Wikipedia embodied the internet’s democratizing promise of universal knowledge

Evidence

Surowiecki’s “wisdom of the crowd” thesis found its most immediate validation in Wikipedia, a crowdsourced website that became the largest and most accessible repository of knowledge in human history. By offering free, multilingual information to anyone with an internet connection, Wikipedia embodied the democratizing promise of the internet. “What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them?” asked its founder, Jimmy Wales. “For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge—the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 264

Categorization

• SHARE: Good for someone interested in Wikipedia’s founding ideals or Wales’s rhetoric.
• XREF: connects to: Wikipedia reflects median internet common knowledge, not emergent truth — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2103; Early 2000s scholars debated Wikipedia’s reliability as a knowledge source — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2156