A few days after September 11, 2001, as lawmakers were approving a declaration to use military force and people downtown were picking through the rubble, someone in Brooklyn stared bleary-eyed into their computer screen at the history they and some strangers were making.
“I’m a little worn out now, as I’ve spent the last 12 hours straight on this site, so I’ll try to keep this brief,” The Cunctator, as the volunteer editor called themselves, wrote to whomever was out there. “I think that the page September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack could be one of the great accomplishments of Wikipedia, if everyone gets involved.”
Wikipedia.org had only been launched nine months earlier by a digital ad entrepreneur named Jimmy Wales and a graduate student in philosophy named Larry Sanger. By July, hundreds of visitors were arriving a day, many brought by links that appeared on Slashdot and Kuro5hin and in the results of a new, fast-growing search engine called Google. Many articles were short, amateurish, questionable. But there were a lot of them, and by the start of September, Wikipedia already boasted versions in French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian, and some 10,000 articles in English.
On the morning of September 11, its prospects as a long-term project were far from certain. But as the attacks exposed the weaknesses of America’s 21st century communications, with cell phone networks struggling, first responders’ radios failing, and the world wide web slowing to a crawl, Wikipedia managed to hold up—mostly. At some point, a link to Wikipedia’s 9/11 page appeared on Yahoo’s popular news portal. Traffic began to spike.
“That brings in this huge influx of editors who are very motivated to do something altruistic online, whatever they can do,” says Brian Keegan, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, who has studied how Wikipedia responded to the attacks. “You had this massive amount of information-seeking and sense-making that people are trying to make of hugely traumatic events. And here’s this platform that’s set up to receive all this demand, not only from a technical capacity, but socially and organizationally.”
Demand fed supply. New pages related to the attacks appeared, and so did more readers and dozens of new editors and new articles—a virtuous cycle that still propels Wikipedia.
Soon there were about 100 pages related to the attacks: lists of casualties, closings, and cancellations, information on how to donate and volunteer, articles on the political and economic effects, on the buildings, the perpetrators, collective trauma, a timeline, even a page listing rumors and conspiracy theories.
