One 10-Year-Old's Birthday Party

One of my favorite clients, the Wikimedia Foundation, tonight celebrated the tenth birthday of its largest project, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that is dedicated to becoming the largest repository of human knowledge, freely available to all, that the world has ever seen.

The cake at our local celebration here in downtown San Francisco, weighed 250 pounds before it was cut and eaten.

Meanwhile, some 400 parties were occurring all over the world, because Wikipedia is not a U.S.-centric project but the result of a global movement of people who believe that access to information should be free, regardless of whether you are rich or poor, live in a poor country or a rich country, or have lots of bandwith or very little.

Wikipedia is for everybody.

As I watched my friends and colleagues celebrate tonight, I was struck by how this community of people has transcended politics and all other trivial pursuits.

Wikipedia strives to be objective, fair, unbiased. The movement that sustains it is dedicated to knowledge, which is a very different thing from opinion. In this way, Wikipedia is a living example of journalistic ideals.

Truth has never been "left" and never been "right." Truth is about respecting others, and including everyone in the search for answers to the questions that no one person on this earth possesses. Truth is what we all can agree to.
Truth is what you can read on Wikipedia.

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