Everyone is an editor

A key tenet of "wiki love" is a devotion to NPOV, Wikipedian for "neutral point of view." Articles don't have to be perfect, but they should be free of bias. As an example, Wales cites the 2000 U.S. presidential election. "Two people who disagree vehemently about whether or not it was a fair outcome can at least agree with the description that there was a controversy."

All wikis run the risk of vandalism. Not all wikis have been bold enough to adapt a neutral content policy. Such distinctions, notes Sunir Shah, a University of Toronto computer scientist who contributes to both Wikipedia and his own wiki project, MeatballWiki, make Wikipedia something of a rogue variant in the wiki world.

"They're not interested in having discussions and learning in a dialectic kind of way," argues Shah. "Their goal is to build an encyclopedia, and that changes everything. They don't want to have opinions and they want everything to look appropriate, which means they have to spend a lot of extra time going after vandalism and trolling."

Offering MeatballWiki as a counterexample, Shah says most traditional wikis evolve along the lines of a dialectic or Talmudic discussion. Readers respond to but rarely overwrite previous' authors comments, leaving room for future readers to follow the conversational evolution. In such a scenario, opinion is more than valued: It's practically necessary to keep the conversation moving.

"At MeatballWiki we are kind of happy dealing with the social problems," Shah says. "We have this saying that Meatball will be around in 50 years, so why worry. We can come to a better answer over time."

Harper, who also contributes to MeatballWiki, shares the rogue variant view. Because of its encyclopedic ambitions, Wikipedia has had to adopt new levels of management and security -- log-in names, I.P. address blocks, arbitration and deletion committees -- that most wikis never have to worry about.

"If anything I would say the wiki is more suited to those smaller-scale projects, he says. "As wikis get larger you run into the problem of troublesome users. You can't manage it like the small group where you say, 'We're not going to invite you down to the pub anymore.'"

Wales, on the other hand, sees that level of familiarity operating at the editorial level, where most people who groom the site and have taken on voluntary management tasks have been around long enough to know the major players. Like other scalable open development projects, Linux most notably, Wikipedia has succeeded in passing on its internal cultural values to newcomers encouraged by the project's overall ambitions. To further fuel that ambition and underwrite costs, Wales says he is already talking with some of the larger search engine players about licensing specific portions of the Wikipedia knowledge base and is talking with a publisher about putting out an official 1.0 version.

A few kinks have to be worked out between now and then, of course. With no formal Q-and-A mechanism, Wikipedia would have to ship its 1.0 version free of guarantees. Readers hoping to catch up on the history of World War I might stumble onto a porn star biography or vice versa. Supposing project leaders did take the time to download and vet Wikipedia content, releasing it on a static format such as CD-ROM, a new question emerges: Is a static version of Wikipedia still Wikipedia? In the Schrodinger's cat paradox of wiki publishing -- where the only way to verify an article's quality is to keep checking it -- never knowing what you're going to find is half the fun.

Despite such complicating factors, Wales is optimistic. A fundraising campaign on the project's third anniversary drew $50,000, more than double the $20,000 target, and Wales says he is currently saving the reserve funds for servers and other future project needs.

"From the beginning, we've never known how it was going to scale," he says, acknowledging the doubts. "There was always that concern as to, if things got too much bigger, would it all just degenerate into garbage?"

Three years later, the concerns are still there. The only difference, of course, is that 1,200 people instead of a dozen people now have a stake in seeing Wikipedia succeed. Reflecting on the project's continued growth, Wales laughs.

"I can't believe that it works, but it works," he says.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

• View blog reactions