Part IV showed you the rest of the picture: the hundreds of Wikimedia wikis that are not the English-language Wikipedia. Maybe the English-language Wikipedia's role as flagship project will persist, but internationalism is clearly a component of all the projects as a whole. The proportion of English content over all the Wikimedia sites is still dropping: Today, three out of four Wikipedia pages are not in English.
As noted in Chapter 2, most of the ingredients for how Wikipedia (and indeed, all of the Wikimedia projects) works were in place by early 2001: a working site with an encyclopedic mission, a strong community, and core wiki philosophies. After all we've said in Parts III and IV about the current Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities, reviewing some features of early Wikipedia history is worthwhile, so we'll pick up where we left off in Chapter 2.
Constant growth has always been a defining feature of Wikipedia. In Wikipedia's first year, over 1,500 articles per month were created; now that number of articles is created in a single day on the English-language Wikipedia. On August 30, 2002, the article count reached 40,000; a year later; the article count was 150,000; and a year after that, in August 2004, the total count was over 300,000 articles. In broad terms, the rate of growth has increased steadily from the project's inception, discounting a few technical slowdowns. (Growth may be slowing, however, for the English-language Wikipedia, if not for the other projects; early 2007 saw continued growth but some flattening of the trend.)
This growth has been technical as well; the initially fairly basic technology behind the site, both MediaWiki and the server infrastructure, has required constant upgrades to keep up with Wikipedia's phenomenal popularity. The number of servers nearly tripled in 2005 alone (the year of the first Wikimania conference, heavy news coverage, and the Seigenthaler scandal), from 39 to over 100. Oldtimers on the site still remember the glitches. How slow the site could be! Early on, the onsite search was often switched off to improve performance, but edits were still commonly lost, in contrast to today's reliability. The number of technical staff has always been small compared to the size of the projects; as of early 2008, all of Wikimedia's projects on hundreds of servers worldwide are run by just four paid technical staff with the help of a few volunteers.
As Wikipedia and the software powering it grew and changed, basic article structure and the style governing articles also changed, and the initial, somewhat primitive look-and-feel was incrementally improved. Big advances in editing came with the use of sections in articles. The category system was delayed, and lists proliferated in Wikipedia's first three years. In the end, categories were enabled somewhat casually in 2004, and three haphazard months of category creation ensued, which annoyed many people (but this settled down in time).
Another theme has been the slow evolution of the Wikimedia community. Wikipedia's social structure has defined itself over time. A preference for very flat hierarchies, which still prevails, didn't stop various classes of Wikipedians from emerging: developers and sysops (administrators), which were first defined as classes of editors in 2001. These classes remain limited, however; today, just as in 2001, any editor who has worked on the site for a few days has the same content privileges as any other editor. Certain community structures also evolved in the first few years as the site grew: The process for requests for administratorship, for instance, was not set up until 2003. This community growth was also reflected in the first in-person meetups in 2004. At the same time, the Foundation began fundraising to try to keep up with the site's growth.
Late 2005 initiated a new era for Wikipedia, as the media generally started to take a much greater interest in the project, its critics, and its internal affairs—a trend that continues to the present. By 2005, the site had arrived.
Some early key policy and technical decisions helped shape the success of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. One of these is the license: Since the content of Wikipedia is released under the GFDL, anyone can reuse Wikipedia content. The emphasis on open content and open source remain absolutely fundamental to the project.
Another innovation from the early days of Wikipedia's development was originally technical—the development of the article talk page. The very first versions of the wiki software had no talk page; comments were left at the bottom of the article. In retrospect, separating out the talk page seems like a simple idea: You have the article page, for instance [[Goldfish]], and [[Talk:Goldfish]] is the separate forum in which to discuss the content of the Goldfish article. The clear division of content (always unsigned) versus editorial comment (signed), was actually a huge step forward. Separating content debates from the articles themselves led to a strong belief that such discussions should be conducted gracefully and certainly not in the flame war style rampant on most Internet forums. Using discussion to work out content and community problems has proved to be a critical part of how Wikipedia deals with contentious issues.
Finally, the key values mentioned in previous chapters—some of which are enshrined as policy, whereas others are simply part of the philosophy behind the site—have made Wikipedia what it is today. On the content side, the ideas of free content, neutrality, and verifiability have been present since the project's first days. On the community side, the ideals of civility, assuming good faith, and being bold have encouraged large-scale participation in a project with shared and interlocking ideals.