How the online "temple of the mind" became the go-to site for looking stuff up.
Wikipedia was not the only online encyclopedia to be launched around the turn of the millennium. Along with Nupedia, there was an interlinked database called Everything2 where anyone could submit an article but no one could edit others' submissions. There was also H2G2, a playful miscellany inspired by Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Before those there was Britannica, which had gone online quietly in December 1993. Microsoft's (MSFT) CD-ROM based Encarta, which was neither collaborative nor originally online, was seen as the primary digital threat to traditional encyclopedias like Britannica because it was given away free with new PCs.
One of Wikipedia's loudest critics is co-founder Sanger.. laid off when the dot-com bubble burst. In 2006 Sanger started Citizendium, a competing wiki-based encyclopedia with "gentle expert oversight" and contributors who use their real names. At the same time, analyses of Wikipedia's accuracy have generally found that, while it's occasionally wrong, it's not much more wrong than traditional encyclopedias.
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