Mass Law Blog

The Sum of All Knowledge

by | Sep 19, 2006

Technology. Do you know what Wikipedia is? Did you know that this open source encyclopedia covers 1,391,807 topics (in the English version, as of this writing)? That it may be (or soon become) the greatest collaborative knowledge gathering effort the world has ever known? That it is the 17th most popular site on the Internet, receiving 14,000 hits per second? That you can find a topic in Wikipedia by simply entering “wiki” at the end of a Google search? (e.g., Lost TV show wiki)?

If you’re interested in understanding the origins, goals and inner-workings of this astonishing phenomenon, I recommend these two articles from The Atlantic and The New Yorker, respectively: