Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a Web-based free content encyclopedia that is openly edited and freely readable. It has 187 independent language editions sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Entries on traditional encyclopedic topics exist alongside those on almanac, gazetteer and current events topics. Its goal is to create "a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." Administrator note Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving around 50 million hits per day. Wikipedia contains approximately 1.3 million articles, over 500,000 of which are in its English language edition, over 200,000 in the German language and over 100,000 in the Japanese language. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on 15 January 2001. Its name is a portmanteau of Wiki, a Hawaiian word meaning "quick" adopted to describe a kind of collaborative software, and encyclopedia. Having steadily gained in popularity, Administrator note it has spawned numerous conceptually related sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikinews.

Wikipedia has been praised for being free, being openly accessible, covering a wide range of topics, and being detailed. It has been criticized for lack of authority versus a traditional encyclopedia, systemic bias, and for deficiencies in traditional encyclopedic topics. Vandalism is a persistent problem. Its articles have been cited by the mass media and academia, and mirrored or forked by websites. Wikipedia's content has not been distributed officially or on a large scale in any physical form.

The idea of a free, open community, united by technology, where increasingly vast amounts of content are actively written, reviewed and debated for public consumption, makes the Wikipedia distinctive not only amongst encyclopedias but amongst informational resources in general. The credibility of Wikipedia has often come into question, because the fact that the content can be freely edited by anyone who so chooses opens the door for a certain degree of inaccuracy and poorly researched content.

Although Wikipedia is a community, project founder Jimmy Wales insists that this is secondary: "Wikipedia is first and foremost 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."  Administrator note

Openly edited

File:WikipediaMainPage.png

Main Page of the English Wikipedia on 4 March 2005.

Wikipedia's content is created by its users. Any visitor to Wikipedia can edit its articles, and many do, although in practice about half of all edits are done by just 2.5% of the users. Pages are always subject to editing, so no article is ever 'finished'. Edits made by people without a Wikipedia username make up around 18% of all edits. For editors not logged in, their IP address is used instead of a username. Wikipedia generally blocks open proxies.

In a study of Wikipedia as a community, Ciffolilli (2003) 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. Administrator note 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." Administrator note Tech author Jon Udell created a movie documenting the revisions which Wikipedia's heavy metal umlaut article went through, available here.

Authors

Multiple levels of users exist within Wikipedia. Fundamentally, every user may edit a page in any way and is on equal footing with all others. However, there are administrative positions as well. Sysops, or administrators, the lowest level, are elected by the community and expected to lock or delete pages and block users in accordance with policies or consensus. Well under one percent of registered users are administrators. There are a still smaller number of "bureaucrats", who set sysop privileges; and "stewards", who are multi-project bureaucrats. Edits may also be done by automated or semiautomated bots. Another small group of users are "developers", who have direct access to the software, and who may or may not choose to contribute to articles in addition to their technical work.

Wikipedia has been viewed as a grand social experiment. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though it is a consequence. Administrator note

Policies

Wikipedia requires that its contributors observe a "neutral point of view" and not include original research. Neutral point of view, itself "non-negotiable", Administrator note articulates the encyclopedia's goal as "representing disputes, characterizing them, rather than engaging in them." Administrator note If achieved, Wikipedia would not be written from a single "objective" point of view, but rather fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a neutral way. It states that views should be given weight equal to their standing. This policy has been criticized as having an unattainable goal, being unnecessary in cases of "pseudoscience," and representing "morally offensive" views. Administrator note Original research is also not allowed, Wikipedians arguing such material cannot be properly attributed under neutral point of view or proved to be factually accurate. Administrator note

Wikipedia's contributors additionally maintain a variety of lesser policies and guidelines. In contrast to other wikis of its time, such as Ward Cunningham's Portland Pattern Repository, Wikipedians use "talk" pages to discuss changes to articles rather than the articles themselves. Wikipedia contributors often modify, move, or delete articles which are felt to be inappropriate to an encyclopedia, such as dictionary definitions or original source texts. Administrator note Often, Wikipedia editions establish style conventions.

Disputes

Articles on Wikipedia are subject to "edit wars" as authors dispute or remove the contributions of others. Red Herring, in an October 2004 article, identified the most contentious articles on the English Wikipedia by number of edits as: George W. Bush, John Kerry, Sexual slang, Jesus, Jew, Adolf Hitler, Recent deaths and Saddam Hussein. Administrator note Wikipedians have attempted to avoid disputes through semipolicies such as "assume good faith" and "work toward agreement." In a study of cooperation within Wikipedia, Reagle argues that disputes consume significant time, cause editors to leave, cause distraction, and disrupt other topics. Administrator note

Vandalism

Wikipedia's open editing approach leaves it vulnerable to vandalism, defined as patently nonsensical or intentionally harmful edits. Popular and contentious articles appear to be vandalised most often, though any page can be affected. Vandalism generally consists of deleting all content on a page or inserting nonsensical remarks, often "obscene." It may be repaired by accessing the history of an article and restoring the last unvandalised revision. Ensuring that no edits are lost and that vandalism is easy to repair are principles of wiki software.

Vandalism's persistency has been shown to vary, though half of obvious vandalism is corrected within minutes. In a study of the english speaking Wikipedia page histories, Viegas, Wattenberg, and Dave (2004) found the mean time to correct "mass delete" and "mass delete obscene" vandalism to be 7.7 days and 1.8 days, and the median times 2.8 minutes and 1.7 minutes respectively. In contrast, the average persistency of a revision marked "all content" was found to be 22.3 days, the median time 90.4 minutes. Administrator note Researcher Martin Wattenberg was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying, "We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed."

Quality efforts

Wikipedians have created a number of voluntary committees and processes in an effort to improve article quality. Custodial tasks such as copyediting, formatting articles for use on a wiki, and merging or updating articles have various pages or categories to collaborate. Within the larger language editions, more significant work to improve an article may be proposed as community-wide collaborations through approval-voting processes. Peer review processes exist on a voluntary basis in many editions. An article felt to be of high quality, which has often entailed formal peer review, may be nominated as a "featured article" and has to undergo another review process. Successful candidates must meet specifications on neutrality, comprehensiveness, references, and version stability. Administrator note

Free content

Original text, images and sounds contributed to Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This makes it free content, allowing it to be freely used, edited, copied and redistributed subject to the terms of that license. Nearly-current copies of the database can be downloaded at any time for this purpose. Wikipedia's GFDL content has been mirrored by websites such as Answers.com and thefreedictionary.com. Material from Wikipedia has been forked by Enciclopedia Libre, after most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia were dissatisfied with Wikipedia.

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. Administrator note

Wikipedia as a whole has not been published on physical media. WikiReader projects, begun by the German Wikipedia, have been published as a limited collection of articles on a specific subject. Mandrakesoft has proposed a DVD distribution of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has incorporated material from public domain and GFDL resources. Public domain resources of the United States federal government or encyclopedias whose copyright has expired are often mined for images and text. As the Wikimedia Foundation and its servers are located in the United States, all language editions are bound, at the least, by United States copyright law.

Language editions

Wikipedia's growth has been exponential in the major language editions.

Wikipedia currently encompasses 187 language editions, not all of which are active. Administrator note Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, German, Japanese, French and Swedish. In total, Wikipedia editions have 1.3 million articles.

Although all language editions operate under the Wikimedia Foundation with the name Wikipedia, they are not bound to the content of other language editions. Translations, while they are done, represent only a small fraction of the articles in any edition. Administrator note All language editions are held to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy.

The creation of a new language edition has generally required only a number of willing contributors and developer efforts to translate interfaces and setup software. However, Wikimedians have debated the creation of language editions for lack of speakers.

See also Complete list of language Wikipedias available, Official article count of all Wikipedias.

Criticism

Main article: Criticism of Wikipedia

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 and editors of encyclopedias.

Critics argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. In an 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." Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor Ted Pappas said to the Guardian: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." Administrator note Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, Boyd argues that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes." Administrator note

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." Administrator note (It is possibly important to note that since this quote was made, the reverse is true: Chinese art is now five times the length of that on Hurricane Frances, and the entry on Tony Blair is twice as long as the article on Coronation Street.)

Criticism of a technical nature includes the argument that Wikipedia is effectively a "Google bomb" which disrupts search engine results by having an extremely large number of internal links. Wikipedia articles, or those hosted on its mirrors, will often be highly placed on search returns as a result.

German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of three encyclopedias: Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Wikipedia. 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. Administrator note In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Emigh and Herring (2004) wrote that Wikipedia "is largely indistinguishable stylistically from the expert-created Columbia Encyclopedia." Administrator note

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia

File:NupediaLogo.jpg

Wikipedia originated from Nupedia.

Wikipedia was created as an openly-editable supplement to Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project written by experts through a formal peer review process. Nupedia was founded in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales with Larry Sanger hired as editor-in-chief and the project underwritten by Wales' Bomis Internet company. Wikipedia was begun as a single English edition on 15 January, 2001, under the same management arrangement. It gained a French and German version in the same year. Wikipedia and Nupedia existed side-by-side until 2003, in which time the latter's output fell dramatically and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.

Within Nupedia and Wikipedia, Sanger had considerable influence on the direction of the project during his tenure, until his position was abolished in February 2002. Wales remains actively involved to this day, contributing both time and resources to the project, and is a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation which now legally oversees Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Board of Trustees consists of Wales, for life; two Bomis employees; and two elected community members. There is no editor-in-chief or content arbitrator, and no paid employees.

Wikipedia reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on 20 September, 2004. Administrator note The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew language Wikipedia, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan.

Software and hardware

Nine servers in a rack in Florida delivered Wikipedia to the world in July 2004.

Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki open source software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida. Increasing demand has been a recurring problem for Wikipedia's servers, with slow-downs or outages resulting. Server resources and software have been regularly increased or optimized in an attempt to improve capacity.

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 is now called MediaWiki. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used not only by all Wikimedia projects, but unaffiliated wikis as well. Brion Vibber has since taken the lead in fixing bugs and tuning the database for performance. Major work on the MediaWiki software, including a new database schema, is currently in progress. Its developers expect significant improvement in the scalability of the Wikipedia server cluster.

Server outages began to seriously diminish the productivity of Wikipedia contributors in 2003. Wikipedia was then served from a single server. During 2004, the server setup was expanded substantially 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 7 Squid cache servers.

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. The Apache servers are connected to two NFS file servers. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France.

Wikipedia's increasing popularity has caused traffic which has often outstripped the capacity of Wikimedia's server cluster. In January 2005, the Wikipedia server cluster was serving 80 million hits and 190 million database queries per day. Extensive work, such as the further expansion of the server cluster, was underway to expand capacity. Wikipedia's status may be found on an off-site status page on OpenFacts.

In February 2005, rumours emerged that Google had offered free hosting and bandwidth for Wikipedia. The deal would have "no strings attached," not requiring Google Adwords or any other form of advertising. The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed that an offer had been made, was under consideration, and was to be further discussed in March, but did not confirm any details of the proposal. Administrator note

Citations of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been increasingly cited by the media, academics, and others.

An error in a Washington Post article was attributed to Wikipedia's article on the Lisbon earthquake. Administrator note

Noncomprehensive lists are maintained by Wikipedians of Wikipedia as a source, as a press source, as a book source, as an academic source, as a court source, and as a conference paper source. Coverage of Wikipedia in the press is listed at Wikipedia's press coverage page.

Sister projects

Wikipedia has the following sister projects as part of the Wikimedia family:

• Wiktionary, a free dictionary project
• Wikibooks, a free textbook project
• Wikiquote, a free encyclopedia of quotations
• Wikisource, a multilingual repository of free source texts
• Wikimedia Commons, a shared media respository
• Wikinews, a free news source

There are many other conceptually related projects, including Wikitravel.

Awards

Wikipedia won two major awards in May of 2004. 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 "Community". 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, USA Today, The Economist, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Wired Magazine. All awards to the Wikipedia project and selected press clippings are listed on Meta.

Notes

1. Template:Anb"Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds" (Slashdot, 28 July 2004).
2. Template:AnbSee plots at "Visits per day" (Wikipedia Statistics, 1 January 2005).
3. Template:AnbJimmy Wales, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" (Wikipedia-l mailing list, 8 March 2005).
4. Template:AnbAndrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia" (First Monday, December 2003).
5. Template:AnbLarry Sanger, "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias" (Kuro5hin, 25 July 2001).
6. Template:AnbJimmy Wales, "Re: Illegitimate block" (WikiEN-l mailing list, 26 January 2005).
7. Template:AnbJimmy Wales, "Articles about ourselves" (WikiEN-l mailing list, 5 November 2003).
8. Template:Anb"Wikipedia:Neutral point of view" (Wikipedia, accessed 4 March 2005). Italics original.
9. Template:Anb"Wikipedia:Neutral point of view".
10. Template:Anb"Wikipedia:No original research" (Wikipedia, accessed 4 March 2005).
11. Template:Anb"Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not" (Wikipedia, accessed 4 March 2005).
12. Template:Anb"Wiki wars" (Red Herring, 14 October 2004).
13. Template:AnbJoseph Reagle, "A Case of Mutual Aid: Wikipedia, Politeness, and Perspective Taking".
14. Template:AnbFernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" (CHI 2004 April 24-29, 2004). Preliminary report "History Flow" available on IBM website.
15. Template:AnbAmong Wikipedia's German, English, and French language editions, collaboration pages are: Qualitätsoffensive, Collaboration of the Week, Article de la semaine; and high-quality article pages are: Exzellente Artikel, Featured articles, Articles de qualité.
16. Template:AnbFor statistics and licenses on the English edition, see "Wikipedia:Image copyright tags" (Wikipedia, accessed 9 March 2005).
17. Template:Anb"Article count (official)" (Wikipedia Statistics, 1 January 2005).
18. Template:AnbFor example, "Wikipedia:Translation into English" (Wikipedia, accessed 9 March 2005).
19. Template:Anb"Who knows?" (The Guardian, 26 October 2004).
20. Template:AnbDana Boyd, "Academia and Wikipedia" (Corante, 4 January 2005).
21. Template:Anb"Who knows?"
22. Template:AnbSee "Wikipedia Reaches One Million Articles", 20 September 2004 press release by Wikimedia.
23. Template:AnbMichael Kurzidim : Wissenswettstreit. Die kostenlose Wikipedia tritt gegen die Marktführer Encarta und Brockhaus an, in: c't 21/2004, 4 October 2004, S. 132-139.
24. Template:AnbWilliam Emigh and Susan C. Herring, "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias" (Paper presented at the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004).
25. Template:AnbNate Mook, "Google Offers to Host Wikipedia" (BetaNews, 11 February 2005).
26. Template:AnbMichael Snow, "Wikipedia accused of being source for Washington Post error" (Wikipedia Signpost, 14 February 2005).

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Introduction
• Wikipedia: Frequently Asked Questions
• Wikipedia: Press releases
• Wikipedia: Size comparisons
• Wikipedia: Statistics
• Wikipedia: Why Wikipedia is not so great
• Wikipedia: Replies to common objections
• Open Directory Project: Wikipedia
• OpenFacts: Copies of Wikipedia content
• SourceWatch: Wikipedia
• Lih, Andrew. "Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource" (Cache). 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, April 2004.
• McHenry, Robert. "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia". Tech Central Station, 15 November 2004.

External links

• wikipedia.org, multi-lingual portal
• en.wikipedia.org, English language edition
• Meta-Wikipedia, policy-related and technical discussions about Wikipedia and its sister projects
• The Wikipedia Cafeshop
• The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource by Richard Stallman (RMS)
• Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website, November 2002, by Lars Aronsson, founder of susning.nu.