Wikipedia-an unplanned miracle http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/14/wikipedia-unplanned-miracle-10-years In praise of Wikipedia http://www.economist.com/node/17902943?story_id=17902943&CFID=159815051&CFTOKEN=41373080 Wikipedia Comes of Age http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/ The State of Wikipedia http://www.thestateofwikipedia.com/ Wikipedia-Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia On January 15, 2001, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales began a new project with the words "Hello, world." Their next entry was "Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes." Since then, Wikipedia has become the go-to online reference source for stumped college students, trivia fans, and the generally curious. Of course, there have been many critics, and some have claimed that many of the entries are merely sounding boards for those who may be singularly possessed by a certain subject, and not in an altogether objective fashion. Today, Wikipedia is the fifth-most popular online destination in the world, and it draws in 410 million unique visitors a month. One area of concern in recent years is that growth of new and discrete entries on the site has slowed significantly. This may be expected due to the fact that with 17 million articles, quite a bit of knowledge has been covered over the past decade. Andrew Lih, who wrote the book "The Wikipedia Revolution", commented that it will be integral for the Wikimedia Foundation to reach out to large cultural institutions in the coming years in order to provide the site with new, high-quality material. The first link will take visitors to a piece from CNET's Daniel Terdiman on the history of Wikipedia. The second link leads to an opinion piece from the Guardian's Clay Shirky on the enduring popularity of Wikipedia. Moving along, the third link leads to a humorous and insightful article from last week's Economist about the future of Wikipedia. The fourth link leads to a bit of reflection on the recent transformation of the reference world from Casper Grathwohl, the vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press. The fifth link leads to a short graphic presentation narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales that talks about Wikipedia's past, present, and future. Finally, the last link is a bit of a "meta" offering, as it leads to the Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia.