The noble foundation upon which the Internet was formed is a digital world where the free exchange of information and knowledge connects the world. And one Web site that represents a noteworthy use of the Internet in that regard is Wikipedia.org.

Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers on the Internet.

Supported through academic goodwill and public donations to the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation, its goal is to produce the most comprehensive, reliable and largest encyclopedia in history.

The current rate of its growth almost makes that last goal seem possible, as there are now more than 440,000 entries in the English-language version and more than 1.1 million articles total in 50 different langues.

Topics range from Internet terms, such as trolling and blogosphere, to more mundane subjects, such as the Tawny Eagle.

Each page on the site contains an “Edit this page” link, which users can click to edit, reposition and revise passages created by other writers. Once a user has made an edit, those changes are posted immediately.

Users can also view older versions of a page, discuss the page, view links on a page or see related changes. These options allow contributors to constantly refine and comment on entries.

All the articles are covered by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License, which allows anyone to reuse the entries for any purpose, including commercially, as long as they pass on that right to others and provide proper credit to Wikipedia.

Representatives from other encylopedia companies, such as Encyclopedia Britannica, have launched attacks against Wikipedia, comparing it to a public toilet in terms of the quality of its content.

The site’s defenders note that bias can find its way into the articles due to the anarchic element the project attracts. But they counter that the site’s growing base of more than 10,000 contributors are always reading and revising, ensuring that the site’s content is as honest and true as possible.

That size brings other issues to play, though. Although one of the site’s creators would like to freeze the progress of the encylopedia at some point and label it Wikipedia 1.0, he admits it probably won’t happen before next year, due to the open-ended nature of the project.

And although Wikipedia is increasingly being cited and relied upon by academics, librarians and researchers, its support by teachers, schools and libraries is quite low. That is partly due to the fact that there is no final authority who signs off on the accuracy of entries.

Most of those involved – Wikipedians – don’t have a problem with that, since they would rather make complex topics accessible to the general reader than create another elitist reference source.

Using the basis of the project – wiki technology – they’ve even begun to branch out into other areas.

Wiktionary.org is a free dictionary; Wikisource.org is a collection of public domain texts; Wikibooks.org has free textbooks for schools and university; and Wikiquote.org is a collection of notable quotations.

And have you ever wanted to make changes to a news story? Wikinews.org lets users test their skills as journalists and editors. A non-elitist media?

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Eddie Hargreaves was the Webmaster of eastoregonian.com. He can be reached at meged@earthlink.net.