Its global identity is summed in its name: from Hawaii, where wiki wiki means quick, to Greece, where paideia in its ancient civilization meant cultural heritage and education. Never before has it been so easy to find out about a subject. In a couple of clicks you have access to information about  whatever interests you.
Wikipedia’s site announces itself as “a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project (...) written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world.” The size of the online phenomenon is impressive. The English encylopedia alone already has more than 1,900,000 articles – and this version accounts for only 25% of all entries, which appear in languages as different as Spanish and Sanskrit, Arabic and Aymara. Each edition is an independent project, although translations from one to the other are sometimes requested. “This is interesting as an expression of cultural diversity,” Beatriz Busaniche, for the free software advocate Fundación Vía Libre, told MYRIADES 1. “The members of language communities themselves are the ones who are maintaining the encyclopedia in their respective languages.”

Quality and quantity
Jimmy Wales laid the foundations for this vast textual edifice in 2001. Wikipedia was born from an earlier venture, Nupedia, which was also conceived of as collaborative in character, but inviting contributions from specialists only. It was anything but wiki wiki: between October 2001 and April 2003 it published only two new entries. The procedure for validating the articles was bogged down in bureaucracy and the criticisms of its users ended up changing the direction of the project. On 15 January 2001 Wikipedia came online in English, applying the wiki technology that Ward Cunningham had developed in 1995.
It may seem to pitch quality against quantity. Wikipedia articles are multiplying as you read this, but solely because it allows anybody to write or modify its contents. The specialist’s input ranks no higher than the layman’s, or even the liar’s. Each article is supported by a forum where users can debate contributions; decisions about what to censor and what to publish are thus taken collectively. So unless and until users demur, then what a professor of mathematics and a secondary school pupil may write about about fractals are awarded equal value.

Consensus and meritocracy
“Wikipedia does not include elaborate software-controlled access and editing capabilities. (...) It depends on self-conscious use of open discourse, usually aimed at consensus,” writes Yochai Benkler in his book The Wealth of Networks.
At the heart of the project is precisely that: consensus. The rules are set by the community. Even administrators – higher-ranking wikipedians elected by their peers – have to stand by community decisions. To become an administrator, one must first earn the confidence of the community. The website features a page where prospective administrators may apply for the position and its special privileges. Administrators can delete pages and images, view and restore those which have previously been deleted, block and unblock the IPs of registered and anonymous users, and edit protected or blocked pages. “Nominees should have been on Wikipedia long enough for people to determine whether they are trustworthy,” indicate the site’s community guidelines. The candidates’ track record is debated on their nomination platforms and a selection is made based on the accrual of merit. All the same, user-power is not absolute. Leandro Rodríguez, a Wikipedia administrator, explained to MYRIADES 1 that, “the fact that we admit someone to adminship or not isn’t what determines whether they stay or not. It’s policy that decides that.”
Policies are also the result of collective agreement. They direct that postings should be evaluated for verifiability, lay down a strict code of conduct on the invasion of privacy and the use of the encylopedia for self-promotion and, above all, promote the adoption of a “neutral point of view“ on subject matter. See: Ganging up on Wikipedia). Busaniche discounts the accusation of anarchy often used by the encylopedia’s detractors to describe its functional methodology: “A strong sense of meritocracy exists within the community. Although it may appear to be an anonymous mass, Wikipedia has a community in which, in the absence of authority, it is recognition of merit that carries weight, respect for the work of others, and, of course, the significant appreciation by the same community to which they are contributing.”

Work sharing
Sometimes the construction of the encylopedia is managed by periodically changing invitations to contribute on a certain subject. “Here are some tasks you can do,” it invites readers. The community chooses a country, a city and a translation, in addition to a particularly topical item, so that users may help to improve the relevant articles. There is also a section listing “Fix-up projects”: those which require information or images, or need to be expanded, or which have a dubious content, are duplicated or non-neutral.
Disputes may be resolved by a Mediation Committee which is comprised of Wipedians who have earned the confidence of the community thanks to the quantity and quality of their contributions. Committee membership is limited to six months. Any registered user may be nominee or voter for the positions. The Committee functions as a peace-maker in so-called “editing wars” in which users differ about the contents of an article. Versions may be batted to and forth between them dozens of times, correction followed by modification, reinstatement by reiteration of changes, and so on. If mediation doesn’t work, the case goes to an “Arbitration Committee” and a member of that panel may decide to protect a certain article (or the part that has achieved consensus), or may even bar a user after the matter has been put to debate.
Contributions aren’t simply limited to creating or expanding articles. Collaborators also apply conventions of style to those articles which fail to respect them, revise their classification, correct spelling mistakes, take out copyrighted texts etc “To start out, I just read the articles. Then when I found an erratum (a letter missing or something like that), I corrected it. Bit by bit, I began to add information; almost with out thinking about it, I registered and supplied my first article,” Spanish Wikipedia user, Jordi, told MYRIADES 1 .
Argentinian Leandro Rodríguez remembers: “I came acrossWikipedia some time in 2003 (...). I discovered the encylopedia looking for information I needed for school, but when I saw the links in red (which tell you when nothing has been written on those subjects), I really wanted to write an article about my city. Since then, I haven’t stopped.”

Economics
Wikipedia now has more than 7 million articles and some 300,000 users/contributors all over the planet. This expansion has spawned other projects, such as Wiktionary, a multi-lingual dictionary and Wikibooks, a library of textbooks and manuals; and there is even a Wikiversity that provides free online activities and learning materials. The projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation, with its headquarters in Florida. This is the non-profit administrative organization that seeks funding by means of donations. Because Wikipedia’s financial situation could be less sound than might appear. Everyone who works for it is a volunteer. “The only employee is me,” Jimmy Wales is fond of declaring. Not everything comes free, however: the project requires 350 servers and an annual investment of five million dollars. In February 2007, at Lift 07 (an international event that brought together experts on the new media), Foundation board member Florence Devouard told the meeting: “As of this moment, Wikipedia has the financial resources to remain in operation for another three or four months. If we fail to obtain additional funding, it is possible that Wikipedia will disappear.”
This fact may seem odd given that we are talking about one of the ten most-visited sites in the world, according to the Alexa ranking. Adolfo Estalella, a researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute in Catalonia, thinks that in the future we may expect see new business models based on the encylopedia. “It’s already happened with free software; companies sprang up offering free software programs that they distribute free of charge. The same thing could happen with projects and initiatives which try out business models based on Wikipedia.” On the other hand, it is hard to believe that Wikipedia could disappear overnight without users intervening to devise a way of keeping it going. Because it is not only an encyclopedia that different people have written: it is a question of a genuinely networked project, a prime example of what planetary-wise connections between individuals, with varying interests and abilities, are capable of.
Perhaps one might discern in it, in the manner of the adherents of the Jesuit philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, one of the manifestation of the noosphere: a kind of collective intelligence which progressively joins together the diverse intelligences of the world.