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| A tribute to Wikipedia (and its founder) on the website's 25th anniversary |
|---|
| Wikipedia was started 25 years ago, in January 2001. It is (in the opinion of the author of this blog) one of humanity's great achievements, and Jimmy Wales (its founder) one of the 21st century's great heroes. |
In this blog
Wikipedia was founded on 15th January 2001, meaning that it has recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales (who previously worked in finance) following a frantic and unsuccessful search to find information urgently on the drug meconium with which doctors were proposing to treat his new-born daughter's illness. In the end Jimmy and his then wife Christine decided to approve the treatment, and his daughter Kira made a full recovery.
While his contemporaries (the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar) went on to become billionaires, Jimmy Wales has always turned down any opportunities to cash in on th success of Wikipedia.

What a hero looks like.
In doing so, he has given mankind its greatest ever reliable source of knowledge, consisting of over 7 million articles in English and pages in more than 340 other languages. You can read a recent interview with Jimmy in this Guardian article.
To celebrate Wikipedia's 25th birthday the Wikipedia Foundation have created this slick online presentation summarising the history of the site (you scroll down to go through the contents - it took me an embarrassingly long time to work this out):

As you scroll down little panels like this will appear which you can play.
You can find a short, slick video about Wikipedia today here:

Click on the obvious link to play the video!
When you've finished watching the presentation, why not take the Wikipedia quiz? I'm not sure what purpose it serves, but the questions are fun:

Question 1 (I went for the graffiti answer).
It's easy to take Wikipedia for granted, but we shouldn't. You can make a one-off or regular donation here:

The familiar pop-up donation form.
Note that if you already donate to Wikipedia you can create a Wikipedia account and untick this option to prevent the irritating fund-raising pop-ups appearing on the website from time to time:

Untick the Fundraising box on the Banners tab.
Here's to the next 25 years!
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