Wikipedia
  The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from many different writing systems |
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Screenshot
 Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal. |
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| URL | wikipedia.org |
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| Slogan | The Free Encyclopedia |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
| Registration | Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages or uploading files) |
| Available language(s) | 271 active editions (282 in total) |
| Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit) |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1] |
| Launched | January 15, 2001 |
| Alexa rank |  6 (February 2012[update])[2] |
| Current status | Active |
Wikipedia (
i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a free, collaborative, multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles (over 3.8 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,[3] and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.[4] As of January 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 283 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[5][6][7][8] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.[5][9] It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.[10]
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[11] Sanger coined the name Wikipedia,[12] which is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating websites collaboratively, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick)[13] and encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content has received ample attention in print media. In its 2006 Person of the Year article, Time magazine recognized the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world. It cited Wikipedia as an example, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[14] Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[15][16] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[17]
Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture);[18] and because it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes,[19][not in citation given] its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[20] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information;[21] though some scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.[22][23] A 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of serious errors.[24]
History
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.[25]
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[26][27] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[28][29] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[30] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a feeder project for Nupedia.[31] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[32] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[28] Wikipedia's policy of neutral point-of-view[33] 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.[28]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web 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 final days of 2004.[34] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the two million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the 1407 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[35] 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.[36] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[37] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol where the articles are a little more essayistic[38] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[39] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopaedia in 2006; by 2010 that average was roughly 1,000.[40] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[41] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called 'low-hanging fruit' – topics that clearly merit an article – have already been created and built up extensively.[42][43]
In November 2009, a PhD thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[44][45] The Wall Street Journal reported that unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting. The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[46] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[47]
In January 2007, Wikipedia initially entered the top ten list of the most popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks Inc. With 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked No. 9, surpassing the New York Times (#10) and Apple Inc. (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was No. 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors.[48] In April 2011, Wikipedia was listed as the fifth-most-popular website by Google Inc.[49][50] As of October 2011, Wikipedia is the sixth-most-popular website worldwide according to Alexa Internet,[51] receiving more than 2.7 billion U.S. pageviews every month,[10] out of a global monthly total of over 12 billion pageviews.[52] In January 2012, the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, called for a twenty-four shut down of Wikipedia as a protest against SOPA.
Nature of Wikipedia
| “ | As the popular joke goes, ‘The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.’ | ” |
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—Miikka Ryokas, [53] |
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Editing
In a departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, wiki editing model. Except for particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account. Different language editions modify this policy: only registered users may create a new article in the English edition. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are agreed on by consensus.[55]
By default, any edit to an article becomes available immediately, prior to any review. This means that an article may contain errors, misguided contributions, advocacy, or even patent nonsense, until another editor corrects the problem. Different language editions, each under separate administrative control, are free to modify this policy. For example the German Wikipedia maintains a system of stable versions of articles,[56] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. In June 2010, the English Wikipedia began a trial of a pending changes system where new users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework) would be subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication, which, as Jimmy Wales told the BBC, would enable the English Wikipedia to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years. Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as neither necessary nor desirable.[57] The trial lasted until May 2011.[58]
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.[59][60] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The Talk pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[61] 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 have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[23] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing.[clarification needed] The most developed state of articles is called featured article status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[62][63] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via the intensive work of few editors.[64] In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged.[65]
A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style (or MoS for short), which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternative titles should appear in bold.
Defenses against undesirable edits
The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[66]
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.[67]
However, obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[22][23] but 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.[68] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[69][70] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.
Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[59][71] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the US House of Representatives and special interest groups[21] has been noted,[72] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[73] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[74]
For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[75]
Wikipedia can be defended from attack by several systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits (e.g. 'watchlists' and 'recent changes'), computer programs ('bots') that are designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[76] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.
For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[77] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[78] Such locking is allegedly applied sparingly and for only short periods of time while attacks may appear likely to continue.[citation needed]
Rules and laws governing content and editor behavior
Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, the copyright laws) of the United States and of the U.S. state of Florida, where the majority of Wikipedia's servers reside. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in the five pillars, and numerous policies and guidelines that are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community are able to write and revise the website's policies and guidelines.[79] Rules can be enforced by deleting or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show similarities, they differ in many details.
English Wikipedia
Content policies
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[80] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of notability,[81] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[82] 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 a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as verifiability, not truth to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[83] This can lead to the removal of information that is valid, thus hindering inclusion of knowledge and growth of the encyclopedia.[84] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[85] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article.[86] This is known as neutral point of view (NPOV).
Dispute resolution
Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A BOLD, revert, discuss cycle sometimes occurs, in which an editor changes something, another editor reverts that, and then the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other editors' input. Wikiquette Assistance is a non-binding noticeboard where editors can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors. Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes.
Arbitration Committee
The Arbitration Committee is the ultimate dispute resolution method. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between 2 opposing views on how articles should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on which view should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and focuses on the way disputes are conducted instead,[87] functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while weeding potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore, the committee does not directly decide how content should be, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, by being biased). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63.2% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43.3%), subject matters (23.4%) or Wikipedia (15.7%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather anti-consensus or violating editing policies, warnings tend to be issued.[88]
Content licensing
All text in Wikipedia was 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,[89] up until June 2009, when the site switched to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0.[90] Wikipedia had been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, was not considered suitable[clarification needed] for online reference works and because the two licenses were incompatible.[91] In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (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 held a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch.[92] The referendum took place from April 9 to 30.[93] The results were 75.8% Yes, 10.5% No, and 13.7% No opinion.[94] In consequence of the referendum, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees voted to change to the Creative Commons license, effective June 15, 2009.[94]
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 doctrine, while the others have opted not to, in part due to the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g., in Japanese copyright law). Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Wikimedia foundation is not a licensor of content, but merely a hosting service for the contributors (and licensors) of the Wikipedia. This position has been successfully defended in court.[95][96]
Accessing Wikipedia's content
Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse, or re-distribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside of the Wikipedia website.
- Web sites – Thousands of mirror sites exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones, that also include content from other reference sources, are Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did.
- Mobile apps – A variety of mobile apps provide access to Wikipedia on hand-held devices, including both Android and Apple iOS devices (see Wikipedia iOS apps). (See also Mobile access).
- Search engines – Some web search engines make special use of Wikipedia content when displaying search results: examples include Bing (via technology gained from Powerset)[97] and Duck Duck Go.
- Other wikis – Some wikis, most notably Enciclopedia Libre and Citizendium, began as forks of Wikipedia content. The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, is a project that extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia and makes it available in a queriable semantic format, RDF. The possibility has also been raised to have Wikipedia export its data directly in a semantic format, possibly by using the Semantic MediaWiki extension. Such an export of data could also help Wikipedia reuse its own data, both between articles on the same language Wikipedia and between different language Wikipedias.[98]
- Compact Discs, DVDs – Collections of Wikipedia articles have also been published on optical discs. An English version, 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles.[99][100] The Polish-language version contains nearly 240,000 articles.[101] There are also German and Spanish-language versions.[102][103] Also: Wikipedia for Schools, the Wikipedia series of CDs/DVDs, produced by Wikipedians and SOS Children, is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia targeted around the UK National Curriculum and intended to be useful for much of the English-speaking world.[104] The project is available online; an equivalent print encyclopedia would require roughly 20 volumes.
- Books – There has also been an attempt to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.[105][106] Since 2009, tens of thousands of print on demand books which reproduced English, German, Russian and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM.[107]
Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.[108] Wikipedia publishes dumps of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2007 there is no dump available of Wikipedia's images.[109] Wikipedia joined a protest against the US SOPA by blacking out its English-language pages for 24 hours on January 18, 2012. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[110][111]
Coverage of topics
Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic of knowledge covered encyclopedically in one article. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional printed encyclopedia.[113] It also contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.[114] It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically, religiously, and pornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wikipedia by national authorities in China,[115] Pakistan[116] and the United Kingdom,[117] among other countries.
As of September 2009[update], Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has s