Since birth Wikipedia has become the informative reference for many millions of people. And it may seem that it was not so long since its arrival, but the truth is that it will turn 21 next January 15, so, for the youngest, we can almost say that it has always existed, although those of us who comb gray hair still remember the Espasa-Calpe and many other living room encyclopedias (some, in our youth, even went door to door trying to sell some of those compilations to get some rooms in our student days, something that today sounds terribly anachronistic).
In these two decades, Wikipedia and the entire ecosystem that has arisen around it (Wikimedia, Wikiquotes, etc.), as well as the websites based on the same operating system, the thematic «wikis», have created an informative proposal without parallel, which has democratized access to information as many of us expected at the dawn of the Internet, allowing not only that everyone with a network connection has access to information, but that everyone can enrich it with their own contributions.
In fact, much of the success of Wikipedia is undoubtedly due to the fact that the great encyclopedia of human knowledge is collaborative. Anyone can participate in the creation and updating of practically any article. This has its pros and cons, of course, we already know that it exists the bandalization of articles, ideological and bias wars and even false publications. However, if we have to make a list of pros and cons, the first undoubtedly beats the second.
This has led to the fact that, for years now, Wikipedia is practically always on the list of the ten most visited web pages in the world. For example, if we review the data for November, we will see that it occupied the ninth position in the global ranking, a position that it also repeated in the Spanish ranking, in our case ranking between the sports newspapers Marca and As. Thus, with its pluses and minuses, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger’s project is a global success, even despite criticism from the latter.
To this day we know, at least from the usual requests for financial assistance from Wales, that Wikipedia has high maintenance costs. And it is understandable, of course, the infrastructure needed to sustain one of the ten most viewed websites in the world is no small feat. For this reason, and although it is actually the most logical thing in the world, it is striking to see the computer on which it all began, the team used by Wales to begin to build the foundations of Wikipedia. And the possibility of owning it is even more striking … although it is not a cheap goal.
And it is the most popular auction house Christie’s has an auction open where you can get the iMac with which Jimmy Wales took the first steps of Wikipedia, back in late 2000. the iMac has a 400 megahertz PowerPC G3 processor, 512 megabytes of SDRAM and a 10 gigabyte hard drive (mechanical, obviously), obviously formatted. In addition, as we can read in the auction notes, sometimes it fails when trying to start and, sometimes, it shuts down suddenly.
The auction, Right now, it has reached $ 8,500 through 40 bids, although there are still three days left, so we can expect that the price will rise even more, since its symbolic value, as the cradle of Wikipedia, is incalculable. Be that as it may, from now on when you access Wikipedia surely, at some point, the image of a first generation iMac G3 Strawberry will come to mind.
