On the Alexa list of the world’s most visited websites, the top spots are largely taken up by corporate sites, such as Google, Baidu and Amazon.
![A man with a magnifier.](https://www.internethalloffame.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/JimmyWales.png)
And then there’s Wikipedia.
Launched in 2001 by Internet Hall of Fame Inductee Jimmy Wales, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia is the fifth most visited website in the world.
In a recent column published by The Guardian, John Naughton writes that the site and its reliance on volunteers to edit and fact-check is an embodiment of the Internet’s potential to harness society’s collective intelligence.
“Reading Wikipedia discussion pages provides a way of understanding how a particular proposition or assertion came to be made and how it evolved over time,” he writes. “It’s like reading the transcript of an argument that has gone on for a long time – an attempt to track rationality in action. Like every other human-made thing, it’s imperfect. But in a polarized political climate, it shows what can be done to preserve us from the madness of hysterical, uncivil, conspiracist discourse that now characterizes social media.”