New frontiers

TO paraphrase Gandhi: First they ignore you.

Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then — when you black out the sixth-largest website on the planet for an entire day — you win.

This is what Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales learned about power on Jan 18, 2012. The online encyclopedia had once been a novelty: Written by everyone, it could contain errors from anyone, as when Stephen Colbert doctored the entry for George Washington in 2006, asserting falsely that he had not owned slaves. But the idea behind Wikipedia was powerful enough to survive pranks, as the service grew to become an essential reference tool for hundreds of millions of users. And late last year, when two bills working their way through the US Congress threatened the site’s ability to function, Wales knew it was time to flex his digital muscles.