Wikipedia turned 10 years old on Saturday. Although Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales once cautioned that the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia shouldn't be used for things such as college papers and theses, you know that recommendation never took. Because of its huge knowledge base, many use Wikipedia as the first source they check.After all, before Wikipedia it was a lot harder to find up-to-date information, rapidly changed, that keeps up with the latest news. Of course, there's a negative as well: sometimes pages are maliciously changed, or even comically changed (Stephen Colbert and Wikiality comes to mind).
Still, despite the negatives, the positives are great. Where else could you accidentally find out that "Medium" had been cancelled in late December when you were actually trying to look something else up? Where else could you find out, in great detail, everything you wanted to know about "Space Ghost" (the original series, not the satire)?
Since Wikipedia's founding, Microsoft has even stopped issuing updates to its Encarta encyclopedia product. Microsoft didn't explicitly name Wikipedia as the reason, but did admit that
[...] the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.The first 10,000 entries in Wikipedia are even archived here.
We can't really recall the first time we used Wikipedia. We also can't recall the first time we edited an article. What about you? What are your Wikipedia memories?
