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Wikipedia logo
Wikipedia logo

Wikipedia is a Web-based free content encyclopedia designed to be read and edited by anyone, with editions of varying sizes in 190 languages. 16,000 registered users collaboratively edit and maintain the English edition Wikipedia, which has allowed it in less than four years of operation to become the world's largest encyclopedia, containing 460,000 articles (growing 3000 per day) and 77 million words. In all language editions combined, Wikipedia contains over 1.3 million articles.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, getting around 80 million [1] hits per day. Wikipedia continues to receive plaudits[2] from sources including BBC News, USA Today, The Economist, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Wired Magazine, and has been the subject of a study by IBM [3].

Critics point to the potential for inaccurate information and that Wikipedia can not be as authoritative as a traditional encyclopedia with a more formal editing process. Vandalism is a recognized problem, though it is generally caught and reverted within minutes by users who monitor the recent changes.

In addition to traditional encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers, and specialist magazines, as well as coverage of current events. Wikipedia, along with several sister projects including Wiktionary and Wikibooks, runs using wiki software and is hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. For more background on collective editing and the wiki movement, see Wiki.

Editing process

The English Wikipedia's front page features both "Today's featured article" and an "In the news" column.

Editable by everyone

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 a dedicated group of just 2.5% of the users. Pages are always subject to editing, so no article is ever 'finished'. Users do not need to be logged in to make edits, and these so-called anonymous edits make up around 18% of all edits; the user's IP address is used instead of a username, so contributors seeking genuine "anonymity" - as well as other benefits - are generally advised to create an account and log in.

Vandalism

One pertinent issue on Wikipedia is "vandalism": silly or offensive edits of the site's articles. Many people do it just for the kick of editing a web page. For example, Sarah Lane, presenter of "Sarah's Blog Report", part of The Screen Savers TV program on TechTV, "vandalized" the Wikipedia page on monkeypox live on-air [4]—leading to a surge of vandalism on that page by viewers of the TV show. Lane later wrote that: "Although this excites me in its ease and simplicity, it's a little frightening. I mean, what if I had instead written, 'My boss is a big fat **** and his phone number is ****'? Sure, somebody would delete it, but this calls for some seriously dedicated moderators." [5]

"Because Wikipedia is a radically free, open project, it attracts an anarchistic element", Larry Sanger stated to Wired News. "Fortunately, most of us are willing to take a definite stand against vandalism ... and to get rid of it instantly." [6]

According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that there are frequent instances of vandalism at Wikipedia, but that these are often quickly resolved:

"Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes. 'We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed,' says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, in Cambridge, Mass." [7]

Policies

Wikipedia's participants (Wikipedians) commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies.

  • Neutral point of view (NPOV): Because there are potentially a huge variety of participants of all ideologies and nationalities, Wikipedia is committed to making its articles as unbiased as possible. There has been criticism that the shared systemic bias of participants can color the neutrality of an article. According to advocates of the NPOV policy, the aim is not to write articles from a single objective point of view, but rather, to fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a neutral way. However, establishing a consensus on what views should be thus attributed can require much heated discussion and debate, and at any rate the attribution never extends to every single statement within an article. Thus, some people have claimed that NPOV is more of an ideology than an actual policy.
  • No original research: Because there is no explicit peer review for content submitted to Wikipedia, submissions must be verifiable by readers and other contributors; unverifiable information, or facts newly discovered that have not been published elsewhere (and therefore cannot be qualified by "according to source, ..."), are not welcome.
  • Limit discussion to talk pages: Wikipedians use "talk" pages or other "out of band" methods to discuss changes to articles, rather than discussing the changes within the articles themselves. This marked a break from other wikis of the time, such as Ward Cunningham's WikiWiki.
  • Focus on encyclopedic content: There are a number of kinds of entries which are generally discouraged, because they do not, strictly speaking, constitute encyclopedia articles. For example, Wikipedia entries are not dictionary definitions, and the wholesale addition of source material such as the text of laws and speeches is generally frowned upon. However, some of Wikipedia's sister projects, such as Wiktionary and Wikisource, are designed to be repositories for many alternative forms of reference material that do not fit well into Wikipedia.

There are a variety of sometimes contradictory rules, guidelines, policies, and common practices that have been proposed and which have varying amounts of support within the Wikipedia community. When these proposed rules are violated, the community decides on a case-by-case basis whether they should be more strictly enforced or not.

There are also a number of important style conventions, particularly with respect to article naming; for example, when several names exist, the most common one in the respective Wikipedia language is preferred.

Neutral point of view

Wikipedia is grounded in the idea that all of its articles need to be written from a neutral point of view. The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, total agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. But Wikipedia seeks a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points. According to Jimbo Wales:

"Perhaps the easiest way to make your writing more encyclopedic, is to write about what people believe, rather than what is so. If this strikes you as somehow subjectivist or collectivist or imperialist, then ask me about it, because I think that you are just mistaken. What people believe is a matter of their perception of fact, and we can present that quite easily from the neutral point of view."

The neutral point of view policy states that one should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly. However, like all collaborative projects, Wikipedia has a built-in bias derived from the demographic make-up of its participants. In Wikipedia's case, this manifests itself in a tendency for contributors to create articles that relate to the interests of computer-literate American and British editors. An example of this effect can be seen by comparing the article on Coronation Street, a British soap opera — which at the start of 2005 totalled 6,933 words, not including the other 14 articles (4,746 words) devoted to its actors and characters — to the article on the Rwandan Genocide — 2,840 words on how 800,000 people died in 100 days. There are similarly long articles on U.S. television programs, actors, characters, pop groups, albums, and video games.

This bias has few defenders on Wikipedia. The presence of articles written from an exclusively U.S. or British point of view is largely a reflection of the fact that there are many Americans and British editors working on Wikipedia. Greater diversity can be achieved by active collaboration from people outside these areas, of whom there are many.

No original research

Another grounding principle of Wikipedia is that it is not a place to contribute or look for research that has not yet been published elsewhere. This helps avoid arguments about new untested theories and claims, and limits the contribution of observations and claims which are unverifiable by others.

Original images and media are welcome if the creator is willing to license them under the terms of the GFDL, other compatible free or "copyleft" licenses, or release them into the public domain.

Content

Free content license

All original material contributed to Wikipedia is deemed to be free content under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning that it may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license. Nearly-current copies of the database can be downloaded at any time for this purpose. A number of sites, such as Wikinfo, Intelipedia, wordiq, thefreedictionary.com, 4reference and nationmaster have used this to mirror or fork Wikipedia's content.

Language editions

As of January 15, 2005, Wikipedia has over 1.3 million articles spread over 200 language editions. The major language editions are:

Wikipedia's growth has been exponential in the major language editions.
Language Articles
English 450,201
German 188,170
Japanese 94,593
French 74,595
Swedish 57,650
Polish 51,960
Dutch 48,298
Language Articles
Spanish 39,062
Italian 32,943
Portuguese 29,126
Danish 21,936
Esperanto 19,768
Chinese 18,256
Norwegian 15,728
Language Articles
Finnish 13,993
Hebrew 13,771
Bulgarian 12,759
Catalan 11,862
Ukranian 10,955
Romanian 10,910
Russian 10,658


See [8] for the complete list.

See [9] for the complete table of the size of each edition.

Criticism

Main article: Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia's utility as a reference work has been questioned. The lack of authority and accountability are considered disqualifying factors by some. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea", but that he would not use it in practice 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." People supporting the idea of Wikipedia counter these arguments by saying that Wikipedia is a more independent source than most traditional encyclopedias and that the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately.

Wikipedia's systemic bias of covering some topics in much greater depth than others is also considered significant, something that even the site's proponents admit. In an interview with The Guardian, the executive team of Encyclopædia Britannica noted 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." In reply, a user on the Wikipedia discussion board noted that the Wikipedia entry on Tony Blair still was several times longer than the corresponding entry in Encyclopædia Britannica. Chinese art was soon thereafter chosen as a "collaboration of the week" (a regular weekly feature on Wikipedia) and the article on Chinese art became more than four times the length of the Hurricane Francis article... an "on-the-fly" edit which would not be possible in a static edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

It is also noted that Wikipedia tends to cover topics that might not be included at all in a print encyclopedia such as topics dealing with the occult, the Western mystery tradition, sexuality, random esoterica, obscure corners of philosophy, avant-garde topics, and other offbeat and extraordinarily arcane areas of human knowledge.

A common Wikipedia maxim is "Out of mediocrity, excellence." The site founder admits that the variation in quality between different articles and topics is significant, but considers the average quality "pretty good", and getting better by the day. The "competing" Encyclopædia Britannica claims it does not feel threatened. "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," said the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, to The Guardian. However Wikipedia articles have been referenced in enhanced perspectives provided on-line in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious (and unmercifully selective) scientific publications in the world. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", by Hartmut Linden, in the August 2, 2002 issue. Since then, dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided hyperlinks to Wikipedia. A search for "Wikipedia" in Science's web site [10] turns up 44 instances as of December 17, 2004, with the perspective "Whence Molecular Electronics?", by Amar H. Flood, J. Fraser Stoddart, David W. Steuerman, and James R. Heath, as the latest in that date range.

Finally, by containing a large number of internally linked pages, it receives high rankings from Google. This can also result in high rankings for the often identical Wikipedia mirrors. This makes it more likely that web searches will return identical results.

(See also the section of external links to reviews, endorsements, criticisms, and discussion of Wikipedia, below.)

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia began as an English language project on January 15, 2001, and soon gained its first other language, French, on March 23, 2001. There has since been a great deal of effort devoted to making it multilingual, and it currently contains over 400,000 articles in English and over 700,000 in other languages (as of November 2004 [11]).

Wikipedia was created as an editor-free offshoot of Nupedia, a free encyclopedia project founded by Jimmy Wales. Larry Sanger was employed by Wales to work on Nupedia as the editor-in-chief and later worked on Wikipedia, and was closely involved in setting up the project and establishing the policy framework. He had considerable influence on the direction of the project during his tenure, until he left the project 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 oversees the project. There is no editor-in-chief, as such, and no paid employees. Instead, the project relies on the contributions of many thousands of volunteers (referred to as Wikipedians).

On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia reached one million articles [12] in 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew language Wikipedia, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan [13].

For a more detailed history of the project, see History of Wikipedia.

Antecedents

Known applications of the idea of collecting all of the world's knowledge under a single roof go back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon. The modern notion of the general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists.

The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' short story World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960).

With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. Free software exponent Richard Stallman articulated the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. He described Wikipedia's formation as "exciting news", and his Free Software Foundation encourages people "to visit and contribute to the site". One never-realized predecessor was the Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia.[14]

Software and hardware

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

The software that originally ran Wikipedia was UseModWiki, written by Clifford Adams ("Phase I"). At first it required CamelCase for links; soon it was also possible to use the current linking method that uses double brackets. In January 2002, Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine, which used an underlying MySQL database, added many features (and abolished the behaviour of CamelCase words automatically becoming links), and was specifically written for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske ("Phase II"). After a while, the site started to slow down to such an extent that editing became almost impossible. Several rounds of modifications to the software provided only temporary relief. Then Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the software from scratch. The new version, a major improvement, has been running since July 2002. This "Phase III" software is now called MediaWiki, and is used by many other wiki projects. Brion Vibber has since taken the lead in fixing bugs and tuning the database for performance.

In late 2003, server outages began to seriously diminish the productivity of Wikipedia contributors. Many reported difficulty editing articles as a result of time-outs and severe slowness. This was due to congestion on the single server that was running all the Wikipedias at the time. Over 2004, the server setup was expanded substantially into an n-tier distributed architecture.

As of January 2005, the project runs on 39 dedicated servers, located in Florida. This new configuration includes a single master database server running MySQL and 21 web servers running the Apache software. There are also a number of slave database servers, which are synchronized with the master server, and serve all non-critical database queries and act as backups for the master server.

User requests are passed to a front end layer of six Squid 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 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 (one primary and one backup — the primary NFS server is currently also the email server).

In addition, the first steps have been taken towards building a global network of caching servers, with the addition of three extra Squid servers located in France which serve Wikipedia content to some European users.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia's increasing popularity has led to an increase in traffic which has outstripped the current capacity of the server cluster. As of January 2005, the Wikipedia server cluster was serving 80 million hits and 190 million database queries per day, and extensive active work, including the further expansion of the server cluster, is underway to expand system capacity to keep up with demand. [15]

In the longer term, major work on the MediaWiki software, including a new database schema, is currently in progress; this new version, to be called MediaWiki 1.5, is expected to significantly improve the scalability of the Wikipedia server cluster.

Sister projects

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

There are many other conceptually related projects, including Wikitravel.

In February 2002, most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia did not agree with the march of the project and broke away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre.

Awards and media coverage

Wikipedia continues to receive plaudits[16] from sources including BBC News, USA Today, The Economist, NewsWeek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Wired Magazine, and has been the subject of a study by IBM[17].

In May 2004, Wikipedia won two major awards. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a €10,000 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" [18]. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby.

In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia won an award from the country's major 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.

Mainstream media organisations mention Wikipedia from time to time.

In Internet applications

Coeus is an Internet Explorer add-on which adds built-in Wikipedia searching. Mozilla Firefox's built-in field for querying search engines includes Wikipedia. Trillian, an instant messaging client, underlines phrases which match the title of a Wikipedia article, and display this entry on request.

External links

Look up wikipedia in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Related sites

Essays

Peer-reviewed articles

Reviews, endorsements, criticisms, and discussion

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