2026-01-29
40 分钟The Economist.
To start this episode, let’s play a game.
Can you guess what links all these sounds?
This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.
2001 was something of a banner year for technology.
The world got its first look at Apple’s iPod.
Microsoft released its Xbox,
setting that staid corporate software company on the path
to becoming a behemoth of the gaming industry.
Also, some entrepreneurs had the idea to reinvent the way people recorded and shared knowledge.
Remember, this was the early days of the World Wide Web.
Big companies, and some people who were early adopters,
had websites where they could display information about themselves.
But Jimmy Wales, and his philosopher friend Larry Sanger,
wanted to use the web for something more intellectual.
They wanted to create an online resource of knowledge, curated not by experts, but by anyone, anywhere.
Jimmy Wales’s website, founded in 2001,
went on to become one of the most visited parts of the internet.
Today, Wikipedia contains more than 7 million articles in English, a total of more than 5 billion words.
It’s also spread to hundreds of languages around the world.