Search and Wikipedia
Finding things becomes solved, and an encyclopaedia is written by volunteers.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2.4 years
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Google's PageRank, ranking pages by who links to them, launches in 1998 and makes a web of billions of documents navigable. Wikipedia launches in January 2001 and grows to over 60 million articles across 300 languages, written and edited by unpaid volunteers under open licence — an outcome almost nobody predicted would work, and which remains one of the few large-scale successes of open collaboration on the internet.