Wikipedia
Laura Sofía Afanador Lamo
Ward Cunningham
The one that creates the Wiki type of website.
Jimmy Wales
Co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia
Larry Sanger
Co-founder of Wikipedia
The beginning
In the beginning there was a man, Ward Cunningham, who creates a new type of website called wiki. This websites are the ones that allow you to create and edit information. Around march of 2000, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger decided to create a Free Online Encyclopedia, they called this project "Nupedia", in witch the contributors had to be experts, but because of lack of resources, they fail in 2003.
At the same time this one was created, Wikipedia also was, at first with the intention of being a discussion to possible articles of Nupedia that will undergo by some editors, but unlike this first website, anyone can create, edit and discuss. By the time Nupedia was out of the internet with only 24 articles, Wikipedia had over 20,000, so Wales decide to focus on it.
Since 2003 Wikipedia has over 10 million of articles in 260 different languages. Is the seven ranked as the most popular webpage.
The Importance
Talking about participation of the public, getting people's hands on the guts of the thing, having them donate that back to the commons, and fulfilling the idea behind open source, then we can only be talking about Wikipedia
How to Edit a Wikipedia Article