Wikipedia

The Wikipedia logo.

Wikipedia (pronounced as [ˌwiˑkiˈpidi.ə] or [ˌwɪki-], also [-ɐ]) is a multi-lingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with an internet connection and added by anyone with a Wikipedia member account. The project began on January 15 2001 as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has more than 2,500,000 articles, including 850,000 in the English-language version. Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,^[1] and has spawned several sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews.

Articles in the Wikipedia are regularly cited by the mass media and academia, who generally praise it for its free distribution, editing, and diverse range of coverage. Editors are encouraged to uphold a policy of "neutral point of view" under which notable perspectives are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth. But Wikipedia's status as a reference work has been controversial. Its open nature allows vandalism, inaccuracy, and opinion. It has also been criticised for systemic bias, preference of consensus to credentials, and a perceived lack of accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias.

There are about 200 language editions of Wikipedia (about 100 of which are active). Ten editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish. Its German-language edition has been distributed on compact discs, and many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by websites.

Characteristics

Wikipedia's slogan is "The Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit", and the project is described by its founder Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."^[2] It is developed on the wikipedia.org website using a type of software called a "wiki", a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb and derived from Hawaiian Wiki Wiki, the name of the shuttle bus line at Honolulu International Airport and itself derived from a reduplication of wiki ("quick"). Wales intends that Wikipedia should achieve a "Britannica or better" quality and be published in print.

Several other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet. Traditional editorial policies and article ownership are used in some, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the now-defunct Nupedia. More casual websites such as h2g2 or Everything2 serve as general guides whose articles are written and controlled by individuals. Projects such as Wikipedia, Susning.nu, and the Enciclopedia Libre are wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal process of review. Wikipedia has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word-count. Unlike many encyclopedias, it has licensed its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Wikipedia has a set of policies identifying types of information appropriate for inclusion. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, revised, transferred to a sister project, or removed altogether.

Free-content

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license under which Wikipedia's articles are made available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content provided its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When an author contributes original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained with them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Wikipedia may thus be distributed to, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license. Wikipedia's content has been mirrored or forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Wikipedia's images and sounds are non-free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. Material has also been given to Wikipedia under no-derivative or for-Wikipedia-only conditions.^[3] However, some editions only accept free media.

Wikipedia has been used by the media, academics, and others as a reference or supplement. News organizations have referred to Wikipedia articles as sources or in sidebars containing related information on the Web, some regularly.^[4] According to lists maintained by Wikipedia's editors, its articles have been cited most frequently in the news media.^[5] Less frequently, it has been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. For instance, the Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Bill C-38.^[6] Noncomprehensive lists are maintained by Wikipedians of Wikipedia as a source.^[7]

Language editions

Wikipedia encompasses 119 "active" language editions as of March 2005.^[8] Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, German, French, Japanese, and Polish. In total, Wikipedia contains 205 language editions of varying states with a combined 2.6 million articles.^[9]

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, and are only held to global policies such as "neutral point of view". Articles and images are nonetheless shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through pages to request translations organized on many of the larger language editions, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in any edition.^[10]

The following is a list of the larger editions, sorted by number of articles as of 7 December 2005. (The article count, however, is a very limited metric for comparing the editions. For instance, in some Wikipedia versions nearly half of the articles are stubs which were created automatically by Bots.) ^[11]

An example of Wikipedia's range in language editions; Wikipedia in Hebrew.

English (854,525)
German (324,631)
French (201,319)
Japanese (162,353)
Polish (147,005)
Italian (124,976)
Swedish (119,828)
Dutch (111,227)
Portuguese (87,082)
Spanish (77,973)
Chinese (48,722)
Norwegian Bokmål (43,496)
Russian (40,519)
Finnish (40,137)
Danish (35,423)

suck ass biatch

Editing

Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's articles, and all regstered users can create new ones and have their changes instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Further, this real-time, collaborative model allows rapid updating of existing topics and introduction of new topics. Its authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who so wishes. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group. Decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia is instead done by consensus and occasionally by vote. Jimmy Wales retains final judgement on Wikipedia policies and user guidelines.^[12]

By the nature of its openness, "edit wars" and prolonged disputes often occur when editors do not agree.^[13] A few members of its community have explained its editing process as a collaborative work, a "socially Darwinian evolutionary process"^[14], but this is not generally considered by the community to be an accurate self-description. Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time due to vandalism or revert wars; therefore, Wikipedia does not declare any article finished. Some users attempt to enter malicious or amusing but irrelevant information but changes of this sort are normally removed quickly.

Regular users often maintain a 'watchlist' of articles of interest to them, so that they are immediately shown which of these articles have changed since their last log in. This allows monitoring of daily editing to prevent false information and spam, and also to keep up with other editor's views, or updates, of the subjects on the watchlist.

Evaluations

Wikipedia's claimed status as an encyclopedia has been controversial, more so as it has gained prominence. Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. Wikipedia is considered to be of sufficient quality in at least some areas by others, notably winning a comparative test by the German magazine c't. Much of its praise is for being both free-content and open to editing by anyone. Wikipedia editors themselves have been quite active in evaluating, both positively and negatively, the encyclopedia.

Quality

Some argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window"(Waldman, 2004). Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven."^[15] On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Wikipedia?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, Danah Boyd said in 2005 that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes"^[16]. Wikipedia articles have been referenced by academics in peer-reviewed articles, including those appearing in the journal Science^[17].

Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,

"[h]owever closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler... The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."^[18]

In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles; see for example Wikipedia:Provenance. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security." However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial (see Wikipedia talk:Provenance). Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."^[19]

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.^[20]

Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus's law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."^[21] Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived."^[22] Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.^[23]

Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."^[24] Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."^[25]

The English-language website also suffers from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative impact on Wikipedia's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information.

It has been praised for, as a wiki, allowing articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.^[26]

Microsoft Encarta has started to solicit comments from readers in attempt to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its encyclopedia. Encarta Feedback allows any user to propose revisions for review by their staff.^[27]

The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-"), Brockhaus Premium 3.3, and Microsoft Encarta 3.1.^[28] In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Wikipedia improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events."^Kishore

At the end of 2005, some controversy regarding the biographical article on John Seigenthaler Sr. erupted. This eventually led to the decision to only allow registered users to create new articles on Wikipedia.

Community

Wikipedia has a community of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing.^[29] Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article.^[30]

In a page on researching with Wikipedia, its authors argue that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen.^[31] Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

Awards

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004^[32]: The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 euro grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby award for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.

Wikipedia has received plaudits from sources including BBC News, Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Science, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Irish Times, Reader's Digest and The Daily Telegraph. Awards to the Wikipedia project and press clippings are listed by Wikimedia contributors on its website.

Authors

During January 2005, Wikipedia had about 13,000 or more users who made at least five edits that month; 9,000 of these active users worked on its three largest language editions.^[33] A more active group of about 3,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the three largest editions. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Wikipedia's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.^[34]

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee.

Former Wikipedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia."^[35] In a study of Wikipedia as a community, Economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.^[36] Wikipedia has been viewed as a social experiment in anarchy or democracy. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence.^[37]

History

File:NupediaLogo.jpg

Wikipedia "originated" from Nupedia.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on 9 March 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was described by Sanger as differing from existing encyclopedias in being open content; not having size limitations, as it was on the Internet; and being free of bias, due to its public nature and potentially broad base of contributors.^[38] Nupedia had a seven-step review process by appointed subject-area experts, but was later widely viewed as too slow for producing a limited number of articles. Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by the use of advertisements.^[39] It was licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License initially, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License prior to Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

Wikipedia's English edition on March 20, 2001, two and a half months after its founding.

On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (...) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can see. [40]

Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. [41] It had been, from 10 January, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model.^[42] Wikipedia thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbias" policy. There were otherwise few rules initially. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles among 18 language editions by the end of its first year. It had 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.^[43] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.

Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository. Wales mentioned that he heard the concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld, an employee of Bomis who showed him the same wiki, in December 2000,^[44] but it was after Sanger heard of its existence from Ben Kovitz, a regular at this wiki, in January 2001,^[45] and proposed a creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales that Wikipedia's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki production, the GNUPedia project existed alongside Nupedia early in its history. It subsequently became inactive and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Wikipedia.^[46]

Citing fear of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and moved its website to wikipedia.org. Projects have since forked from Wikipedia's content for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo, which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view."

From Wikipedia and Nupedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was created on June 20, 2003.^[47] Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki" had been created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquotes, a collection of quotes, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below.

Wikipedia has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or less new articles per day. The English Wikipedia reached a 100,000 article milestone on January 22, 2003. In 2004, its article growth rate was approximately 1,000 to 3,000 per day. In all editions, it reached 500,000 articles on February 25, 2004.^[48] Wikipedia reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on September 20, 2004.^[49]

Software and hardware

Wikipedia receives over 1000 page views per second. Around 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.

Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida and three other locations around the world. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required CamelCase for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske. Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki. It was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects.

Wikipedia was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into an n-tier distributed architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to more than 100 servers in four locations around the world.

Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to two load-balancing servers running the Perlbal software, which then pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page-rendering from the database. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France. A new Dutch cluster is also online now. In spite of all this, Wikipedia page load times remain quite variable. The ongoing status of Wikipedia's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.

Sister projects

Wikipedia has free content sister projects which fulfill non-encyclopedic roles. These include: Wiktionary, a free dictionary project; Wikibooks, a free textbook project; Wikisource, a free library; Wikiquote, a free compendium of quotations; and Wikinews, a free news source. The Wikimedia Commons is a shared media repository that serves all the sister projects (including Wikipedia). Wikipedia and its sister projects are administered by the Wikimedia Foundation.