It's the late-nineteenth century. Professor James Murray is leading a literary project that draws from the knowledge, expertise and time of tens of thousands of volunteers. Operating in Oxford, England, he receives hundreds of thousands of slips of paper over the course of several decades, each containing the definition of a particular English word. To Murray, these contributors are strangers -- unpaid, but working together as one to collate the definitions and origins of every word in the English language.

It took 70 years to complete, but the Oxford English Dictionary was arguably history's first massively-crowdsourced collation of English knowledge.

It's now the early 21st century. Jimmy Wales is leading a literary project that draws from the knowledge, expertise and time of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Operating globally, his project has received millions of contributions, edits and expansions. To Wales, these contributors are often strangers -- unpaid, but working together as one to collate the collective product of all human knowledge.


This week it celebrates its 10th year of existence, and Wikipedia is arguably the product of the same process that ultimately resulted in the modern Oxford English Dictionary and the authority it commands for so many.

However, it's also subject to many similar criticisms. But has that made a difference to its academic acceptance?

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Initially published steadily in numerous volumes, the

OED was contributed to in much the same way as Wikipedia.


Volunteers requested books from Murray and were tasked with recording each instance of a given word, along with its date of first use, its meaning within context, and other data. Who these volunteers were was of trivial importance. In fact, little did Murray know that for 20 years, one of the most prominent contributors was a mentally unstable ex-US military surgeon named William Chester Minor.

Minor contributed from the Broadmoor asylum after killing a man during a paranoid episode, but being found not guilty on account of his insanity. But it didn't matter. Minor was remarkably well-read and highly educated, so his extremely detailed contributions of thousands of definitions was just as valuable -- even though the personal circumstance behind them was unknown for two decades, at least to Murray*.

The "metadata" recorded by Minor and other volunteers was recorded on special slips of paper, then sent to Oxford. Multiple citations and definitions of identical words were manually considered, before being entered into the dictionary.

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Similar rules of citation and objectivity are encouraged on Wikipedia. Facts and figures must be attributed to a source, either in printed books, on websites or otherwise. But unlike the


OED, Wikipedia can of course be improved or corrected continually and instantly by people who believe they have better sources, or simply more of them. But all the while it results from the work of a massively male-dominated volunteer team, generally in their late-twenties, that gives prominence to topics readily available for citation in the northern hemisphere, such as western pop culture.

The OED, under related criticism, has been accused of bias -- deliberate or otherwise in the modern day -- to unfairly favour the usage of words by "great writers", such as Shakespeare.

One could argue that the relatively recent inclusion of terms such as "D'oh" (of Homer Simpson fame) and "google", suggest this bias is now less evident.

Regardless of their criticisms, however, the origins of both the

OED and Wikipedia are extraordinarily similar, and today the Oxford English Dictionary is an academic standard; a trusted compendium of a thousand years of the English language.

Perhaps if granted the tens of decades the OED has had to achieve this, Wikipedia will become the same for all human knowledge as the OED became for the English tongue.


Nate Lanxon is the editor of Wired.co.uk. He can be found on Twitter at @NateLanxon. Follow Wired at @WiredUK.

Read more about Wikipedia in our Wikipedia Week 2011 Topic Hub!

*Murray and Minor eventually met and developed an extraordinary working relationship. A highly detailed and enjoyable account of this can be read in Simon Winchester's book The Professor and The Madman.