Wikipedia is revolutionizing the concept of encyclopedias and the way we gather knowledge.
Since its birth online, Wikipedia has become the world’s largest reference work. With more than 1.2
million articles in nearly 160 languages, it easily dwarfs the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Encarta
Reference and a half-dozen other rivals.
How did Wikipedia get started? Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder and leader, began with a
simple yet counterintuitive idea: create an open encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. (The
name Wikipedia comes from the “wiki” sort of collaborative software that powers the website.) The
project adopted a few rules of order: whenever someone edits an article, a new version of the article
is created and saved. This is important because Wikipedia is an open-content project. Such projects
are fueled by the authority derived by the contributors from the work that they do. Your contribution
to an article, no matter how small, is kept for future generations and clearly identified as such.
【題組】26. What can be inferred from the passage?
(A) People like to have their own copies of encyclopedia.
(B) People will order encyclopedias from the Internet.
(C) People may keep their names in Wikipedia for a long time.
(D) People used to look for ideas from Wikipedia.