Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

Wikipedia

Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Available in	multi-lingual (182 active editions)
Headquarters	Miami, Florida
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger
URL	http://www.wikipedia.org/
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most of its articles to be edited by nearly anyone with access to the Web site. Its primary servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1 2002. 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".

Wikipedia has over six million articles in many languages, including more than 1.6 million in the English-language version and more than half a million in the German-language version; in all there are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, 22 of which have more than 50,000 articles. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity since its inception, and according to Alexa Internet currently ranks among the top fifteen most visited websites worldwide. It has spawned several sister projects, and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and consistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking the reliable sources that, in the eyes of most regular contributors, are necessary for an article to be considered of high quality.

Features

Image depicting the linking characteristics of a wiki; pages are linked extensively, which allows the user to traverse a pathway of related articles.

Wikipedia uses a type of software called a "wiki," which allows for content to be authored by multiple people easily. Visitors are encouraged to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change its content to help build the encyclopedia. Such contributions can be made without the need to register a user account. It is therefore possible for large numbers of people to write articles and update them quickly as new information becomes available; however, it also means online vandalism and disagreement about content are common. Many other Internet encyclopedia projects use traditional multi-lingual editorial policies and article ownership, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, h2g2 and Everything2. Projects such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie are other wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors and there is no formal process of review.

Wikipedia has a set of policies identifying types of information appropriate for inclusion. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, revised, transferred to a sister project, or removed. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that articles must be written from a "neutral point of view", presenting all noteworthy perspectives on an issue along with the evidence supporting them — rather than attempt to determine the objective truth of their subjects, Wikipedia articles attempt to describe them impartially from all significant viewpoints. The project also forbids the use of original research. Following the introduction of a more user-friendly citation functionality in 2006, articles frequently include a reference section, to support the information presented in the article and to allow verification of the article.

Free content

As a large and collaborative project that requires users to create and edit content en masse, it is imperative that all contributions be freely modifiable legally. Normally, the creator of a work retains the copyright, disallowing others from copying it or creating derivative works. It is for this reason that Wikipedia's articles are released under a license that permits anyone to build upon them. The "GNU Free Documentation License," or "GFDL," one of the many "copyleft" licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content, was chosen for this purpose. The license also states that, as a condition for the use of the information, its authors be attributed and any redistributed content remains available under the same license. Despite this free nature, the contributions of original material to the project by authors are still rightfully theirs and the copyright to their work is retained by them; they simply agree to make that work available so that others may benefit from it. Contributors may choose to multi-license their contributions, which allows them to be used by third parties under any of the licenses, or to simply release them into the public domain.

However, a significant proportion of images and other media on Wikipedia do not fall under the GFDL license. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use under the United States copyright law. Other content on Wikipedia is released under different copyleft terms or licenses that are compatible with the GFDL, such as Creative Commons licenses. The Wikimedia Commons, a media repository and sister project in which many of Wikipedia's images are stored, also allows other copyleft licenses, but does not accept fair use images.

Language editions

An example of Wikipedia's range in language editions: Wikipedia in Hebrew.

Wikipedia contains 182 "active" language editions (those with more than 100 articles), out of a total of 250 language editions in varying states. According to Alexa Internet's audience measurement service, the English sub-domain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 55% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining 45% split among the other languages.

Language editions operate independently from one another; editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to manually translate articles. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared among Wikipedia editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.

Wikipedia's article count has shown rapid growth in some of the major language editions.

The following is a list of the largest editions — those containing over 100,000 articles — sorted by number of articles as of 26 January 2007. Note that the article count does not always provide a fair comparison; in some editions, many of the articles are short "stubs" created automatically by bots, and the ratio of active users to articles also varies.

1. English (1,603,809)
2. German (533,266)
3. French (432,827)
4. Polish (339,884)
5. Japanese (318,413)
6. Dutch (267,236)
7. Italian (238,532)
8. Portuguese (234,816)
9. Swedish (205,775)
10. Spanish (194,192)
11. Russian (131,436)
12. Chinese (109,983)

Editing

Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's content; registered users can also create new articles. Changes made to pages are instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the expectation that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Some of Wikipedia's editors have explained its editing process as a "socially Darwinian evolutionary process". This real-time, collaborative model allows editors to rapidly update existing topics as they develop and to introduce new ones as they arise.

Some take advantage of Wikipedia's openness to add nonsense to the encyclopedia, which is called "vandalism". Additionally, collaboration sometimes leads to "edit wars" — multiple people repetitively replacing or removing each other's contributions because they disagree with each other — and prolonged disputes when editors are unable to agree on an article's content.

The "recent changes" page shows the newest edits to the English Wikipedia. This page is often watched by users who revert vandalism.

Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time owing to the aforementioned vandalism or edit wars. Wikipedia does not declare any of its articles to be "complete" nor "finished". The authors of articles need not have any expertise nor qualifications in the subjects that they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who wishes to do so. Articles are not controlled or copyrighted by any particular user or editorial group; decisions on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia are instead made largely through consensus decision-making and, occasionally, by vote. Jimmy Wales retains final judgment on Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.

Regular users often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can monitor changes to those articles, including updates, discussions, and vandalism. Past edits to Wikipedia articles are retained, and remain viewable through "edit history" pages sorted chronologically, making it possible to see former versions of any page at any time. The only exceptions are the histories of articles that have been deleted, which may only be viewed by Wikipedia administrators, and some individual edits that contain libelous statements, copyright violations, and other content that could incur legal liability or be otherwise detrimental to Wikipedia; these edits are permanently hidden from view using a process called "oversight".

Other formats

Spoken versions of some articles are available in ogg format (using the Vorbis audio codec). The ogg format is favored for Wikipedia over the more ubiquitous and better-known MP3 format due to the decision to favor content accessible with "Free software" compatible with Wikipedia's licensing — MP3 fails this criterion as it is covered by multiple enforced software patents.

As Wikipedia is available online and released under an unrestrictive license, it is possible to download its content for use in environments other than the Web; a number of projects have been established that use the Wikipedia content differently. For example, SOS Children distributes the encyclopedia on a CD (2006 Wikipedia CD Selection). Published copies of selected Wikipedia articles are also available via PediaPress, a Print on Demand service. A project within Wikipedia is working on "Wikipedia 1.0", a collection of Wikipedia articles that have been verified for accuracy and are ready for printing or burning to CD. Stand-alone versions are available for handheld devices (for example, Lexipedia).

Software and hardware

Wikipedia receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.

Wikipedia itself runs on its own in-house created software, known as MediaWiki, a powerful, open source wiki system written in PHP and built upon MySQL. As well as allowing articles to be written, it includes a basic internal macro language, variables and transcluded templating system for page enhancement, and features such as redirection.

Wikipedia runs on a cluster of dedicated Linux servers located in Florida and four other locations around the world. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required camel case for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske. Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects.

Overview of system architecture, May 2006. Source: Server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.

Wikipedia was served from a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world.

Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Perlbal software, which then pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page-rendering from the database. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses, which can lead to a lag. To further increase response times, Wikimedia began building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three caching servers in France. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now take much of Wikipedia's traffic load. However, Wikipedia's page load times can be variable at times, with occasional more serious problems. wikipedia was created by Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel

Encyclopedic characteristics

The quality of any encyclopedia is gauged by several factors, including overall size, organization, ease of navigation, breadth of coverage, depth of coverage, timeliness, readability, biases, and reliability.

Overall size, organization and navigation

At the start of 2007, Wikipedia had over 1.5 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for nearly 600 years. However, a large size would be an impediment, if readers could not quickly find the information they seek. Print encyclopedias have traditionally overcome this problem in three ways, by organizing their topics alphabetically and/or by topic, and by including an alphabetical index. A more subtle organization is also imposed by the editor's choice of main articles and system of cross-referencing. Print encyclopedias generally discuss smaller topics within larger essays; for example, the term "Scalpel" might be described within the "Surgery" article. Smaller topics are usually given a short entry and a cross-reference to the larger article. Indeed, the judicious grouping of topics into larger articles was a key factor in making the 1st edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica popular, its vaunted "new plan".

Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia have different methods of organization. Information is most commonly found either by following a hyperlink from one article to another, or by using a search engine. Hyperlinks are roughly equivalent to cross-references in traditional encyclopedias, although a typical Wikipedia article has a far higher density of cross-references (hyperlinks) than traditional encyclopedia articles. A search can be either using a search engine integral to the encyclopedia, or by using a publicly available search engines such as Google. This is roughly equivalent to searching the index of a print encyclopedia, although the number of possible search terms for Wikipedia is far higher than the number of index entries of traditional encyclopedias; for example, the Index of the 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica has only 700,000 terms, less than half the number of articles in Wikipedia (1.6 million).

In addition, Wikipedia has its own topical organization; articles are grouped into categories that may be searched. The closest analog in print encyclopedias would be the Outline of Knowledge found in the Propædia of the Encyclopædia Britannica. However, unlike that Outline, the categorization of Wikipedia articles is not strictly hierarchical; they form a network of ideas, rather than a Great Chain of Being.

Breadth and depth of coverage

Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, meaning that it seeks to encompass and describe as wide a range of topics as possible. Other general encyclopedias include the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Encyclopedia Americana and the World Book Encyclopedia. Wikipedia covers subjects that would be expected in traditional encyclopedias, as well as less formal topics. It also covering more controversial topics, such as religion politics; however, it has a firm policy of presenting topics from a neutral point of view.

Wikipedia covers many subjects in great depth; this is especially evident for some popular culture topics when compared aginast traditional encyclopedias, but more classical subjects are also often covered in more depth than would be found in other encyclopedias. However, not every topic and field is covered with appropriate depth; despite a steady increase in the size of the project, significant gaps in coverage may still be found and many articles are but a few short paragraphs with no references, similar to the articles of the Micropædia.

Timeliness and readability

One strength of Wikipedia is its timeliness. Traditionally, new editions of print encyclopedias were released every few decades, as their information become noticeably outdated. However, in 1933, Elkan Harrison Powell introduced the idea of "continuous revision", in which every article is revised on a systematic schedule and the entire encyclopedia revised and reprinted every few years to incorporate the changes; most encyclopedias now employ continuous revision.

Wikipedia takes "continuous revision" to its ultimate limit. Almost all articles are potentially undergoing revision at all times, thanks to a large community of editors interested in keeping it up-to-date. Wikipedia is therefore able to incorporate recent events, and the latest developments in science and culture. For example, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake article in the English-language edition, was frequently cited by the press in the days following the event.

Even the best reference work is of limited use if it is poorly written and unintelligible to its main audience. Wikipedia fosters clearly written articles through its policies and practises; for example, an article must exhibit "excellent writing" to become a "featured article", one of Wikipedia's best articles. Wikipedia also benefits from a large community of proofreaders, who may detect typographic errors and ambiguous phrasings; for comparison, the Encyclopædia Britannica employs only 12 copy editors.

Biases

The editors of any encyclopedia have a responsibility to keep its articles as free of bias as possible. Historically, even the best encyclopedias have suffered from bias; for example, the "Lynch Law" article of the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes the Ku Klux Klan as a "protective society" and unabashedly defends its actions. A less noxious pathology of encyclopedias is the prejudice of even expert editors; a classic example is Dr. George Gleig's rejection of the Newtonian theory of gravity in the 3rd edition of the Britannica, a scientific theory that had long since been accepted.

Wikipedia has firm policies on maintaining a neutral point of view and giving complete, balanced presentations of all of its subjects. Although a few zealous editors may seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, most contributors to Wikipedia respect its policies scrupulously and, in general, swiftly revert such biased editing. In extreme cases, biased editors may be banned from editing. In general, editors also strive to be complete, i.e., include all aspects of a topic and reflect the prevailing consensus in the scholarly community.

The demographics of the community of regular Wikipedia editors may result in a more subtle, unintentional bias. Although Wikipedia attracts a diverse range of editors, some groups may be over-represented among its most active contributors. Important articles that are the focus of a controversy generally receive input from editors on both sides of the debate, but bias can show up in secondary articles.

Being freely available, Wikipedia need not appeal to the tastes and interests of buyers and, thus, is able to avoid some bias that can skew commercial encyclopedias. As an example, the 2007 Macropædia tends to describe only the Western branch of a field, specifically in histories of architecture, literature, mathematics, music, dance, painting, philosophy, political philosophy, philosophical schools and doctrines, sculpture, theatre, and legal systems. Similarly, the 2007 Macropædia allots only one article each to Buddhism and most other religions but devotes fourteen articles to Christianity, nearly half of all its religion articles.

Reliability

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia

Reliability is a key feature of any encyclopedia; its readers must have confidence that its assertions are true. Traditionally, this confidence is established by appealing to the authority of anonymously peer-reviewed publications and to the personal authority of an expert experienced in a field. However, since experts can disagree and any one expert may be biased or mistaken, peer-reviewed publications — also called "references" or "citations" — are considered to have higher authority. Most encyclopedias provide both forms of authority; for example, the 699 Macropædia articles of the 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica give both references and the names of the authorities that wrote those articles, many of whom are leading experts in their fields. By contrast, most of the ~65,000 Macropædia articles give neither citations nor identify their authors; in such cases, the reader's confidence derives from the reputation of the Britannica itself.

Wikipedia does not generally appeal to the personal authority of experts, but rather to the higher authority of peer-reviewed publications. This is a practical strategy; since its contributors need not give their true names, it is difficult to identify expert contributors to whose authority Wikipedia could appeal. Some contributors have identified themselves as experts whose assertions could be considered authoritative, e.g., professors and post-docs actively researching a scientific field. However, this is relatively uncommon and Wikipedia has made the policy of basing its reliability on citations alone.

The English-language Wikipedia has introduced a formal scale so that readers and contributors can appreciate the confidence that should be placed in a given article. Articles must pass a rigorous set of criteria to acquire the highest "featured article" status; a typical featured article is intended to provide a thorough, well-written coverage of its topic and be supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications. Other articles are labelled as "A"-class, "Good article" standard, "B"-class, "Start"-class and, at the lowest level, "Stub"-class — articles that usually have but a few paragraphs and no references.

Naturally, every article of every encyclopedia could be made more complete or more accurate. By its nature, every encyclopedia article must be a summary, rather than a complete exposition of a subject. The first editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, William Smellie, has elegantly expressed the frustration and hope of every well-meaning encyclopedian.

With regard to errors in general, whether falling under the denomination of mental, typographical or accidental, we are conscious of being able to point out a greater number than any critic whatever. Men who are acquainted with the innumerable difficulties of attending the execution of a work of such an extensive nature will make proper allowances. To these we appeal, and shall rest satisfied with the judgment they pronounce.

— William Smellie, in the Preface to the 1st edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia originally developed out of another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder and member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

The Wikipedia concept was not novel — Everything2 (in 1998-1999) had used similar ideas before Wikipedia was founded — and Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was described by Sanger as differing from existing encyclopedias in being open content, in not having size limitations, due to being on the Internet, and in being free of bias, due to its public nature and potentially broad base of contributors. Nupedia had a seven-step review process by appointed subject-area experts, but later came to be viewed as too slow for producing a limited number of articles. Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by the use of advertisements. It was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GFDL before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

On January 10 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15 2001, as a single English-language edition at http://www.wikipedia.com/, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. It had been, from January 10, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model. Wikipedia thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. There were otherwise few rules initially. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of its first year. It had 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's English edition on March 30 2001, two and a half months after its founding.

Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository. Wales mentioned that he heard the concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld, an employee of Bomis who showed him the same wiki, in December 2000, but it was after Sanger heard of its existence in January 2001 from Ben Kovitz, a regular at the wiki, that he proposed the creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales and Wikipedia's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki-based production, the GNUpedia project existed alongside Nupedia early in its history. It subsequently became inactive, and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Wikipedia.

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo, which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view".

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20 2003. Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", was created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006 and is no longer managed by the Foundation. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects.

Wikipedia has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or fewer new articles per day; by 2004, this had accelerated to a total of 1,000 to 3,000 per day (counting all editions). The English Wikipedia reached its 100,000-article milestone on January 22 2003. Wikipedia reached its one millionth article, among the 105 language editions that existed at the time, on September 20 2004, while the English edition alone reached its 500,000th on March 18 2005. This figure had doubled less than a year later, with the millionth article in the English edition, Jordanhill railway station, being created on March 1 2006; meanwhile, the millionth user registration had been made just two days before. The 1.5 millionth article was created on November 25, 2006 about the Kanab ambersnail.

The Wikimedia Foundation applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia® on September 17 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16 2004 and in the European Union on January 20 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet". There are plans to license the usage of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.

Authorship and management process

During December 2005, about 27,000 users made at least five edits to Wikipedia; of these, 17,000 worked on the English edition. A more active group of about 4,000 users made more than 100 edits each during the month, over half of whom worked on the English edition. In March 2005, approximately one-quarter of Wikipedia's traffic came from users without accounts, most of whom were not regular editors.

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteers; these include developers, who work on the MediaWiki software, and other trusted users with various permission levels including "steward", "bureaucrat" and "administrator". These permissions are normally granted by community consensus; stewards are elected at irregular intervals. Administrators are the largest group, and have the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete pages, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on the English-language edition, an elected "Arbitration Committee".

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia". In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Wikipedia has been viewed as an experiment in a variety of social, political, and economic systems, including anarchy, democracy, and communism. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence. Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch has referred to Jimmy Wales as the "dictator" of Wikipedia; however, most Wikipedia users either do not consider Wales to be a dictator, or consider him to be one who rarely gives non-negotiable orders.

Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget. Bomis, an online advertising company that caters to a generally male audience and has hosted soft-core pornography, played a significant part in the early development of Wikipedia and the network itself. The Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and holds regular fundraisers; the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over $1 million.

Criticism and controversy

Main article: Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence and popularity, with critics alleging that Wikipedia's open nature makes it unauthoritative, that a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable, and that it exhibits systemic bias and inconsistency. Wikipedia has also been criticized for using dubious sources, having a biased but neutrally written perspective towards certain points of view, for disregarding credentials, for lacking understanding and international nature, and for being vulnerable to vandalism and special interest groups. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia's own editors (and ex-editors), representatives of other encyclopedias, and subjects of articles, especially those who find information presenting them in a bad light.

At the end of 2005, controversy arose after journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax, which had gone undetected for 132 days. This discovery led to several policy decisions within Wikimedia regarding creation of articles and the overview process, intended to address some of the flaws which had allowed the hoax to go undetected for that time.

The Wikipedia model

Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Critics allege 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 can become intermingled within an entry. Supporters argue that Wikipedia meets the basic definition of the word 'encyclopedia', and that, unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia's history feature allows users to review an article's history to gauge the accuracy of a particular version.

Wikipedia has also been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. Some librarians, academics, and editors of more formally written encyclopedias consider it to have little or no utility as a reference work. Many university lecturers discourage students from referencing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources instead, while others specifically disallow citation of Wikipedia. A critical website, Wikipedia Watch, was created by Daniel Brandt, accusing Wikipedia of having "…a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information." Founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias as a whole (whether print or online) are not usually appropriate as primary sources and should therefore not be relied upon as authoritative.

In a 2005 study of Wikipedia, Emigh and Herring note that there are not yet many formal studies of Wikipedia or its model, and draw a number of conclusions regarding style and encyclopedic quality. They claim that statistically speaking, "the language of Wikipedia entries is as formal as that in the traditional print encyclopedia", and that Wikipedia achieves its results by social means — including self-norming, a core of active and vigilant users watching for problems, and editors' expectations of encyclopedic text drawn from the wider culture.

Reliability

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a policy of citing reliable sources; however, this is not always adhered to. The project's openness means that its reliability depends on the detection and removal of false or misleading information. A study suggests that vandalism is usually — but not always — reverted quickly. In November 2005, controversy arose after journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax, which had gone undetected for 132 days. This discovery led to several policy changes within Wikipedia. Studies suggest that Wikipedia provides a good starting point for research, and that articles are in general reasonably sound, but that it also suffers from sometimes serious omissions and inaccuracies. An investigation by Nature suggested that the science entries of Wikipedia are roughly as accurate as equivalent entries in Encyclopædia Britannica; however, this was challenged by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., who described the study as "fatally flawed".

Wikipedia has no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and editors may not be well-versed in the topics they write about, leading to criticism that the project's contents lack authority. Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise. Some editors may contribute biased material phrased to sound more credible. Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." and former Britannica editor Robert McHenry also criticized the wiki approach.

Other commentators have drawn a middle ground, asserting that the project contains valuable knowledge has some reliability, though it is not always evident how much. Among those taking such a view are Danah Boyd, Larry Sanger (re-applying Eric Raymond's "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow") and technology figure Joi Ito. Bill Thompson, a well known technology writer, commented that the debate is probably symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today.

Systemic bias

Wikipedia has been criticized as having a systemic bias caused by a number of factors. The project's editors, being volunteers, tend to write about things that are of interest to them. Coverage is thus uneven, and may at times be seriously unbalanced, with notable omissions. Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica's editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued this case, as has former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger who stated in 2004 that "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."

Community

The Wikipedia community consists of a small group of the most frequent contributors, some of whom refer to themselves as "Wikipedians". Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing. Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article themselves (also a common complaint about open-source software development). Professor James H. Fetzer criticized Wikipedia in that he could not change the article about himself; Wikipedia has a policy that prohibits the editing of biographies by the subjects themselves except in cases of confirmed mis-statement, in order to ensure impartiality.

The community has been described as "cult-like", although not always with entirely negative connotations. Like any Internet group, the project may become dominated by cliques of habitual users who express condescension and hostility to users not involved in the "in-group" — habitual users also feel a sense of "ownership" over "their" pages, leading to edit wars. In a page on researching with Wikipedia, the community view is argued that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community, in that authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen. Some Wikipedia editions contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

Wikipedia does not require that its users identify themselves. On the one hand, this practice is sometimes considered admirable — even inspiring — since the editors receive no tangible benefit for their hard work. Instead, their reward seems a literally selfless joy in sharing knowledge with the world, consistent with the Victorian ideal

...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

— George Eliot, in the conclusion to Middlemarch

However, the anonymity of Wikipedian editors has also been sharply criticized, since it does not allow editors to be held accountable for their edits. It also means that multiple people may use one account — or, more often, one person may use multiple accounts, often in an attempt to influence an argument. The latter practice is known as "sock puppetry"; both practises are actively discouraged on Wikipedia.

Responses to criticisms

In an interview with BusinessWeek on December 13 2005, Wales discussed the reasons that the Seigenthaler hoax had gone undetected, and steps being taken to address them. He stated that use of Wikipedia had increased faster than its self-monitoring system could comfortably handle, and that new page creation would therefore be restricted to those with registered user accounts, addressing one of Seigenthaler's main criticisms. He gave his opinion that encyclopedias in general (whether print or online) are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative (as some were doing), but that nonetheless on balance Wikipedia was more reliable as "background reading" on subjects than most online sources. He also stated that Wikipedia was a "work in progress".

Proposals to provide various forms of provenance for Wikipedia's content, beyond that provided by the article history, have been made in response to this. Knowing "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article may affect the reader's "sense of security". For example, Tom Cross proposes a temporal provenance scheme which colors text based how on how long it has remained in place. However, these proposals are controversial; in a rebuttal article, Aaron Krowne criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them as "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".

Awards

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 ($12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project. In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.

Wikipedia has also received plaudits from sources including the BBC News, The Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Science, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Irish Times, Reader's Digest, and The Daily Telegraph. Founder Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006.

On 26 January 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 popular culture

Main article: Wikipedia in popular culture

Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by hundreds of sites including database dumps. Wikipedia content has also been used in academic studies, books and conferences. As of 2006, Wikipedia has been used once in a United States court case, and the Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Civil Marriage Act. Wikipedia maintains a (non-comprehensive) list of such uses.

With increased usage and awareness, there have been an increasing number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Uncyclopedia is the largest such website; its Main Page claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its [[Main Page|Main Page]]. In the episode "Wikiality" of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert has instigated his viewers to vandalize articles in humorous ways, once doing so on the Wikipedia article on elephants. "Weird Al" Yankovic's character in his video 'White & Nerdy' is seen vandalising the entry for the Atlantic record label with the exclamation "You suck!", after they rescinded permission for a parody.

See also

• Congressional staffer edits to Wikipedia
• Encyclopedia
• Internet encyclopedia project
• List of encyclopedias
• List of wikis
• Open content
• User-generated content
• Criticism of Wikipedia

External links

Find more information on Wikipedia by searching Wikipedia's sister projects:

Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews

Links to content created under a Wikimedia Foundation project

• wikipedia.org, multi-lingual portal
  • en.wikipedia.org, English language edition
• Meta-Wiki, policy-related and technical discussions regarding Wikimedia
• Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Signpost, English Wikipedia community newsletter published weekly
• Sanger, Larry, Origins of Wikipedia, essay within Sanger's English Wikipedia user page, wiki revision of 16 February 2006
• The Main Page of English-language Wikipedia at various times:
  • Main Page on 20 December 2001, from nostalgia.wikipedia.org
  • Main Page on 2 December 2003, from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Wikipedia project pages

• Wikipedia:Introduction
• Wikipedia:FAQ
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies
• Wikipedia:Press releases
• Wikipedia:Press coverage
• Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great
• Wikipedia:Replies to common objections
• Wikipedia:Statistics

Overviews

• Wikipedia at the Open Directory Project
• Template:SourceWatch
• Dennis, Michael A., "Wikipedia" (2007). In Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Reports and news articles (chronological)

For an expanded list maintained by Wikipedia contributors, see Wikipedia:Press coverage

• Meyers, Peter, Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You, New York Times 20 September 2001
• Viegas, Fernanda B., Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations", CHI 2004 April 24 – April 29 2004. Preliminary report "History Flow" available on the IBM website.
• Udell, Jon, Heavy metal umlaut: the movie, screencast illustrating the editing process on a selected Wikipedia article, 22 January 2005
• Sanger, Larry, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir, from Slashdot and Open Sources 2.0, 18 April 2005
• Worldwide Wikimania, The Guardian, 11 August 2005
• Interview with Jimmy Wales, CEO of WikiPedia," nPost, November 1 2005
• Seigenthaler, John, Sr., "A false Wikipedia 'biography'", USA Today, 29 November 2005
• Giles, Jim, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica, 14 December 2005
  • Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., March 2006
  • Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature, 23 March 2006
• Berinstein, Paula, "Wikipedia and Britannica: The Kid’s All Right (And So’s the Old Man)", Searcher Vol. 14 No. 3, March 2006
• Vaknin, Sam, The Six Sins of the Wikipedia, YoursDaily.com, 7 April 2006
• Sjöberg, Lore, The Wikipedia FAQK, Wired News, 19 April 2006
• Rosenzweig, Roy, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46
• Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy The New York Times (June 17, 2006)
• Schiff, Stacy, Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?, The New Yorker, July 31 2006
• Levine, Robert, "The Many Voices of Wikipedia, Heard in One Place", New York Times, 7 August 2006
• Poe, Marshall, The Hive, The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006
• Pearson, Helen, Textbook free for all, Nature, 15 September 2006
• Hubbard, John, Why Wiki?, a library video course on Wikipedia, October 10 2006
• Kirschner, Ann, Adventures in the Land of Wikipedia, from the November 17 2006 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Other

• Uncyclopedia: Uncyclopedia, a satirical parody of Wikipedia
• WiKP: WiKP, a Google-based Wikipedia search engine