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Wikipedia



 
 
Wikipedia (pronunciation
Wikipedia (terminology)

The name Wikipedia is one of several different related terms based on the words wiki and encyclopedia. These terms may be easily confused due to their similarity, although each of them refer to a specific project, product or entities....
 ) is a free
Free content

Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, Work of art, or other creative Content having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, and produce modified versions of and works derived from the content....
, multilingual
Multilingualism

The term multilingual can refer to an individual speaker who uses two or more languages, a community of speakers in which two or more languages are used, or speakers of different languages....
 encyclopedia
Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
 project supported by the non-profit
Non-profit organization

A nonprofit organization is any organization that does not aim to make a profit, and which is not a public body....
 Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation

File:Edit 01-12-09 small.oggThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based....
. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki
Wiki

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content , using a simplified markup language....
 (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'fast') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.77 million in English) have been written collaboratively
Collaboration

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals ? for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature?by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus....
 by volunteer
Volunteer

A volunteer is someone who works Community service or for the benefit of environment primarily because they choose to do so. The word comes from France, it can also be translated as "will" ....
s around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website.






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Quotations


Wikipedia's promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge - both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. This is a radically popular idea.

The Economist, 20 April 2006

Shoppin' online for deals on some writable media I edit Wikipedia.






Encyclopedia


Wikipedia (pronunciation
Wikipedia (terminology)

The name Wikipedia is one of several different related terms based on the words wiki and encyclopedia. These terms may be easily confused due to their similarity, although each of them refer to a specific project, product or entities....
 ) is a free
Free content

Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, Work of art, or other creative Content having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, and produce modified versions of and works derived from the content....
, multilingual
Multilingualism

The term multilingual can refer to an individual speaker who uses two or more languages, a community of speakers in which two or more languages are used, or speakers of different languages....
 encyclopedia
Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
 project supported by the non-profit
Non-profit organization

A nonprofit organization is any organization that does not aim to make a profit, and which is not a public body....
 Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation

File:Edit 01-12-09 small.oggThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based....
. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki
Wiki

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content , using a simplified markup language....
 (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'fast') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.77 million in English) have been written collaboratively
Collaboration

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals ? for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature?by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus....
 by volunteer
Volunteer

A volunteer is someone who works Community service or for the benefit of environment primarily because they choose to do so. The word comes from France, it can also be translated as "will" ....
s around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an United States Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia launched in 2001....
 and Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an United States philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the creator of the Encyclopedia#Free encyclopedia Citizendium....
, it is currently the most popular
Popularity

Popularity is the quality of being well-liked or mainstream. Cult of personality are an important part of many people's personal value systems, and forms a vital component of success in people-oriented fields such as politics....
 general reference work
Reference work

A reference work is a compendium of information, usually of a specific type, compiled in a book for ease of reference. That is, the information is intended to be quickly found when needed....
 on the Internet
Internet

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers, enabling users to share information along multiple channels. Typically, a computer that connects to the Internet can access information from a vast array of available server and other computers by moving information from them to the computer's local memory....
.

Critics of Wikipedia
Criticism of Wikipedia

The major points of criticism of Wikipedia are the claims that the principle of being open for editing by everyone makes Wikipedia unauthoritative and unreliable , that it exhibits systemic bias, and that its group dynamics hinder its goals....
 target its systemic bias
Systemic bias

Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates....
 and inconsistencies and its policy of favoring consensus
Consensus

Consensus has two common meanings. One is a general Wiktionary:agreement among the members of a given group or community, each of which exercises some discretion in decision making and follow-up action....
 over credential
Credential

A credential is an attestation of qualification, competence, or authority issued to an individual by a third party with a relevant de jure or de facto authority or assumed competence to do so....
s in its editorial process. Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy
Reliability of Wikipedia

The reliability of Wikipedia, compared to both other encyclopedias and more specialized sources, is often assessed in several ways, including Statistics, by comparative review, by analysis of the historical patterns, and by strengths and weaknesses inherent in the Wikipedia process....
 are also an issue. Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism
Vandalism

Vandalism is the behaviour attributed to the Vandals, by the Ancient Romes, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything Beauty or venerable....
 and the addition of spurious or unverified information, though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.

Jonathan Dee, of The New York Times
The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, "The Gray Lady"?named for its staid appearance and style?is regarded as a national newspaper of record....
, and Andrew Lih, in the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, have cited the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently-updated news resource.

When Time
Time (magazine)

Time is a weekly United States newsmagazine, similar to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. A European edition is published from London....
 magazine recognized You
You (Time Person of the Year)

In 2006 Time magazine chose the millions of anonymous contributors of user-generated content to Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, the Linux Operating System, and other providers, as Person of the Year, personified simply as You....
 as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of Web 2.0
Web 2.0

The term "Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and web design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web....
 services, along with YouTube
YouTube

YouTube is a Video hosting service website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005....
 and MySpace
MySpace

MySpace is a social network service website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally....
.

Nature of Wikipedia


Editing model

Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclop?dia Britannica is a general English language encyclopedia published by Encyclop?dia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company....
, no article in Wikipedia undergoes formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority. Except for a few vandalism-prone pages that can be edited only by established users, or in extreme cases only by administrators, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in English edition). Consequently, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content. Being a general reference work, Wikipedia also contains materials that some people, including Wikipedia editors, may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions
Depictions of Muhammad

The permissibility of depictions of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, has long been a concern in Islam's history. Oral and written descriptions are readily accepted by all traditions of Islam, but there is disagreement about visual depictions....
 in its English edition
English Wikipedia

name = File:Wikipedia's W.svg The English Wikipedia| logo = File:Wikipedia-logo-en.png| screenshot = File:Wikipedia screenshot.png| collapsible = yes...
, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the List of countries by population in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately a fifth of the world's population....
 to block
Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China

On several occasions, the government and Internet service providers of the People's Republic of China have blocked access to Wikipedia in mainland China due to strict censorship laws enacted by the PRC....
 access to parts of the site. (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia
Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia

On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation , a British watchdog group, added the Uniform Resource Locator of the English Wikipedia of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia's article Virgin Killer to a Blacklist , as it was deemed to contain "potentially illegal" content as defined by the Protection of Children Act 1978....
)

Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law
Copyright

Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain....
) in Florida
Florida

Florida is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States of the United States, bordering Alabama to the northwest and Georgia to the northeast....
, where Wikipedia servers are hosted, and several editorial policies and guidelines that are intended to reinforce the notion that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and thus is worthy of inclusion. A topic is deemed encyclopedic if it is "notable" in the Wikipedia jargon; i.e., if it has received significant coverage in secondary reliable sources (i.e., mainstream media or major academic journals) that are independent of the subject of the topic. Second, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized. In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to reliable sources. Within the Wikipedia community, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers are left themselves to check the truthfulness of what appears in the articles and to make their own interpretations. Finally, Wikipedia does not take a side. All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article. Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. (See also deletionism and inclusionism
Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia

Deletionism and inclusionism are opposing philosophies held by editors of the Internet encyclopedia project Wikipedia, regarding the criteria for including or deleting content....
)

s keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.]] Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards. This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors. Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called bots
Internet bot

Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet....
 have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made, to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, at any point, a reader of an article cannot be certain, without consulting its "history" page, whether or not the article she is reading has been vandalized. Critics argue that non-expert editing undermines quality. Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Historian Roy Rosenzweig
Roy Rosenzweig

Roy Alan Rosenzweig was an United States historian at George Mason University in Virginia. He was the founder and director of the Center for History and New Media from 1994 until his death in October 2007 from lung cancer, aged 57....
 noted: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel
Achilles' heel

An Achilles? heel is a fatal weakness in spite of overall strength, actually or potentially leading to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, metaphorical references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to their downfall are common....
 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." All of these led to the question of the reliability of Wikipedia as a source of accurate information.

In 2008 two researchers theorized that the growth of Wikipedia is sustainable.

Reliability and bias


Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias
Systemic bias

Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates....
 and inconsistency; critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. Editors of traditional reference work
Reference work

A reference work is a compendium of information, usually of a specific type, compiled in a book for ease of reference. That is, the information is intended to be quickly found when needed....
s such as the Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclop?dia Britannica is a general English language encyclopedia published by Encyclop?dia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company....
 have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. Many university
University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education....
 lecturer
Lecturer

Lecturer is a term of academic rank. In the United Kingdom lecturer is the name given to university teachers in their first permanent university position....
s discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work
Academia

Academia, Academe, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research....
, preferring primary source
Primary source

Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines. In historiography, a primary source is a document, recording or other source of information that was created at the time being studied, by an authoritative source, usually one with direct personal knowledge of the events being described....
s; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Co-founder Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an United States Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia launched in 2001....
 stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."]] Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability
Accountability

Accountability is a concept in ethics with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as Social responsibility, answerability, enforcement, blameworthiness, liability and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving....
 that results from users' anonymity, the insertion of spurious information, vandalism
Vandalism

Vandalism is the behaviour attributed to the Vandals, by the Ancient Romes, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything Beauty or venerable....
, and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months. John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today
USA Today

'USA TODAY' is a national United States daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Allen Neuharth. The paper has the widest newspaper circulation of any newspaper in the United States , and among English-language broadsheets, it comes second worldwide, behind only the 2.6 million daily paid copies of The Times of...
 and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University is a private university research university in Nashville, Tennessee, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for ship transport and rail transport magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial United States dollar1 million endowment despite having never been to the Southern...
, called Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and asked him, "...Do you ...have any way to know who wrote that?" "No, we don't", said Jimmy. Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for Internet trolls
Troll (Internet)

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an Internet forum or chat room, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion....
, advertisers
Spam (electronic)

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: Messaging spam, Newsgroup spam, spamdexing, spam in blogs, wiki spam, Classified advertising spam, mobile phone spam, Forum...
, and those with an agenda to push. The addition of political spin
Spin (public relations)

In public relations, spin is providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favor or against a certain organization or public figure....
 to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives
United States House of Representatives

The United States House of Representatives, commonly referred to as "the House", is one of the bicameralism of the United States Congress; the other is the United States Senate....
 and special interest groups has been noted, and organizations such as Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
 have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles. These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert

Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an United States comedian, Satire, actor and writer, known for his ironic style , and for his deadpan comedic delivery....
 in The Colbert Report
The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report is a Peabody Award- and Emmy Award-winning American news satire television program that airs from 11:30 p.m. to 12:00 midnight Eastern Time Zone each Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central in the United States and on both The Comedy Network and CTV Television Network in Canada....
.

Economist Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen occupies the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics as a professor at George Mason University and is co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution ....
 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. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson

The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates....
 newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University
Harvard University

Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher learning in the United States....
 include Wikipedia in their syllabus
Syllabus

A syllabus is an outline and summary of topics to be covered in a education. It is often either set out by an exam board, or prepared by the professor who teaches the course, and is usually given to each student during the first class session....
, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association
American Library Association

The American Library Association is a group based in the United States that promotes library and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 65,000 members....
 Michael Gorman
Michael Gorman (librarian)

Michael Gorman is a British librarian. He grew up in London, England and gained an interest in Library in part through his experiences at the Hendon library run by Eileen Colwell....
 condemned Wikipedia, along with Google
Google

Google Inc. is an United States public company, earning revenue from AdWords related to its Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Apps, Orkut, and YouTube services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the Google Search Appliance....
, stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian
Dietitian

A dietitian is an expert in food and nutrition.Dietitians help promote good health through proper eating. They supervise the preparation and foodservice, develop modified diet s, participate in research, and educate individuals and groups on good nutritional habits....
 who recommends a steady diet of Big Mac
Big Mac

The Big Mac is a hamburger sold by the international fast-food chain store McDonald's. It is one of the company's signature products, along with the Quarter Pounder....
s 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
Oxford Internet Institute

The Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in Balliol College, Oxford....
) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. 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."

There have been efforts within the Wikipedia community to improve the reliability of Wikipedia. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged; other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 2000 articles in English 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. 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. 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. Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public university, residential college university; one of ten campuses in the University of California....
 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.

Wikipedia community

, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.]] The community has a power structure. Wikipedia's community has also been described as "cult
Cult

This article does not discuss "cult" in the original sense of "veneration" or "religious practice"; for that usage see Cult . See Cult for more meanings of the term "cult"....
-like," although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator
SysOp

Sysop is short for "System operator". It is a commonly used term for an administrator of a multi-user website, such as a bulletin board system or special-interest area of an online service....
", a group of privileged users ( for the English edition on February 21, 2009), who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making and are prohibited from using their powers to settle content disputes. The roles of administrators, often described as "janitorial", are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors in order to minimize disruption, as well as banning users from making disruptive edits such as vandalism.

As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg
Digg

digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories....
. Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz is a writer, web developer, and entrepreneur. At age 14, he was a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification. Since then he has become a member of the World Wide Web Consortium?s Resource Description Framework Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and has been involved in many other proj...
, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private university, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, New Hampshire. Incorporated as "Trustees of 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." Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. The project's preference for consensus
Consensus

Consensus has two common meanings. One is a general Wiktionary:agreement among the members of a given group or community, each of which exercises some discretion in decision making and follow-up action....
 over credential
Credential

A credential is an attestation of qualification, competence, or authority issued to an individual by a third party with a relevant de jure or de facto authority or assumed competence to do so....
s has been labeled "anti-elitism
Elitism

Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite—a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes—are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most...
".

In August 2007, a website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith
Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith , also known as Romanpoet, is an United States Hacker , known for his involvement with a 2003 lawsuit with the Blackboard Inc....
 named WikiScanner
WikiScanner

WikiScanner is a tool created by Virgil Griffith and released on August 14, 2007, which consists of a publicly searchable database that links millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to the organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses....
 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 are attempts to remove criticism.

In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph.D. or PhD for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", is an postgraduate academic degree awarded by University....
 student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction cost
Transaction cost

In economics and related disciplines, a transaction cost is a cost incurred in making an economic exchange. For example, most people, when buying or selling a stock, must pay a commission to their stock broker; that commission is a transaction cost of doing the stock deal....
s of participating in wiki
Wiki

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content , using a simplified markup language....
 software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan L. Zittrain is an United States professor of cyber law at Harvard Law School and a faculty co-director of Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society....
 of the Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford Internet Institute

The Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in Balliol College, Oxford....
 and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center founded at Harvard Law School that focuses on the legal study of cyberspace. As of May 15, 2008 the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University....
 cites Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web.

A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were lower in agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness than non-Wikipedia users.

Signpost
The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia

name = File:Wikipedia's W.svg The English Wikipedia| logo = File:Wikipedia-logo-en.png| screenshot = File:Wikipedia screenshot.png| collapsible = yes...
, and was founded by Michael Snow
Michael Snow (attorney)

Michael Snow is a Seattle-based lawyer and the current chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. He was elected on July 17, 2008, after being appointed to the board in February....
, an administrator and the current chair of the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation

File:Edit 01-12-09 small.oggThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based....
 board of trustees. It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, from which uploaded files can be used across all Wikimedia projects in all languages, including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikinews, or downloaded for offsite use, as all of the content is either...
.

Operation


Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters

logo]] Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation

File:Edit 01-12-09 small.oggThe Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based....
, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wikibooks
Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia Foundation wiki for the creation of free content b:WB:WIW that anyone can edit....
. The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of Wikipedians, also participate in the promotion, the development, and the funding of the project.

Software and hardware

The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki
MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a World Wide Web wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis, including some of the largest and most popular ones....
, a custom-made, free
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 and open source wiki software
Wiki software

Wiki software is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system. This typically allows web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser....
 platform written in PHP
PHP

PHP is a scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in Standalone software Graphical user interface....
 and built upon the MySQL
MySQL

MySQL is a relational database management system which has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases....
 database. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variable
Variable

A variable is a symbol that stands for a value that may vary; the term usually occurs in opposition to constant, which is a symbol for a non-varying value, i.e....
s, a transclusion
Transclusion

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document into another document by reference. It is a feature of Web template....
 system for templates
Web template

A web template is a tool used to Separation of concerns content from presentation in web design, and for mass-production of web documents. It is a basic component of a web template system....
, and URL redirection
URL redirection

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many Uniform Resource Locator....
. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft....
 and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki
UseModWiki

UseModWiki is a wiki software in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in Flat file database, not in a relational database....
 written in Perl
Perl

In computer programming, Perl is a high-level programming language, List of programming languages by category, Interpreter , dynamic programming language....
 by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase
CamelCase

CamelCase is the practice of writing compound noun and adjectives or phrases in which the words are joined without Whitespace s and are capitalization within the compound?as in Patti LaBelle, Visual Basic, or iPod....
 for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki
PhpWiki

PhpWiki is World Wide Web wiki software application.It began as a clone of WikiWikiWeb and was the first wiki written in PHP.PhpWiki has been used to edit and format paper books for publication....
 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
Exponential growth

Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportionality to the function's current value. In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay ....
 demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker
Lee Daniel Crocker

Lee Daniel Crocker is an United States Computer programming and Poker player. He is best known for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs to address scalability problems, including a move from Flat file database to a MySQL database backend....
. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. Until April 2005, the built-in MediaWiki search engine has been used as a default search engine for Wikipedia. The default search engine has later been replaced by Lucene search, a search engine designed to index and search MediaWiki content based on Lucene
Lucene

Lucene is a free software/open source software information retrieval Library , originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License....
 search API. There are several versions of Lucene based search engine, designed to be used in Wikipedia. The current search engine used in Wikipedia is Lucene Search 2, which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.0.

.]]

Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters
Cluster (computing)

A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely so that in many respects they form a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks....
 of Linux
Linux

Linux is a generic term referring to Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Their development is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone under the terms of the GNU GPL license...
 servers (mainly Ubuntu), with a few OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris

File:Opensolaris-screenshot-2008-05.pngOpenSolaris is an open source operating system based on Sun Microsystems' Solaris . It is also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around it....
 machines for ZFS
ZFS

In computing, ZFS is a file system designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume , Snapshot and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs....
. As of February 2008, there were 300 in Florida
Florida

Florida is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States of the United States, bordering Alabama to the northwest and Georgia to the northeast....
, 26 in Amsterdam
Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the Capital of the Netherlands and List of cities in the Netherlands with over 100,000 people of the Netherlands, located in the Provinces of the Netherlands of North Holland in the west of the country....
, and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul
Seoul

Seoul is the Capital and largest city of South Korea. With a population of over 10 million, It is one of the world's List of cities proper by population.The Seoul National Capital Area - which includes the major port city of Incheon and satellite towns in Gyeonggi-do, has 24.5 million inhabitants and is the world's second largest List of me...
. Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture
Multitier architecture

In software engineering, multi-tier architecture is a client-server architecture in which, the presentation, the application processing and the data management are logically separate processes....
. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers
Dedicated hosting service

A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone....
 located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server
Database server

A database server is a computer program that provides database services to other computer programs or computers, as defined by the client-server software modeling....
 running MySQL
MySQL

MySQL is a relational database management system which has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases....
, multiple slave database servers, 21 web server
Web server

The term web server can mean one of two things:# A computer program that is responsible for accepting Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests from clients , and Server them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are web pages such as Hypertext Markup Language documents and linked objects ....
s running the Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to simply as Apache , is a web server notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web....
, and seven Squid cache servers.

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. 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
Linux Virtual Server

Linux Virtual Server is an advanced Load balancing solution for Linux systems. It is an open source project started by Wensong Zhang in May 1998....
 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 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.

License and language editions


All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License
GNU Free Documentation License

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project....
 (GFDL), a copyleft
Copyleft

File:Copyleft.svgCopyleft is a Word play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions....
 license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. The position that Wikipedia is merely a hosting service has been successfully used as a defense in court. Wikipedia had 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. In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to distribute and modify computer software without restriction....
 (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC-BY-SA by August 1, 2009. Wikipedia and its sister projects will hold a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch.

The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use
Fair use

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review....
 doctrine, while the others have opted not to. This is in part because of the difference in copyright laws between countries; for example, the notion of fair use does not exist in Japanese copyright law
Japanese copyright law

Japanese copyright laws consist of two parts: "Author's Rights", and "Neighboring Rights", and as such, "copyright" is a convenient collective term rather than a single concept in Japan....
. Media files covered by free content
Free content

Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, Work of art, or other creative Content having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, and produce modified versions of and works derived from the content....
 licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' cc-by-sa) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, from which uploaded files can be used across all Wikimedia projects in all languages, including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikinews, or downloaded for offsite use, as all of the content is either...
 repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are currently 262 language editions of Wikipedia
List of Wikipedias

This is a list of many of the different language editions of Wikipedia; as of December 7, 2008, there are 265 Wikipedias. For number of their articles, see the list linked below....
; of these, 24 have over 100,000 articles and 81 have over 1,000 articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain
Subdomain

In the Domain Name System hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain name that is part of a larger domain. For example, "mail.example.com" and "calendar.example.com" are subdomains of the "example.com" domain, which in turn is a subdomain of the "com" top-level domain ....
 (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia

name = File:Wikipedia's W.svg The English Wikipedia| logo = File:Wikipedia-logo-en.png| screenshot = File:Wikipedia screenshot.png| collapsible = yes...
) receives approximately 52% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Spanish: 19%, French: 5%, Polish: 3%, German: 3%, Japanese: 3%, Portuguese: 2%). As of July 2008, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English
English Wikipedia

name = File:Wikipedia's W.svg The English Wikipedia| logo = File:Wikipedia-logo-en.png| screenshot = File:Wikipedia screenshot.png| collapsible = yes...
, German
German Wikipedia

The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia. It is the second largest Wikipedia, after the English Wikipedia, and was one of the first to be created....
, French
French Wikipedia

The French Wikipedia is the French language edition of Wikipedia, spelled Wikip?dia. Started in March 2001, this edition has over 750,000 articles as of January 2009 and is the third largest Wikipedia after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia editions....
, Polish
Polish Wikipedia

Polish Wikipedia is the Polish language edition of Wikipedia. The ninth edition of Wikipedia, it was started in September 26 2001. As of May 2008, it has more than 500,000 articles and is the fourth largest Wikipedia edition ....
, and Japanese Wikipedia
Japanese Wikipedia

The is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. , it had over 500,000 articles, making it the fifth largest language edition of Wikipedia after the English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, French Wikipedia and Polish Wikipedia....
s.

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
English Wikipedia

name = File:Wikipedia's W.svg The English Wikipedia| logo = File:Wikipedia-logo-en.png| screenshot = File:Wikipedia screenshot.png| collapsible = yes...
). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences
American and British English spelling differences

American and British English spelling differences are one aspect of American and British English differences.The spelling systems of Commonwealth of Nations countries, for the most part, closely resemble the British system....
, (e.g. color vs. colour) or points of view. 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
Free content

Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, Work of art, or other creative Content having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, and produce modified versions of and works derived from the content....
 may be used under a claim of fair use
Fair use

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review....
. 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". 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, in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed. Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki
InterWiki

InterWiki is a facility for creating links to the many WikiWikiWebbys on the World Wide Web. Users avoid pasting in entire Uniform Resource Locators and instead use a shorthand similar to links within the same wiki ....
" links, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.

Several language versions have published a selection of Wikipedia articles on an optical disk version. An English version, 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles. Another English version developed by Linterweb
History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone and that aims to provide free encyclopedic information to its readers. It was formally launched on ....
 contains "1988 + articles". The Polish version contains nearly 240,000 articles. There are also a few German versions.

Cultural significance

strip entitled "Wikipedian Protester."]] In addition to logistic growth
Logistic function

A logistic function or logistic curve is the most common sigmoid curve. It modelsthe S-curve of growth of some set P, where P might...
 in the number of its articles, Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. According to Alexa
Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites....
 and comScore
ComScore

comScore is an internet marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses. comScore tracks all internet data on its surveyed computers in order to study online behavior....
, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide. 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, a good portion of which is related to academic research. In April 2007 the Pew
Pew Research Center

The Pew Research Center is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the United States and the world....
 Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia. In October 2006, the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran advertisements.

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada
Parliament of Canada

The Parliament of Canada is Canada's legislature, seated at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario. The Governor General of Canada appoints the 105 members of the upper house, the Canadian Senate, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister of Canada....
's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage

Same-sex marriage and gay marriage are terms for a Law or socially recognized marriage between two people of the same sex. While state-sanctioned same-sex marriage is a relatively new phenomenon in the modern world, same-sex unions have been documented throughout human history....
 in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act
Civil Marriage Act

The Civil Marriage Act was legislation legalizing same-sex marriage in Canada. It was introduced as Bill C-38 in the first session of the 38th Canada Parliament of Canada on February 1, 2005....
. 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
World Intellectual Property Organization

The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations. WIPO was created in 1967 "to encourage creative activity, to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world"....
 – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case. Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency
United States Intelligence Community

The United States Intelligence Community is a cooperative federation of 16 separate Federal government of the United States agencies that work separately and together to conduct Intelligence activities considered necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security of the United States....
 reports.

newspaper headline "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence"]] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism
Journalism

Journalism is the craft of conveying news, descriptive material and editorial via a widening spectrum of Media . These include newspapers, magazines, radio and television, the internet and, more recently, the cellphone....
, sometimes without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia. In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a domestic UK radio station that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history....
 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
Google

Google Inc. is an United States public company, earning revenue from AdWords related to its Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Apps, Orkut, and YouTube services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the Google Search Appliance....
, Facebook
Facebook

Facebook is a free-access social network service website that is operated and privately held company by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people....
, YouTube
YouTube

YouTube is a Video hosting service website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005....
) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th-century terms as Hoovering
The Hoover Company

The Hoover Company started out as an American floor care manufacturer based in North Canton, Ohio, Ohio. It also established a major base in the United Kingdom and for most of the early-and-mid-20th century, it dominated the electric vacuum cleaner industry, to the point where the "hoover" Genericized trademark for vacuum cleaners and vacuum...
 or Coke
Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is a carbonation soft drink sold in stores, restaurants and vending machines worldwide . It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke or as Cola or Pop....
. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert

Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an United States comedian, Satire, actor and writer, known for his ironic style , and for his deadpan comedic delivery....
 has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show
The Colbert Report
The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report is a Peabody Award- and Emmy Award-winning American news satire television program that airs from 11:30 p.m. to 12:00 midnight Eastern Time Zone each Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central in the United States and on both The Comedy Network and CTV Television Network in Canada....
and coined the related term "wikiality
The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report is a Peabody Award- and Emmy Award-winning American news satire television program that airs from 11:30 p.m. to 12:00 midnight Eastern Time Zone each Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central in the United States and on both The Comedy Network and CTV Television Network in Canada....
."

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
The Onion

'The Onion' is an United States "news satire" organization. It features satire articles reporting on international, national, and local news as well as an entertainment newspaper and website known as The A.V....
in July 2006 with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence." Others may draw upon Wikipedia's statement that anyone can edit, such as "The Negotiation
The Negotiation

"The Negotiation" is the eighteenth episode of the third season of the The Office , aired on April 5, 2007. It is the second "super-sized" episode of the third season....
," an episode of
The Office, where character Michael Scott
Michael Scott (The Office)

Michael Gary Scott is a fictional character on NBC's The Office portrayed by Steve Carell, and based on David Brent from the The Office . Michael, the central character of the series, is the regional manager of the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of paper distribution company Dunder Mifflin....
 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". A select few parody Wikipedia's policies, such as the
xkcd
Xkcd

xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe, a former Independent contractor for NASA. Munroe describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." xkcd is a widely read webcomic and has been recognized in mainstream media such as The Guardian....
strip named "Wikipedian Protester."

The first documentary film about Wikipedia, entitled
Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story
Truth in Numbers

Truth in Numbers will be the first film to extensively and exclusively cover the phenomenon and global implications of Wikipedia as well as to have comprehensive access to Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, and the Wikimedia Foundation....
, is scheduled for a 2009 release. Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Wikipedia and feature interviews with Wikipedia editors around the world. Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen
Tegenlicht

Tegenlicht is a television programme of the VPRO, a Netherlands Public Broadcasting, its aim is to practice critical journalism. The VPRO qualifies the programme as a documentary dealing with politics, economics, sociology and science....
 premiered his 45-minute television documentary
The Truth According to Wikipedia in April, 2008.

On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini
Franco Grillini

Franco Grillini is an Italy politician and a gay rights activist....
 raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama
Panoramafreiheit

Panoramafreiheit, translated literally into English as Freedom of Panorama or Panorama Freedom, is a provision in the copyright laws of Germany that permits taking pictures or creating other images of buildings and sculptures which are permanently located in a public place without infringing any copyright that may subsist in such wor...
. 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. receiving the Quadriga
Quadriga (award)

Quadriga is an annual German award sponsored by Werkstatt Deutschland, a non-profit organization based in Berlin. The award recognizes four people or groups for their commitment to innovation, renewal, and a pioneering spirit through political, economic, and cultural activities....
 
A Mission of Enlightenment award]] On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post
The Washington Post

The Washington Post is the newspaper with the largest circulation in Washington, D.C., United States and is the city's oldest paper, founded in 1877....
reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 U.S. election campaign
United States presidential election, 2008

The United States presidential election of 2008 was held on Tuesday, November 4, 2008. It was the 56th consecutive wikt:quadrennial United States United States presidential election....
, 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." An October 2007 Reuters
Reuters

Reuters Group Limited is a United_Kingdom-based, Canadian controlled news agency and former financial market data provider that provides reports from around the world to newspapers and broadcasters....
 article, entitled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica
Prix Ars Electronica

The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important yearly prizes in the field of electronic art and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music....
 contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria
Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west....
 later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award
Webby Awards

The Webby Awards is an international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile web sites, presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996....
 for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. On January 26, 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fourth 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?"

In September 2008, Wikipedia received Quadriga
Quadriga (award)

Quadriga is an annual German award sponsored by Werkstatt Deutschland, a non-profit organization based in Berlin. The award recognizes four people or groups for their commitment to innovation, renewal, and a pioneering spirit through political, economic, and cultural activities....
 
A Mission of Enlightenment award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadic
Boris Tadic

Boris Tadic is a Serbian politician and the current President of Serbia of Serbia. A psychology by profession, he is a leader of the Democratic Party ....
, Eckart Höfling
Eckart Höfling

Eckart H?fling is a German Catholic priest who works combating poverty in Brazil.In 1949 Eckart H?flich completed his schooling in W?rzburg and passed the legal clerk exams in 1952....
, and Peter Gabriel
Peter Gabriel

Peter Brian Gabriel is a Grammy Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated England musician and songwriter. He first rose to fame as the lead vocals and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis ....
. The award was presented to Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an United States Internet entrepreneur known for his role in the creation of Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia launched in 2001....
 by David Weinberger
David Weinberger

David Weinberger is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto ....
.

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
BBC Domesday Project

The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England....
, which included text (entered on BBC Micro
BBC Micro

The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation....
 computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK
United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom , the UK or Britain,is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe....
, 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. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2
H2g2

h2g2 is a collaborative Internet Internet encyclopedia project engaged in the construction of, in its own words, "an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything", in the spirit of the fictional publication The Guide from the comic science fiction series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams....
, which was created by Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams

Douglas Noel Adams was an England author, dramatist and musician. He is best known as the author of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series....
 and is run 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. A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia
GNUpedia

GNUPedia was a project to create a free content encyclopedia under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation. The idea for the project was initially proposed by Richard Stallman in 1999 and officially started in January 2001....
 project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 figure Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman , often abbreviated "rms","'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman...
, has lent his support to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects, which are also run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", created in October 2002, detailed the September 11 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary
Wiktionary

Wiktionary is a multilingualism, World Wide Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians", using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website....
, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote
Wikiquote

Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films and proverbs, and to give details about...
, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks
Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia Foundation wiki for the creation of free content b:WB:WIW that anyone can edit....
, a collection of collaboratively written free books. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, including Wikiversity
Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project, which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than formal content....
, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. None of those sister projects, however, have come to meet the success of Wikipedia.

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base
Knowledge base

A knowledge base is a special kind of database for knowledge management, providing the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval of knowledge....
 development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu
Susning.nu

Susning.nu was/is a Swedish language wiki, started in October 2001 by Lars Aronsson , and it ran for three years as an open wiki. In April 2004, Susning had over 60,000 articles on various topics, making it the largest Swedish wiki at the time....
, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie
WikiZnanie

WikiZnanie is a Russian language WikiWiki encyclopedia released under the FreeBSD Documentation License license and created in 2003. It uses the MediaWiki software....
 likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review
Peer review

Peer review is the process of subjecting an author's Scholarly method work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field....
, such as Encyclopedia of Life
Encyclopedia of Life

Encyclopedia of Life is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world....
, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a Open access online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford University. The SEP was initially developed with U.S....
, Scholarpedia
Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is an English language online wiki-based encyclopedia in which articles are written by invited expert authors and are subject to peer review....
, h2g2
H2g2

h2g2 is a collaborative Internet Internet encyclopedia project engaged in the construction of, in its own words, "an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything", in the spirit of the fictional publication The Guide from the comic science fiction series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams....
, and Everything2
Everything2

Everything2, Everything2, or E2 for short, is a collaborative World Wide Web-based community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material....
. Citizendium
Citizendium

Citizendium is an English language wiki-based free content encyclopedia project spearheaded by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001....
, an online encyclopedia, was started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in an attempt to create an "expert-friendly" Wikipedia.

See also

  • List of online encyclopedias
    List of online encyclopedias

    This is a list of online encyclopedias, which are accessible on the World Wide Web....
  • List of wikis
    List of wikis

    This page contains a comparison of notable websites that use a wiki model....
  • Open content
    Open content

    Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with "open source", describes any kind of creative work published in a format that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual....
  • USA Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia
  • User-generated content
    User-generated content

    User-generated content , also known as Consumer generated media or user-created content , refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users....
  • Wikipedia:Press coverage
  • Wikipedia Review
    Wikipedia Review

    The Wikipedia Review is an Internet forum for the discussion of Wikimedia projects, particularly the English Wikipedia, its content and conflicts, and its participants' editing practices....
  • Wikipedia Watch
    Wikipedia Watch

    Wikipedia Watch is a website created by a book indexer named Daniel Brandt on 13 October 2005. The criticism site began after he read what he says was a false and unflattering Wikipedia entry about himself in order to warn users about the accuracy of information there....
  • Wikitruth
    Wikitruth

    Wikitruth is a website Criticism of Wikipedia of the online encyclopedia project Wikipedia. It was created on March 20, 2006.The site argues that there are fundamental problems with the structure of Wikipedia....


Academic studies

  • Priedhorsky, Reid, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. . Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: 1316624.131663.

Books

  • (See book rev. by Baker, as listed below.)


Book reviews and other articles

  • Baker, Nicholson
    Nicholson Baker

    Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, his writings focus on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' Stream of consciousness writing....
    . .
    The New York Review of Books
    The New York Review of Books

    The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City....
    , March 20, 2008. Accessed December 17, 2008. (Book rev. of The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, as listed above.)
  • Rosenzweig, Roy
    Roy Rosenzweig

    Roy Alan Rosenzweig was an United States historian at George Mason University in Virginia. He was the founder and director of the Center for History and New Media from 1994 until his death in October 2007 from lung cancer, aged 57....
    . . (Originally published in
    Journal of American History
    Journal of American History

    The Journal of American History , is the official journal of the Organization of American Historians. It was first published in 1914 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, the official journal of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association....
     93.1 (June 2006): 117-46.)


Learning resources

  • Wikiversity list of learning resources. (Includes related courses, Web-based seminars
    Web conferencing

    Web conferencing is used to conduct live meetings or presentations via the Internet.In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet....
    , slides, lecture notes, text books, quizzes, glossaries, etc.)


Media debate


Other media coverage



External links

  •  – multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
  • - 15 languages
  • - Larry Sanger's talk in 2002 at Stanford University
    Stanford University

    Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private university research university located in Stanford, California, California, United States....
     about Wikipedia ( and transcript of the talk)
  • at the Open Directory Project
    Open Directory Project

    The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content Web directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a virtual community of volunteer editors....
  • A wikiHow
    WikiHow

    wikiHow is a wiki-based community with an extensive database of how-to guides. All of the site's content is licensed under Creative Commons ; and the site uses a modified version of MediaWiki 1.12....
     article.
  • [irc://irc.freenode.net/Wikipedia #Wikipedia] on freenode
    Freenode

    freenode, formerly known as Open Projects Network, is a popular Internet Relay Chat computer network used to discuss peer-directed projects....