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| slogan = The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
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'''Wikipedia''' ({{IPAEng|ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə}},<br>{{IPA|/ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/}}, {{IPA|/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/}}, or {{IPA|/ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/}}) ({{audio|en-us-Wikipedia.ogg|Audio (U.S.)}}) is a [[Free Content|free]],<ref>Some language versions such as English one contains non-free images.</ref> [[multilingualism|multilingual]], [[open content]] [[encyclopedia]] project operated by the [[non-profit organization|non-profit]] [[Wikimedia Foundation]]. Its name is a [[blend]] of the words ''[[wiki]]'' (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and ''[[encyclopedia]]''. Launched in [[January]] [[2001]] by [[Jimmy Wales]] and [[Larry Sanger]],<ref name="Miliard">{{cite news|url=http://www.slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=article.details&id=37BD3969-14D1-13A2-9F5EEAF5A79E0898|title=Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Wikipedia?|accessdate=2008-02-21|date=2008-03-01 |publisher=[[Salt Lake City Weekly]]|first=Mike|last=Miliard}}</ref> it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the [[Internet]].<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1595184,00.html|title=Look Who's Using Wikipedia|first=Bill|last=Tancer|date=2007-05-01|publisher=''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]''|accessdate=2007-12-01|quote=The sheer volume of content [...] is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category}} ([http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2007/03/wikipedia_search_and_school_ho.html the author's blog post on the article])</ref><ref name="go-to site">{{cite news |url=http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN0819429120070708 |title=Wikipedia remains go-to site for online news |date=2007-07-08 |accessdate=2007-12-16 |first=Alex |last=Woodson |publisher=''[[Reuters]]'' |quote=Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.}}</ref>
'''Wikipedia''' ({{IPAEng|ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə}},<br>{{IPA|/ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/}}, {{IPA|/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/}}, or {{IPA|/ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/}}) ({{audio|en-us-Wikipedia.ogg|Audio (U.S.)}}) is a [[Free Content|free]],<ref>Some language versions such as English one contains non-free images.</ref> [[multilingualism|multilingual]], [[open content]] [[encyclopedia]] project operated by the [[non-profit organization|non-profit]] [[Wikimedia Foundation]]. Its name is a [[blend]] of the words ''[[wiki]]'' (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and ''[[encyclopedia]]''. Launched in [[January]] [[2001]] by [[Brand Melillo]] and [[his mangania]],<ref name="Miliard">{{cite news|url=http://www.slweekly.com/index.cfm?do=article.details&id=37BD3969-14D1-13A2-9F5EEAF5A79E0898|title=Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Wikipedia?|accessdate=2008-02-21|date=2008-03-01 |publisher=[[Salt Lake City Weekly]]|first=Mike|last=Miliard}}</ref> it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the [[Internet]].<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1595184,00.html|title=Look Who's Using Wikipedia|first=Bill|last=Tancer|date=2007-05-01|publisher=''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]''|accessdate=2007-12-01|quote=The sheer volume of content [...] is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category}} ([http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2007/03/wikipedia_search_and_school_ho.html the author's blog post on the article])</ref><ref name="go-to site">{{cite news |url=http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN0819429120070708 |title=Wikipedia remains go-to site for online news |date=2007-07-08 |accessdate=2007-12-16 |first=Alex |last=Woodson |publisher=''[[Reuters]]'' |quote=Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.}}</ref>


As of December 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The [[English Wikipedia]] edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on [[September 9]], [[2007]], <!-- Do not use {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}, breaks on mirrors --> and as of [[March 12]], [[2008]] it had over 2,276,000 articles consisting of over 990,000,000 words.<ref name="ListOfWikipedias">{{cite web | url = http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias | title = List of Wikipedias | publisher = [[Wikipedia:Meta|Meta-Wiki]] | '''accessdate = 2007-07-12 | date = [[2007-07-12]]}}</ref> Wikipedia's articles have been written [[collaboration|collaboratively]] by [[volunteer]]s around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception,<ref name="AlexaStats">{{cite web | url = http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t | title = Five-year traffic statistics for wikipedia.org | publisher = [[Alexa Internet]] | accessdate = 2007-01-29 }}</ref> it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.<ref name=AlexaTop500 />
As of December 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The [[English Wikipedia]] edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on [[September 9]], [[2007]], <!-- Do not use {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}, breaks on mirrors --> and as of [[March 12]], [[2008]] it had over 2,276,000 articles consisting of over 990,000,000 words.<ref name="ListOfWikipedias">{{cite web | url = http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias | title = List of Wikipedias | publisher = [[Wikipedia:Meta|Meta-Wiki]] | '''accessdate = 2007-07-12 | date = [[2007-07-12]]}}</ref> Wikipedia's articles have been written [[collaboration|collaboratively]] by [[volunteer]]s around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception,<ref name="AlexaStats">{{cite web | url = http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t | title = Five-year traffic statistics for wikipedia.org | publisher = [[Alexa Internet]] | accessdate = 2007-01-29 }}</ref> it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.<ref name=AlexaTop500 />

Revision as of 21:42, 17 March 2008

This article is about the free encyclopedia. For the different similar terms related to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia (terminology).
For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia's multilingual portal shows the project's different language editions.
Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
Available in236 active editions (253 in total)[1]
HeadquartersMiami, Florida
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byJimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2]
URLhttp://www.wikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional

Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/,
/ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/, or /ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/) (Audio (U.S.)ⓘ) is a free,[4] multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a blend of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Brand Melillo and his mangania,[5] it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.[6][7]

As of December 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of March 12, 2008 it had over 2,276,000 articles consisting of over 990,000,000 words.[1] Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception,[3] it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[8]

Critics have questioned Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, citing its open nature.[9] The criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism, such as the insertion of profanities or random letters into articles, and the addition of spurious or unverified information;[10] uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies;[11] and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.[13][14]

In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated.[15][16] When Time Magazine recognized "You" as their Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.[17]

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[18]

Jimmy Wales
Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia.[2][19] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[20] Sanger is usually credited with the counter-intuitive strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[21] On January 10 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[22] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[23] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[24] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[25] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[20]

Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article).

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the closing stages 2004.[26] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. As of December 2007, English Wikipedia had over 2 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for nearly 600 years.[27]

Citing fears 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 its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons. Wikinfo does not require neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Amapedia and Google's Knol — have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research and commercial advertising.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20 2003.[28] It applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia® on September 17 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004, and in the European Union on January 20 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet". There are plans to license the usage of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.[29] In October 2007 the foundation announced that it plans to move its headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco, California, in February 2008.[30]

The Wikimedia Foundation's 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.[31] The Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and holds regular fundraisers;[32] the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over $1 million.[33]

Content and internal structure

Almost every article in Wikipedia may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. The "History" page attached to each article contains every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[34][35] All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. Wikipedia has been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are currently incompatible.[36] Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while free media files are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Wikipedia is submitted to formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. To ensure its quality, the project relies on its community members, called Wikipedians,[37] to remove vandalism or identify problems such as violation of neutrality[38] and factual errors in its articles.[39] Since June 2006, vandalism-repair bots have also been in use.[14]

Articles in Wikipedia are subject to the law in Florida, United States and several internal policies and guidelines;[40] they need to be on "notable" [41] topics, contain "no original research"[42] and only "verifiable"[43] facts and must be written from a "neutral point of view."[44] Articles that fail to meet those guidelines and policies are modified or deleted. Deletionism and inclusionism are two editor philosophies on the extent of these modifications and deletions.[45][46]

The community has a power structure.[47][48] While they are welcomed by the community,[49] authors new to Wikipedia are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Wikipedia.[34] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator"[50] and goes up with "steward" and "bureaucrat".[51] Administrators, the largest group of privileged users (1,503 Wikipedians for the English edition on February 23, 2008), have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and deter users from editing. Much of the coordination of the editing of Wikipedia takes place on the "Talk" pages associated with each individual article.[52]

As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia" has become one of questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.[53] Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes up a bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". This was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portion of their content contributed by a user with low edit count.[54]

Software and hardware

The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.

Overview of system architecture, May 2006. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.

Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of GNU/Linux servers, 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul.[55] Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier 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 HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

Wikipedia receives between 20,000 and 45,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.[56] Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.

Language editions

See also: List of Wikipedias
Contributors for English Wikipedia by country as of September 2006[57]

There are currently 253 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, 16 have over 100,000 articles and 145 have over 1,000 articles.[1] According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 55% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Spanish: 17%, Japanese 4%, German: 4%, Polish: 3%, French: 3%, Portuguese: 2%).[3] As of December 2007, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish and Japanese Wikipedias.[58]

Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour)[59] or points of view.[60] Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.[61][62][63]

Percentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest language editions (blue). As of November 2007, less than 25% of Wikipedia articles are in English.

Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia 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".[64] Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia and maintain a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions,[65] in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed.[66] Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. Images and other non-verbal media are shared among the various language editions through the Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia foundation.

Several language versions have published a selection of Wikipedia articles on a DVD version. An English version[67] developed by Linterweb contains "1964 + articles".[68][69] The Polish version contains nearly 240000 articles.[70] There are also a few German versions.[71]

Reliability and bias

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia

Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site.[72] Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources.

Wikipedia tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view.[73] The English-language Wikipedia has introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[74] other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1500 articles have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.[75]

In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. student 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.[76]

Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. But he also cautions that errors are frequently found in Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[77]

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[78] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[79] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are “the intel­lectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything.” He also said that “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet” was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on the academics who cite Wikipedia that: “You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she said. “The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way.”[79]

Speaking at a conference in Pennsylvania, Wales said he receives about ten e-mails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia. According to the Sunday Times of London, Wales told the students they got what they deserved. "For God's sake, you’re in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," he said.[80]

Criticism

Main article: Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[9] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[81] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.[12] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[11] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[82] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[83] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[84] Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[85] Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."[86]

In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing – but the community has been unable to form a consensus in favor of such changes, partly because they would require a major software overhaul.[87][88] However a similar system is being tested on the German Wikipedia, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version at some future time.[89] Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz is now being tested that will assign "trust ratings" to individual Wikipedia contributors, with the intention that eventually only edits made by those who have established themselves as "trusted editors" will be made immediately visible.[90]

John Seigenthaler Sr. has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[91]

Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[92] and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[91] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[93][34] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[10] has been noted,[94] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[95] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[96]

Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[97] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[98] and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[99] While praising many aspects of Wikipedia, historian Roy Rosenzweig notes: "Overall, writing is the Achilles’ heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."[100]

In August 2007, a website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia by editors who are not logged in, which reveals that many of these edits come from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and were attempts to remove criticism.[101]

Wales called WikiScanner "a very clever idea," and said that he was considering some changes to Wikipedia to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them. "When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’" he said. "That might make them stop and think."[101]

Cultural significance

See also: Wikipedia:Wikipedia in the media
An xkcd strip entitled "Wikipedian Protester."

In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,[102] Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.[103] According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites world-wide.[8][104] Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit website. The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results; about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google,[105] a good portion of which is related to academic research.[106] In April 2007 the Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia.[107] In October 2006 the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran ads.[108]

File:Wikipedia HE-MAN.jpg
A parody comic of Skeletor vandalizing the article He-Man.

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[109][110] The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act.[111] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization[112] — though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[113]

Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[114] sometimes without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[115][116][117] In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30 minute documentary on BBC Radio 4[118] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th century terms as Hoovering or Coke. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".[96] Websites such as Uncyclopedia have also been set up parodying Wikipedia; its Main Page claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[119] parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its Main Page.

Wikipedia has also created an impact upon forms of media. Some media sources satirize Wikipedia's susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, such as a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006 with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence",[120] while others may draw upon Wikipedia's statement that anyone can edit, such as "The Negotiation", an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott said that "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information", and a select few parody Wikipedia's policies, such as the xkcd strip named "Wikipedian Protester", that also included the joke "Semi-protect the Constitution!"

The first documentary film about Wikipedia, entitled Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, is scheduled for 2008 release. Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Wikipedia and feature interviews with Wikipedia editors around the world.[121][122]

On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Wikipedia, "the seventh most consulted website" to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.[123]

On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia has become a focal point in the 2008 election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day."[124] An October 2007 Reuters article, entitled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.[125]

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[126] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) 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.[127] 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.

In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.[128] On January 26 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[129] Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006.[130] In 2006 and 2007, the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised[131] by the Russian government agency FAPMC.

In November 2006, Turkish Wikipedia was nominated under the Science category for the Altın Örümcek Web Ödülleri (Golden Spider Web Awards), which are commonly known as the "Web Oscars" for Turkey. In January 2007, Turkish Wikipedia was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. The award was given in a ceremony on January 25 2007 at Istanbul Technical University.

Wikia and Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation shares hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia. The Wikimedia Foundation received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006."[132]

Related projects

A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been emulated on a website.[133] One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users.

Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki",[134] created in October 2002,[135] detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[136] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free books. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects.[137]

A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.[18]

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, h2g2 and Everything2.

Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[138] said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields:[139] "We welcome a diversity of efforts. If Larry's project is able to produce good work, we will benefit from it by copying it back into Wikipedia."[140]

See also

Meta has related information at: List of Wikipedias

Further reading

Press coverage

  • Dee, Jonathan (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
  • Giles, Jim (2007-09-20). "Wikipedia 2.0 - now with added trust". New Scientist. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
  • "Wikipedia Rules". The Phoenix. 2007-12-02. Retrieved 2008-02-22. {{cite news}}: |first= missing |last= (help)
  • Taylor, Chris (2005-05-29). "It's a Wiki, Wiki World". Time. Retrieved 2008-02-22.

Academic studies

References

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  131. ^ Template:Ru iconMajor award of Russian Internet became a state one — Lenta.Ru, August 29 2005
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  139. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (September 18, 2006). "Wikipedia founder forks Wikipedia, More experts, less fiddling?". The Register. Retrieved 2007-06-27. Larry Sanger describes the Citizendium project as a "progressive or gradual fork", with the major difference that experts have the final say over edits. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) — Andrew Orlowski.
  140. ^ Lyman, Jay (September 20, 2006). "Wikipedia Co-Founder Planning New Expert-Authored Site". LinuxInsider. Retrieved 2007-06-27.

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