In its almost nine years of existence, Wikipedia has achieved unequivocal success: as the fifth most visited website in the world, it features more than 14.3m articles in 270 languages contributed by more than 100,000 volunteers.

Given that this has been done on a shoestring budget, Wikipedia easily puts to shame all other efforts to create and disseminate digital knowledge.

The debates about the truthfulness of entries have also subsided — perhaps a sign that most of us have discovered there are plenty of other lies on the internet. Wikipedia has become the lazy man's Google: why bother sifting through 100 search results if chances are that someone has already done this job for you in a Wikipedia entry?

Most projects would be comfortable with gaining so much power in so little time, but Wikipedians are an ambitious bunch. Their commitment, as codified in the vision statement of the Wikimedia foundation, the legal entity behind the project, is to create a world where "every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge".