The Wikipedia Revolution
The Wikipedia Revolution is the first narrative account of the remarkable success story of the "encyclopedia anyone can edit." Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia editor/administrator, academic and journalist, tells how the Internet's free culture community inspired its creation in 2001, and how legions of volunteers have emerged to create over 10 million articles in over 50 languages. The book recounts colorful behind-the-scenes stories of how obsessive map editors, automated software robots, and warring factions have come to shape a complex online community of knowledge gatherers. Learn about the historical underpinnings of Wikipedia: how a Hawaiian vacation and a fringe piece software from Apple Computer inspired the wiki concept and realized the original read-and-write capabilities of the Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web. While Wikipedia has become firmly planted at the top of Google's search results, what are the challenges as sum of all human knowledge becomes more complete, and its problem is not growth, but reliability? Should we be putting so much trust in a resource created by anonymous nobodies?
Andrew Lih is a new media researcher and technology author. After a decade in academia as a professor of journalism and media studies, he has spent two years researching and writing the book The Wikipedia Revolution, the only narrative account about the online community that created one of the most influential web sites in the world.
After founding one of the first dot-com companies in New York in 1994, from 1995 to 2000 he created the new media program at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism where he served as adjunct professor and director of technology for their Center for New Media. During that time, he taught the first generation of new media journalists and advised New York media companies on content strategy and Web site design. He also developed the first guidelines for the Pulitzer Prizes to accept digital multimedia submissions, starting in 1999.
His research in the social and technical dynamics of collaborative communities have made him a recognized expert on the Wikipedia project, one of the largest collaborative reference works on the Internet. He is an administrator on the English edition, and has served on the program committee and as proceedings editor for the annual Wikimania conferences. To continually cover the online community, he hosts the Wikipedia Weekly roundtable audio podcast that discusses issues related to Wikipedia, free culture, peer production and crowdsourcing.
Lih’s work and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, National Public Radio (US), MSNBC, CNN International, South China Morning Post, and The Standard (HK), among others. He was recognized as a Young Leader by the American Swiss Foundation in 2000 and by the Asia Society in 2007.
