Mr. Jimmy Wales, a former options trader who in 1999 set out to reinvent the encyclopedia for the Internet age—free, up-to-date and available to all. He started the way most encyclopedists start, by commissioning articles from experts and subjecting them to peer review.
After 18 months, he had a pitiful 12 entries; at that rate, it would have taken him a few millenniums to equal Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Wales created a free-form companion site based on a little-known software program called a wiki (the Hawaiian term means quick) that makes it easy—with the "edit this page" button—to enter and track changes to Web pages. The effect was explosive. That simple button turned readers into contributors and contributors into evangelists. Wikipedia now has more than a million articles in English, nearly 10 times as many as in Britannica.
Today Wales is celebrated as a champion of Internet-enabled egalitarianism. He describes himself not as antielitist but as "anticredentialist." That's a key distinction. It means that amateurs can have as much to contribute as professionals and that talent can be found anywhere. Everyone predicted that mob rule would lead to chaos.