over 17,000,000 articles that have been written by people all over the world. Wikipedia is funded by the non-profit Wikimedia foundation, yet private donations also help to keep its servers running and the website free of advertisements. The birthday of Wikipedia was celebrated at the Amsterdams Historisch Museum. Allow me to ‘wiki’ through the events…

It all started with IT specialists showing off some fascinating innovations such as iPhone applications being able to upload pictures to the site within 5 seconds, which was demonstrated with a beautiful picture of, well… us! The next presenter talked about teams translating the pages into, up until now, 200 languages. Finally, another one discussed ways of making Wikipedia easier to edit and add pictures to. A debate followed where the audience could state their concerns to the developers and the president of Wikipedia NL. Examples include: ‘Is Wikipedia hurting museums?’ or ‘Copywriting issues of pictures as well as texts’. Finally, a representative of the museum gave Wikipedia a symbolic USB-stick with pictures and information of 70,000 items from their museum. The event ended with a fun drink where people exchanged ideas and opinions while enjoying their beer and ‘bitterballen’. I felt like it was my obligation to go there because although I have not donated any money yet, this way I could at least show my support by attending the event as a representative of Wittenborg (with my ID card hanging from my pants).

Wikipedia has almost everything we could wish to look for. We have all used the website one time or another and quite often, we include the site’s address in our sources slide at the end of our PowerPoint presentations. I want to give a big thank you from all of us to Wikipedia. For the information which answered even the most ridiculous questions that suddenly popped up in our ever so curious minds.”