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Berlin (dpa) - reference works as thick, leather-bound books are not extinct, even 20 years after the founding of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
But while the classic encyclopedias can only be found in a few households and often gather dust on the bookshelves there, Wikipedia accompanies users in everyday life.
According to a study, at least people in the richer industrialized countries (OECD) look at an average of nine Wikipedia articles per month.
The most important non-commercial service in Internet history began on January 15, 2001, like so many online projects, with the programmer's greeting: "Hello World".
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales typed the two words into new wiki software that was supposed to enable an online lexicon to be set up quickly.
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The man from the southern United States had already made enough money in the burgeoning financial markets shortly after studying to be able to lead a carefree life.
In 1996, he and two partners founded the Bomis company, which, like Yahoo, maintained a web catalog.
Bomis also offered “The Babe Engine”, a search engine for pictures of scantily clad women.
Even then, Wales was pursuing the plan to set up an online reference work.
The first approach for “Nupedia” was very classic.
In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger as an editor-in-chief.
This should order contributions from experts and take care of the publication.
But the seven-step review process that had been established proved to be expensive and inefficient.
Far too few articles were published, only 21 in the first year.
The experiment with the wiki software was actually only intended as a collecting basin where the first ideas for an online encyclopedia should be collected on the Internet, says the Austrian economist Leonhard Dobusch, who did research on Wikipedia.
“But it soon became apparent that this reservoir was the really exciting thing.
Because while the encyclopedia originally planned by Wales failed very quickly, Wikipedia developed rapidly, attracted a large number of volunteers and volunteers and had already produced thousands of articles within weeks. "
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Sanger left Wikipedia in early 2003 and said in an interview that he was fed up with the “trolls” and “anarchist guys” who “are against the idea that someone should have any kind of authority that others don't”.
But this criticism could not prevent the rise: 20 years after the foundation there are more than 55 million contributions in almost 300 languages, written by countless volunteers.
In the book “Wikipedia Story” by long-time insider Pavel Richter, Wikipedia co-founder Wales praised the role of the German-speaking community: “Shortly after we started German Wikipedia, it turned out that the Germans apparently have a special relationship with the idea behind Wikipedia .
How else can we explain that German is only 13th on the list of the most widely spoken languages worldwide, but German Wikipedia is the fourth largest of all editions? "
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If only the articles by human authors were counted, the German Wikipedia would even be directly behind the English edition at the top.
The versions in second place (Cebuano, a language spoken in the Philippines) and third (Swedish) were inflated with texts by the controversial software robots of the Swede Lars Sverker Johansson.
The German-speaking community has also made a major contribution to the discarding of all ideas for commercializing Wikipedia.
"Nobody became a billionaire through them, there is no advertising," says Richter, who was from 2011 to 2014 board member and managing director of the German Wikimedia support company.
Initially, Wikipedia was only viewed as an internet project by a few nerds.
Established reference works would have ignored them at first, and then fought vigorously.
However, Wikipedia has left the renowned dictionaries behind for years.
After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica publisher announced in 2012 that it would only appear digitally.
Two years later the Brockhaus - which was the measure of all reference works in this country - followed suit.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, gets by with comparatively small sums: The Wikimedia Foundation, which finances the infrastructure of the online lexicon and pays more than 100 programmers, receives over 120 million dollars in donations annually.
The German sponsorship association Wikimedia Germany has over 80,000 members and an annual budget of around 18 million euros.
Like all media projects that people work on, Wikipedia is not flawless.
It was only years later that it was discovered that the Rhine is not 1320 kilometers long, but only 1230 kilometers.
However, the number rotator was also previously in printed dictionaries.
More serious are mistakes such as the false claim that 200,000 Poles were gassed in a German concentration camp in Warsaw.
There is no doubt that the Warsaw concentration camp existed, but it was not an extermination camp, as the English Wikipedia read for 15 years.
"It remains a dark shadow on the history of Wikipedia to have failed in this central case over such a long period of time," writes Richter.
After all, the article about the Warsaw camp is also proof that sooner or later the quality control will work for important Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia researcher Dobusch sees the risk of errors being higher with small articles than with large topics: “When I use Wikipedia, I have to be aware that the more popular and important a topic is, the more trustworthy Wikipedia is.
Because that means that more people are interested, more people read these articles, look over them or complain and correct mistakes. "
Co-founder Wales often emphasizes that functioning Wikipedia communities are a prerequisite for quality assurance: «Communities in which members treat each other in a respectful and friendly manner;
Communities that are open to people from any religion, any gender, any political orientation and any social origin. "
However, Wikipedia has not been bogged down with this challenge for years.
Around 90 percent of the authors are men, most of them from western industrial nations.
And not a few believe that the discussion culture in the Wikipedia community is in great need of improvement.
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An impulse for the future viability of Wikipedia comes from the German-speaking community, namely Wikidata.
"That is the idea behind Wikipedia only for a machine-readable knowledge database," explains Richter in an interview with the dpa.
The future will belong to artificial intelligence.
"Everyone agrees on that."
With Wikidata, a large and important basis, namely structured machine-readable knowledge, is placed on a non-profit basis right from the start and supported by the power of a strong community.
"That means that we as a society do not become dependent on Google, Facebook and Alibaba and other Internet giants."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210112-99-988801 / 2