Oh yes, Wiki – the Hitchhiker’s Guide only without wit, charm, personality or froodiness.

Yeah, but Wikipedia got something very right with its basic approach mixing dry design with an emphasis on pure content. It rapidly blazed past h2g2.com, Douglas Adams’ own online take on his famous book, and has succeeded where a string of conventional online encyclopaedias failed.

By the end of year one, Wikipedia had 19,000 articles and said it wanted to “make over 100,000” — a goal that now seems quaint given that the site has more than six million entries in English alone. And as the site turned 20 last week, we'd like to hold up our magnifying glass and ask some questions.