Jimbo Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia gave a great talk at Reboot. I managed to grab him afterwards for a quick chat about the difficulties of growing at such speed (wikipedia was launched in 2001 and is now bigger than Britannica and Encarta combined). He told me that the key had been to...
not, "build up systems for things that might not happen," or, "don't put cages in a steak house in case people stab each other". This was a recurring theme at Reboot that I'd summarise as 'release and react'.
Jimmy initially tried a model that he referred to as Newpedia which involved a structure of committees. It was only when he tried to publish one of his own articles through this system that he realised how slow it was. He then turned to the wiki model and found that his article was up and running within weeks, with people adding and contributing to it. It was at that point that he knew Wikipedia would work. In fact he left me with the impression that wikipedia was in part an accident - in that the wiki his team were using to manage the Newpedia project, became the project.
He also told me that there were about 2000 super-contributors who created most of wikipedia's content (1.6 million articles). That's pretty amazing, especially when you consider they are all volunteers. He said his job was to, "go around thanking them".
Jimmy is an ultra modern marketeer (and a nice guy too).
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