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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