The internet''''''''''''''''s omniscience is one of its most useful and transformative features or many common queries the top match will be an entry in Wikipedia，an online，user-generated encyclopedia which celebrates its tenth birthday this week….

Wikipedia started life as an offshoot of Nupedia， a free， online encyclopedia being written by experts. To speed up the production of articles， two members of the Nupedia team， Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales…， had the idea of allowing anybody to edit entries， using "wiki" technology. The result quickly eclipsed Nupedia. It is an astonishing success story. On paper， the idea that volunteers could collectively produce the largest and most popular encyclopedia the world has ever seen sounds implausible. Surely reference works need to be compiled by experts？ Yet Wikipedia now has over 17m articles， 3.5m of them in English， and its popularity-it is one of the ten biggest sites on the web and is used by around 400m people each month-shows how much people value it….

－ The Economist， 2010. 1. 15