Until Now
MediaEducationTechnology

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.

Just before

Just after