Wikipedia – an unplanned miracle  Every day since its birth 10
years ago, Wikipedia has got better. Yet it's amazing it even
exists  Wikipedia is the most widely used reference work in the
world. That statement is both ordinary and astonishing: it's a
simple reflection of its enormous readership; and yet, by any
traditional view about how the world works, Wikipedia shouldn't
even exist, much less have succeeded so dramatically in the
space of a single decade.  The cumulative effort of Wikipedia's
millions of contributors means you are a click away from
figuring out what a myocardial infarction is, or the cause of
the Agacher Strip war, or who Spangles Muldoon was. This is an
unplanned miracle, like "the market" deciding how much bread
goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the
market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it
is available to you free; even the servers and system
administrators are funded through donations. That it would
become such a miracle was not obvious at i