Be honest, when you're doing any kind of writing that needs a little bit of stunt brain added in,

what's your first stop? No doubt it's Wikipedia. It's actually hard to imagine the internet without it,

but close to 20 years ago, it nearly went extinct. I'm Patty Steele, when the place we turned to

for all human knowledge almost had its lights turned off.

That's next on the backstory.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

The backstory is back.

First off, got to thank super backstory fan Steve Kingston for sharing this

story idea. Okay, in 2004, as Wikipedia was getting its wings, co-founder Jimmy Wales said in an

interview, imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to

the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're

doing. It was a monumental undertaking, particularly because it needed billions of pieces of

information to go out to billions of people for free. The mid-2000s were actually like the

dawn of the internet as a user-friendly tool for everybody,

not just genius computer guys. Google felt permanent. YouTube felt kind of inevitable. Facebook

and similar sites were becoming unavoidable. Still is. But Wikipedia, it felt like infrastructure, not a website, actually more like a utility,

similar to how folks decades ago used encyclopedias and dictionaries, right? It was turning into a thing

we put in the same category as electricity or top water, something that would always be there

for a quick reference on pretty much anything.

Now it's 2007. Very quietly, Wikipedia is approaching extinction. It's not because of hackers

or the government, not because misinformation, scandals, lawsuits. It boils down to the same old

boring thing that's killed businesses for centuries.

...