Late last year, two days before Christmas, Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of the people-powered encyclopedia Wikipedia, posted an evangelical message on his Web site, Wikia.com. "Help me out," he wrote. "Spread the word" Six years earlier Wales' cofounding partner at Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, had posted a similar message. "Humor me," Sanger's January 2001 electronic missive had said. "Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes." These were the three sentences that, unfortunately, changed the information world. Today Wikipedia is a top-ten Internet destination, with 7 million articles in 251 languages and a volunteer militia of several hundred thousand editors.
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