User:Cream147/essays/Why is Wikipedia so popular?

The age old question. Why is Wikipedia so popular? It started off as an experimental website, and now it's top of nearly every google search you do! There is more knowledge on Wikipedia than there is everywhere else on the internet. Why is Wikipedia so popular? Many other essays have been written on the topic, so I thought I'd write my own to express my opinion.

Wikipedia started off as an experiment as I've already mentioned. It was something completely new, something that had never been tried before. As far as I am aware of, before Wikipedia, there were no websites that anyone could edit and their changes wouldn't have to be accepted, or pass through an administrator of some sort.

Wikipedia was one of the first wikis. When people found it, they thought 'Wow, this is great. I can just go to this website and edit it however I like'. Of course, many of those people were vandals, who believed that they could tell people that bananas were green and the such. They were removed quickly. However, many people came and thought, 'Wow, I can share my knowledge with the world and not have to have it passed through any moderator or anything. It would just be there. Wow.' These people, are in my opinion, the reason why Wikipedia is so brilliant today.

Vandals kept streaming in but they got bored quickly, as their changes were quickly reverted. However, the people who wanted to build the best encyclopedia in the world stayed, and enjoyed making their brilliant edits, and adding more and more onto the encyclopedia. And the bigger Wikipedia has got, the quicker it has grown. More and more people join Wikipedia every day. More and more vandals join also, but because more and more good-willed people join, vandals are stopped equally quickly. Wikipedia is in a delicate balance, and as long as good-willed people join at the same rate as vandals, Wikipedia will continue to grow and eventually will hopefully become the most reliable source of information on the internet, as well as the biggest.