It was indeed an epiphany—really, a synthesis of a lot of ideas that were fairly new and floating around at the time (wikis, Extreme Programming, free content,

It was indeed an epiphany—really, a synthesis of a lot of ideas that were fairly new and floating around at the time (wikis, Extreme Programming, free content, and others). The main idea of Wikipedia, even its combative/collaborative style and its peculiar solution to the epistemological problem of getting reliable knowledge, was cooked up in a flash of inspiration, and then talked out over a single dinner. The main policy ideas did not take a whole lot longer to work out, and they were mostly developed by one person—a philosophy Ph.D. who had a thing about reliability and bias. The majority of the work for a long time was the relentless political/marketing effort to attract people to the Wikipedia community and keep them agreed to the main social values that had been envisioned very early.