Today the world celebrates Wikipedia’s tenth birthday, with founder Jimmy Wales active on the interview circuit. Here’s what I noted:

• The Wikipedia site hosts Jimmy Wales’ celebratory video, with his call for more people to join the project.
• Hundreds of birthday celebrations are happening today around the world!
• In an interview with the BBC, Wales says that Wikipedia — a non-profit — hopes to grow to one billion users by 2015 — and is engaged in efforts to involve more women and people in the developing world as participants
• Last month archival backups documenting the early history of Wikipedia were found, just ahead of this milestone. While the buzz is definitely about Wikipedia’s future, it is reassuring to know that its past is now being safeguarded as well. Early contributors must be so proud to see what is growing from of their efforts!
• One of Wikipedia’s founders, Ohio State Alumnus Larry Sanger, has gone on to develop other projects, including WatchKnow.org, a collection of high quality, freely-available education videos for children and teachers.
• While news stories ran in the papers and on TV, and it seemed like everyone was celebrating — or at least marking the significance of this milestone in some way — I was a bit surprised that Google did not make one of its characteristic doodles, especially since Google made a $2 million contribution to Wikimedia last year. However, a Google Livesearch turned up some interesting research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project showing use of Wikipedia among American Internet users growing from 25% (2007) to 42% (2010). It is especially popular among well-educated, affluent audiences.
• On Twitter I found a link to IT PRO’s article on The Top 10 Facts About Wikipedia which reminded me that Time Magazine’s choice of YOU as the person of the year in 2006 was in large part due to wide participation globally in Wikipedia. It was a foreshadowing of the 2010 choice of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
• At the Time Magazine site I found an interesting article on Wikipedia’s Top 10 Moments, among which is a notice about Wikimania meetups, when editors of the online encyclopedia meet up in person at various places around the world.
• Twitter also sent me to BoingBoing’s post marking the occasion:
  A decade of Wikipedia: lesser-known miracles by Andrea James, which has some great links. I could not agree more with what she wrote: “At the very least, just marvel at the possibilities for the future of free culture embodied in the project.”

That’s only a hint of all that is out there today about Wikipedia. In teaching the course, Understanding the Global Information Society? — which motivated us to start this blog — we look for patterns of transformation of work and play in the “global information society.” Certainly we find widespread reliance on Wikipedia is a common denominator when we look at cases. Its importance as a platform for global sharing of information in various languages may be its biggest contribution. While Twitter, Facebook and media sources such as Al Jazeera may be mentioned prominently with regard to developments such as the protests (Jasmine Revolution) currently taking place in Tunisia, certainly the availability of information available in Wikipedia is an underlying factor. Open availability of information makes it hard for dictators to keep control.

Congratulations, Wikipedia!! Many Happy Returns!!

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posted by Maureen Donovan, Japanese Studies Librarian; Associate Professor, donovan.1@osu.edu