• Home

Wikipedia :

Welcome to Wikipedia, the communal encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Begun in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference website on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, written collaboratively by people from all around the world. This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link.

Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which has created an entire family of wiki projects. On Wikipedia, and its sister projects, you are welcome to be bold and edit articles yourself, contributing knowledge as you see fit in a collaborative way.

In every article, links will guide you to associated articles, often with additional information. You are welcome to add further information, cross-references, or citations, so long as you do so within Wikipedia's editing policies and to an appropriate standard. You do not need to fear accidentally damaging Wikipedia when you add or improve information, as other Wikipedeans are always around to advise or correct obvious errors if needed, and the Wikipedia encyclopedia software, known as Mediawiki, is carefully designed to allow easy reversal of editorial mistakes.

Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which in principle anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in some very important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this in order to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation which has been recently added and not yet removed. (See Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia for more details)

If you have not done so before, we invite you to take a few moments to read What Wikipedia is (and is not) and Researching with Wikipedia, so that you have an understanding of how to use, rely upon or contribute to Wikipedia as you continue. Further information on a variety of key topics can be found below.

Happy browsing!

Wikipedia information is free for anyone to use

Main article: Wikipedia:Copyright

Wikipedia contributions are voluntarily given under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which applies the legal principle known as copyleft, a way of using the copyright process to prevent information being controlled by any one person, to ensure it remains freely accessible forever.

All of the information in Wikipedia is free for anyone to copy, modify for their own purposes, and redistribute or use as they see fit, as long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a credit or backlink to the original article is sufficient for this). For full information see the copyright page or the text of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Making the best use of Wikipedia

Exploring Wikipedia

Main article: Wikipedia:Explore

Many visitors come to this site to acquire knowledge. The other reason visitors come to this site is to share knowledge. In fact, at this very instant, dozens of articles are being improved. You can view the changes at the Recent changes page. New articles are also being recorded. Many different kinds of people help to write Wikipedia articles.

Wikipedia also has many ongoing projects. The hope of any contributor is to provide useful and accurate information to others, and the projects help coordinate efforts. Most articles start as stubs, but after many contributions, they can become featured articles.

If you are searching for free information about a subject you can't find in Wikipedia, you may want to request articles or ask a question on the reference desk. You can also decide to view a random article.

You might also enjoy reading Wikipedia in other languages. Wikipedia has more than a hundred different languages (see other language versions), including a Simple English version, and related projects include a dictionary, quotations, books, manuals and scientific reference sources, and a news service (see sister projects). All of these are maintained, updated and managed by separate communities, and often include thought-provoking information and articles which can be hard to find through other common sources.

Basic navigation in Wikipedia

Main article: Wikipedia:Basic navigation

Wikipedia articles are all linked, or cross-referenced. Wherever you see highlighted text like this, it means there is a link to some relevant article or Wikipedia page with further in-depth information elsewhere if you need it. Holding your mouse over the link will often show you where a link will take you. You are always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached.

There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external web sites and pages, reference material, and organized categories of knowledge which you can search and traverse in a loose hierarchy for more information.

Some articles may also have links to dictionary definitions, audio-book readings, quotations, or the same article in other languages.

You can add further links if a relevant link is missing, and this is one way to contribute.

Using Wikipedia as a research tool

Main article: Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia As a wiki, articles are never complete. They are continually edited and improved over time, and in general this results in an upward trend of quality, and a growing consensus over a fair and balanced representation of information.

Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start. Indeed, many articles commence their lives as partisan, and it is after a long process of discussion, debate and argument, that they gradually take on a consensus form. Others may for a while become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint which can take some time - months perhaps - to extricate themselves and regain a better balanced consensus.

In part, this is because Wikipedia operates an internal resolution process when editors cannot agree on content and approach, and such issues take time to come to the attention of more experienced editors.

The ideal Wikipedia article is balanced, neutral and encyclopedic, containing notable verifiable knowledge. An increasing number of articles reach this standard over time, and many already have. However this is a process and can take months or years to be achieved, as each user adds their contribution in turn. Some articles contain statements and claims which have not yet been fully cited. Others will later have entire new sections added. Some information will be considered by later contributors to be insufficiently founded, and may be removed or expounded.

While the overall trend is generally upward, it is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source, since individual articles will, by their nature, vary in standard and maturity. There are guidelines and information pages designed to help users and researchers do this effectively.

Summary of strengths, weaknesses and article quality in Wikipedia Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses and differences arise because it is open to anyone, has a large contributor base, and articles are written by consensus according to editorial guidelines and policies.

Wikipedia is open to a large contributor base -- so it is less susceptible to retaining bias, is very hard for any group to censor, and is far more responsive to new information, especially information not widely known in the West, and it is more easily vandalized or susceptible to unchecked information later needing removal. Wikipedia is written by consensus -- so eventually for most articles, all notable views become fairly described and a very neutral stance can be achieved even on emotive subjects, and the reaching of consensus takes considerably longer than a simple drafting, and is occasionally made harder by extreme-viewpoint contributors. (Articles also tend to be more fluid or changeable for a long time compared to other reference sources until they find their "neutral approach" that all sides can agree on.) Key strengths: (Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great)

Having a very large number of active writers and editors in many languages, Wikipedia often provides access and breadth on subject matter that is otherwise inaccessible or little documented. Wikipedia often produces excellent encyclopedic articles and resources covering newsworthy events within hours or days of their occurrence. Wikipedia is one of few sites even attempting neutral, objective, encyclopedic coverage of popular culture. The Western-centric bias found in many Western publications is significantly reduced on Wikipedia. In comparison with most web-based resources, Wikipedia's open approach tremendously increases the chances that any particular factual error or misleading statement will be relatively promptly corrected. There is no one central point where censorship can be imposed, and therefore censorship by any given group, restriction to "officially reported" sources, or "pushing" of any particular viewpoint, whether official or unofficial, is difficult to achieve and almost always fails after a time. In contrast with many web resources, information added to Wikipedia never "vanishes", and is never "lost" or deleted. Key weaknesses: (Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great)

Wikipedia's radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state, such as in the middle of a large edit, a controversial rewrite, or recently vandalized. Wikipedia operates a full editorial dispute resolution process, that allows time for a discussion to be discussed and resolved in depth, but also permits months-long disagreements before poor quality or biased edits will be removed forcibly. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is more subject to subtle vandalism and viewpoint promotion than a typical reference work. There is no systematic process to make sure that "obviously important" topics are written about, so Wikipedia may contain unexpected oversights and omissions. Articles may be incomplete in ways that would be less usual in a more tightly controlled reference work, for example some aspects may be well covered but others briefly or not at all. Many contributors do not yet comply fully with key policies, or may add information without citable sources. Quality of information: (Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia)

While Wikipedia articles generally attain a good standard after editing, it is important to note that fledgling, or less well monitored, articles may be susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information, although this usually ceases to be as significant a problem as articles mature. Inappropriate edits are often noticed and corrected within a relatively short time on most articles. (See for example this 2005 incident reported by the Boston Herald, resulting from a person who inserted a fake biography linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations and Soviet Russia as a joke on a co-worker, saying afterwards he "didn’t know [Wikipedia] was used as a serious reference tool.")

How Wikipedia differs from a paper encyclopedia

Main article: Wikipedia is not paper

Disclaimers

Main article: Wikipedia:Disclaimers

Content advisories can also be found here.

Contributing to Wikipedia

Main articles: Contributing to Wikipedia, First steps in editing articles, Bootcamp Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia by clicking on the Edit this page tab in an article. Before beginning to contribute however, you should check out some handy helping tools such as the tutorial and the policies and guidelines, as well as our welcome page.

It is important to realize that in contributing to Wikipedia, users are expected to be civil and neutral, respecting all points of view, and only add verifiable and factual information rather than personal views and opinions. "The five pillars of Wikipedia" cover this approach and are recommended reading before editing.

Who writes Wikipedia?

Main article: Wikipedia:Who writes Wikipedia

There are tens of thousands of regular editors - everyone from expert scholars to casual readers. Anyone who visits the site can edit it, and this fact has encouraged contribution of a tremendous amount of content. There are mechanisms that help community members watch for bad edits, a few hundred administrators with special powers to enforce good behavior, and a judicial committee which considers the few situations remaining unresolved, and decides on withdrawal or restriction of editing privileges or other punishments when needed, after all other consensus remedies have been tried. The site is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is largely uninvolved in daily operation and writing.

Editing Wikipedia pages

Main article, including list of common mark-up shortcuts: Wikipedia:How to edit a page Wikipedia uses a simple yet powerful page layout to allow editors to concentrate on adding material rather than page design. These include automatic sections and subsections, automatic references and cross-references, image and table inclusion, indented and listed text, links ISBNs and math, as well as usual formatting elements and most world alphabets and common symbols. Most of these have simple formats that are deliberately very easy and intuitive.

Wikipedia has robust version and reversion controls. This means that poor quality edits or vandalism can quickly and easily be reversed or brought up to an appropriate standard by any other editors, so inexperienced editors cannot accidentally do permanent harm if they make a mistake in their editing. As there are many more editors intent upon good quality articles than any other kind, articles which are poorly edited are usually corrected rapidly.

Wikipedia content criteria

Main article: Wikipedia:Wikipedia in eight words

Wikipedia content is intended to be factual, notable, verifiable with external sources, and neutrally presented, with external sources cited.

The appropriate policies and guidelines for these are found at:

Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not summarizes what Wikipedia is, and what it is not. Wikipedia:Neutral point of view wikipedia's core approach, neutral unbiased article writing. Wikipedia:No original research what is, and is not, valid information Wikipedia:Verifiability what counts as a verifiable source and how a source can be verified Wikipedia:Citing sources sources should be cited, and the manner of doing so. These can be abbreviated to WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:V, and WP:CITE respectively.

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia history

For more details on this topic, see History of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was seen as very slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed various ways to supplement Nupedia with a more open, complementary project.

On the evening of January 2, 2001, Sanger had a conversation over dinner with Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer, in San Diego, California. Kovitz, who was a regular on "Ward's Wiki" (the WikiWikiWeb), explained the wiki concept to Sanger. Sanger saw that a wiki would be an excellent format whereby a more open, less formal encyclopedia project could be pursued. Sanger easily persuaded Wales, who had been introduced to the wiki concept previously, to set up a wiki for Nupedia, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10.

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, however, so the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now humorously called "Wikipedia Day" by some users). The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have done some work on the encyclopedia include Tim Shell, one of the co-founders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey.

In May 2001, the first wave of non-English Wikipedias were launched (in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, German, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian . In September, [4] a further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbocroatian versions were announced.

Wikipedia statistics

Main articles: Wikipedia:Statistics, Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia There are 13,000 active contributors working on over 3,800,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there are 996,705 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the amount of knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Visitors do not need any special qualifications to contribute, and people of all ages help to write Wikipedia articles.

All the text in Wikipedia, and most of the images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information).

Behind Wikipedia

Wikipedia uses the Mediawiki software. It's an open-source program that is used on all Wikimedia projects.

The hardware supporting the various projects is based on almost 100 servers hosted in various hosting centers around the world. Full descriptions of the various servers are available on this meta page.

For technical information about Wikipedia, you can check Technical FAQs.

Culture

Category:Wikipedia culture contains a wealth of content about how Wikipedians see themselves and the project. You will find humor, essays, awards, and more.

Feedback and questions Wikipedia itself is run as a communal effort. It is a community project whose end result is an encyclopaedia. Feedback about content should, in the first instance, be raised on the discussion pages of those articles. You are invited to be bold and edit the pages yourself to add information or correct mistakes if you are knowledgable and able to do so.

Giving feedback

There is an established escalation and dispute process within Wikipedia, as well as pages designed for raising questions, feedback, suggestions and comments:

Wikipedia:Talk pages -- the associated discussion page for discussion of an article or policy's contents. This is usually the first place to go. Wikipedia:Vandalism -- to report vandalism (you're encouraged to fix vandalism yourself as well as report it) Wikipedia:Dispute resolution -- for disputes which remain unresolved within an article's talk space. Wikipedia:Village pump -- the Wikipedia discussion area, part of the community portal.

Contacting individual Wikipedia editors If you need more information, the first place to go is the Help:Contents. To contact individual contributors, leave a message on their talk page. Standard places to ask policy and project-related questions are the village pump, online, and the Wikipedia mailing lists, over e-mail. You can also reach other Wikipedians via IRC and instant messenger.

There is also a meta-Wikipedia, a site for coordinating the various Wikipedia projects (and abstract discussions of policy and direction), and there are many different places for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

Source

Wikipedia

For information on the internal side of Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:About.

The Wikipedia logo.Wikipedia (pronounced /?w?ki'pi?di.?/ or /?wiki-/) is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia wiki service. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an Internet connection. The project began on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has more than 3,380,000 articles, including more than 995,000 in the English-language version. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,[1] and its success has spawned several sister projects. There has, however, been controversy over its reliability.

Wikipedia is regularly cited in the mass media and academia, sometimes critically, and sometimes to praise it for its free distribution, constant editing, and diverse coverage, not to mention its multilingual dimensions. It is often cited not as a subject but as a source on other subjects. Editors are encouraged to uphold a policy of "neutral point of view" under which notable perspectives are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth. Wikipedia's status as a reference work has been controversial since its open nature allows vandalism, inaccuracy, inconsistency, uneven quality, and unsubstantiated opinions. It has also been criticised for systemic bias, preference of consensus or popularity to credentials, and a perceived lack of accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias. But the scope and detail of its articles, as well as its constant updates, have made it a useful reference source for millions.

There are over 200 language editions of Wikipedia, around 100 of which are active. Thirteen editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Norwegian. Its German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there are proposals for an English DVD/paper edition. Many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by websites.

Characteristics

Related topics: Criticism of Wikipedia

Detail of Wikipedia's multilingual portal at http://www.wikipedia.org. Here, the project's largest language editions are shown.Wikipedia's slogan is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", and the project is described by its co-founder Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."[2] It is developed on the wikipedia.org website using a type of software called a "wiki", a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb and derived from the Hawaiian Wiki Wiki, which means "quick". Wales intends for Wikipedia to achieve a "Britannica or better" quality and be published in print.

Although several other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet, none has achieved Wikipedia's success. Traditional multilingual editorial policies and article ownership are used in some, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the now-defunct Nupedia. More casual websites such as h2g2 or Everything2 serve as general guides, the articles of which are written and controlled by individuals. Projects such as Wikipedia, Susning.nu, and the Enciclopedia Libre are wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal process of review. Wikipedia has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word count. Unlike many encyclopedias, it has licensed its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.

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.

Free content

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license through which Wikipedia's articles are made available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content provided its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When an author contributes original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained with them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Wikipedia may thus be distributed multilingually to, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license. Wikipedia's content has been mirrored or forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Wikipedia's images and sounds are non-free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. media]].[Less frequently, it has been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. For instance, the Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Bill C-38.[4] Noncomprehensive lists of such uses are maintained by Wikipedians.

Language editions

Wikipedia's article count has grown quickly in several of the major language editions.Wikipedia encompasses 123 "active" language editions (100+ articles) as of January 2006.[6] Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, German, French, Polish and Japanese. In total, Wikipedia contains 211 language editions of varying states with a combined 3.3 million articles.

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, and are only held to global policies such as "neutral point of view". Articles and images are nonetheless shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through pages to request translations organized on many of the larger language editions, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in any edition.

The following is a list of the large editions, sorted by number of articles as of 1 February 2006. (The article count, however, is a limited metric for comparing the editions. For instance, in some Wikipedia versions nearly half of the articles are short articles created automatically by robots.)

An example of Wikipedia's range in language editions: Wikipedia in Hebrew.English (996,377) German (355,862) French (240,264) Polish (216,777) Japanese (182,280) Italian (138,178) Swedish (137,140) Dutch (132,978) Portuguese (115,846) Spanish (94,143) Russian (58,545) Chinese (56,826) Norwegian Bokmål (50,891) Finnish (49,208) Esperanto (40,652)

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 articles, and registered users can create new ones and have their changes 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. Further, this real-time, collaborative model allows rapid updating of existing topics and introduction of new topics. The authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who so wishes. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group. Decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia is instead done by consensus and occasionally by vote. Jimmy Wales retains final judgement on Wikipedia policies and user guidelines.

By the nature of its openness, "edit wars" and prolonged disputes often occur when editors do not agree. A few members of its community have explained its editing process as a collaborative work, a "socially Darwinian evolutionary process", but this is not generally considered by the community to be an accurate self-description. Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time due to vandalism or revert wars; therefore, Wikipedia does not declare any article finished. Some users attempt to enter malicious or amusing but irrelevant information, but changes of this sort are normally removed quickly.

Regular users often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they are immediately shown which of these articles have changed since their last log in. This allows monitoring of daily editing to prevent false information and spam, and also to keep up with other editors' views, or updates, of the subjects on the watchlist.

Because of the wiki-principle, all edits of a Wikipedia article are kept in an edit history which can be looked at by everyone. Wikipedia is the first major encyclopedia where everybody can see how an article evolved over time and if, or how and where the content of an article was controversial. All controversial standpoints which were once voiced and afterwards deleted and even plain page vandalism remain visible for everyone and provide additional information about the article's topic and its degree of controversy and add the dimension of time to every article.

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia "originated" from Nupedia.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 9 March 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; not having size limitations, as it was on the Internet; and 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 licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License initially, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License prior to Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

Wikipedia's English edition on March 20, 2001, two and a half months after its founding.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 see."

Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. It had been, from 10 January, 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 "nonbias" 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 among 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.

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 from Ben Kovitz, a regular at this wiki, in January 2001, and proposed a creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales that Wikipedia's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki 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 fear 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 moved its website to wikipedia.org. Projects have since forked from Wikipedia's content 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."

From Wikipedia and Nupedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was created on June 20, 2003.[19] Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki" had been created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotes, 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, detailed below.

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 1,000 to 3,000 per day across all editions. The English Wikipedia reached a 100,000 article milestone on January 22, 2003[20]. Wikipedia reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on September 20, 2004, while the English edition alone reached its 500,000th on March 18, 2005.

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 servicemark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet".

There are currently plans to license the usage of the Wikipedia trademark for some products like books or DVDs.[23] The German Wikipedia will be printed in its entirety by Directmedia, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication will begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010.

Software and hardware

Wikipedia receives between 2000 and 7000 page views per second. Over 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic. Picture of the Wikimedia servers on the first day of installation.Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated 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 CamelCase 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 was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects.

Wikipedia was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into an n-tier distributed 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 two 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. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France. A new Dutch cluster is also online now. In spite of all this, Wikipedia page load times remain quite variable. The ongoing status of Wikipedia's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.

Funding

Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.

Bomis, an on-line advertising company that hosts mostly adult-oriented web-rings, played a significant part in the early development of Wikipedia.

Evaluations

Wikipedia's claimed status as an encyclopedia has been increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence. This is seen in articles and discussion venues both within Wikipedia and elsewhere. Information related to evaluations of Wikipedia, including individual opinions, quality control, and awards are discussed below.

General criticism

Main article at Criticism of Wikipedia

Criticism of Wikipedia has increased with its prominence. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of the articles. Notable criticisms include that its open nature makes Wikipedia unauthoritative and unreliable, that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals.

Wikipedia is criticised on the following issues:

Usefulness as a reference Anti-elitism as a weakness Systemic bias in coverage Systemic bias in perspective Difficulty of fact checking Use of dubious sources Exposure to vandals Privacy concerns Quality concerns Flame wars Fanatics and special interests Censorship It must be noted that many university lecturers discourage their students from using Wikipedia as a reference in academic work.

Quality

Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality.

Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. A website called Wikipedia Watch has been created to denounce Wikipedia as having "...a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."

Some argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window"(Waldman, 2004). Similarly, 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." On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Wikipedia?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, danah boyd said in 2005 that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes".

Be Bold has become the unofficial slogan of Wikipedia.Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,

"[h]owever closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler... 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." In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles; see for example Wikipedia:Provenance. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security." However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial (see Wikipedia talk:Provenance). Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.

Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus' law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow." Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived." Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.

Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." (Note that this is not true anymore as of December 2005.) Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."

The English-language website also suffers from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative impact on Wikipedia's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information.

It has been praised for, as a wiki, allowing articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.

Microsoft Encarta has started to solicit comments from readers in attempt to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its encyclopedia. Encarta Feedback allows any user to propose revisions for review by their staff.

The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-"), Brockhaus Premium 3.3, and Microsoft Encarta 3.1. In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Wikipedia improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events.". The journal Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Wikipedia are comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia had an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contained three. Of eight "serious errors" found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source. (Nature, 438, pp 900-901, 15 December 2005).

At the end of 2005, controversy erupted after journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. found that his biography had been vandalized. This led to the decision to restrict the ability to start articles to registered users.

Community

The Wikipedia community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. 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.[18] Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article.

In a page on researching with Wikipedia, its authors argue that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen. Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

Wikipedia related communities, such as The Wikipedia Review, whose members tend to dislike Wikipedia, also exist.

Awards

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004: The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 euro 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.

Wikipedia has received plaudits from sources including BBC News, 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.

Authors

During January 2005, Wikipedia had about 13,000 or more users who made at least five edits that month; 9,000 of these active users worked on its three largest language editions. A more active group of about 3,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the three largest editions. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Wikipedia's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia. 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 its English 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 a social experiment in anarchy or democracy. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence.

Source