YouTube. MySpace. iPod. CareerBuilder. Two words fused together with a capital letter in the middle: The construction seems like it has been standard form all our lives.
And yet, as Andrew Lih describes in his book that comes out today, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, so-called CamelCase was the way computer programmers designated topics that would be linked together on the Internet. And it became the technical underpinning for Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that launched in 2001, about the time the commercial world adopted the spelling quirk to name companies and products.
The first time Lih saw Wikipedia, he thought it was "garbage" - an implausible ant-colony system of volunteers compiling a huge, free online fact book. But he later became a volunteer editor for it himself. And he came to view the Web site that has become the ninth-most popular in the U.S. as pioneering many of the ways in which society now interacts with the Internet.
The act of thousands of people writing information anonymously for the sheer pleasure of having it used by others was a precursor to the blogging and social networking that has followed.
Wikipedia was one of the innovations that became the bridge between the early computer bulletin boards that techies were using to swap information in the early- to mid-1990s, before most people had an inkling of the Internet, and the social-networking phenomenon of today.
In between was the dot-com rush, when Web sites modeled after traditional stores burned through millions of investor dollars before flaming out after 2000.
"If you looked at the Web in 2000, it was fairly conventional; they were trying to reproduce the brick-and-mortar stuff online," Lih said, speaking by phone from his home in Beijing. "When Web 2.0 started, a lot of people rolled their eyeballs, but it became more like a digital commons."
Named for the Hawaiian word for "quick," Wikipedia now commands 97 percent of the online reference market, while more established names like Brittanica and others cling to the remainder. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger originally intended it as the start of an online paid encyclopedia called Nupedia, but it swallowed that plan.
