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Wikipedia
Wikipedia-logo.png
Wikipedia's multilingual portal shows the project's different language editions.
Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal.
URL http://wikipedia.org/
Slogan The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Registration Optional
Available language(s) 240 active editions (272 in total)
Content license Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 3.0 and GFDL dual-license
Owner Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1]
Launched January 15, 2001 (2001-01-15) (9 years ago)
Alexa rank 6[2]
Current status Perpetual work-in-progress[3]
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia

Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə/ WI-ki- PEE-dee-ə) is a free,[4] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 14 million articles (3.1 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[5] It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[6] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.[2][7][8][9]

Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[10] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[11] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[12] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[13] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[14][15 ] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[16]

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[17] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[18][19]

Contents

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[20]

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[21][22] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[23][24] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[25] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[26] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[27] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[23] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[28] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[23]

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

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.[29] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[30]

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.[31] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[32] Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol[33] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.

Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against logistic curves for 3, 3.5 and 4 million articles appears to suggest that Wikipedia may reach about 3.5 million articles by 2013.

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around Spring 2007.[34] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009, that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[35] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal". This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[36][37]

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[38][39] The finding was later disputed by Jimmy Wales, who admitted the decline in the number but questioned the methodology of the study.[40]

Nature of Wikipedia

See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies of Wikipedia

Editing model

Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[41]

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs the open editing model called "wiki". Except for a few vandalism-prone pages that can be edited only by established users, or in extreme cases only by administrators, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors.[42]

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[43] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[44][45] Another proposal is the use of software to create "trust ratings" for individual Wikipedia contributors and using those ratings to determine which changes will be made visible immediately.[46]

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

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[47][48] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[49] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[15 ] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.

Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article": they are precisely ones that someday get featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[50][51] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[52] other editions have also adopted this.

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate works on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, cases in which an article must start with the article title in bold in the first sentence.

In 2008, two researchers theorized that the growth of Wikipedia is sustainable.[53]

Attacks on the encyclopedia

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been vandalized with the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopaedia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[54]

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. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[55]
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[56]

In practice, vandalism is fairly easy to remove from wikis, and the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is typically very low, usually a few minutes,[14][15 ] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[56] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked him, "...Do you ...have any way to know who wrote that?" "No, we don't", said Jimmy.[57] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[47][58] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[13] has been noted,[59] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[60] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[61]

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[62 ]

The Wikipedia has a complex multi-layered defence against these kinds of attacks. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect them and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[63] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[64]

Coverage of topics

The 20 most viewed Wikipedia articles in 2009[65]
Wiki
The Beatles
Michael Jackson
Favicon
YouTube
Wikipedia
Barack Obama
Deaths in 2009
United States
Facebook
Current events portal
World War II
Twitter
Transformers
Slumdog Millionaire
Lil Wayne
Adolf Hitler
India
Transformers 2
Scrubs (TV series)
See also: Notability in Wikipedia

As an encyclopedia building project, Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge: all of the topics covered by a conventional print encyclopedia plus any other "notable" (therefore verifiable by published sources) topics, which are permitted by unlimited disk space.[66] In particular, it contains materials that some people, including Wikipedia editors,[67] may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.[68] It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site.[69] (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia)

Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) in Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted, and several editorial policies and guidelines that are intended to reinforce the notion that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and thus is worthy of inclusion. A topic is deemed encyclopedic if it is "notable"[70] in the Wikipedia jargon; i.e., if it has received significant coverage in secondary reliable sources (i.e., mainstream media or major academic journals) that are independent of the subject of the topic. Second, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[71] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to reliable sources. Within the Wikipedia community, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers are left themselves to check the truthfulness of what appears in the articles and to make their own interpretations.[72] Finally, Wikipedia does not take a side.[73] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[74] Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[75] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. (See also deletionism and inclusionism)[76][77]

As of September 2009, Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are written about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of large parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.[78]

A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University and Research Center Palo Alto gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to Jan 2008) in each field:[79]

  • Culture and Arts 30% (210%)
  • Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)
  • Geography and places: 14% (52%)
  • Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)
  • History and events: 11% (143%)
  • Natural and Physical Sciences: 9% (213%)
  • Technology and Applied Science: 4% (-6%)
  • Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)
  • Health: 2% (42%)
  • Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)
  • Thought and Philosophy: 1% (160%)

Quality

Critics argue that non-expert editing undermines quality. Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Historian Roy Rosenzweig noted: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."[80]

Reliability

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.[81] Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[82] the insertion of spurious information[83], vandalism, and similar problems.

Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[12] additionally, critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[84] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.[11] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[85] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[86] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[87] Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[88]

However, an investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[16] These claims have been disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.[89 ]

Andrew Lih, author of the 2009 book The Wikipedia Revolution, notes: "A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection... Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.”[90] Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[91]

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[92] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[93] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything". He also said that "a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way."[93]

Community

The Wikipedia community has established "a bureaucracy of sorts", including "a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control."[94][95][96] Wikipedia's community has also been described as "cult-like",[97] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[98] and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[99] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator",[100][101] a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead they are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to block users making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).[102][103]

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

As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.[104] Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.[105] A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site."[106] Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[10]

In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.[107] In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society cites Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web.[108] A 2008 study found that Wikipedia users were less agreeable and open, though more conscientious, than non-Wikipedia users.[109][110] A 2009 study suggested there was "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content."[111]

At OOPSLA 2009, Wikimedia CTO and Senior Software Architect gave a presentation entitled "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site"[112] in which he discussed the challenges of handling the contributions from a large community and compared the process to that of software development.

The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia,[113] and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the current chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.[114] It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.[115]

Notable users of Wikipedia include film critic Roger Ebert[116][117] and University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park.[118]

Operation

Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters

Wikimedia Foundation logo

Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wikibooks. The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of Wikipedia users, also participate in the promotion, the development, and the funding of the project.

Software and hardware

The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database.[119] The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed[120] to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension[121][122] was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. Currently Lucene Search 2.1,[123] which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3,[124] is used.

Overview of system architecture, April 2009. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.

Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu),[125][126] with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam.[127] Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.[128] Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers.[129] Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.

Delivery media

Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed internet connection. However, Wikipedia content is now also accessible through offline media, and through the mobile web.

On mobile devices access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), through the Wapedia service. In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009 a newer mobile service was officially released,[130] located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or the Palm Pre. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged (See Wikipedia:Mobile access). Several devices and applications optimise or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata (See Wikipedia:Metadata), such as geoinformation.[131]

Collections of Wikipedia articles have been published on optical disks. An English version, 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles.[132][133] The Polish version contains nearly 240,000 articles.[134] There are also German versions.[135]

License and language editions

See also: List of Wikipedias

All text in Wikipedia was covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work,[136] up until June 2009, when the site switched to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-by-SA) 3.0.[137] Wikipedia had been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses were incompatible.[138] In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC-BY-SA by August 1, 2009. Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch.[139] The referendum took place from April 9 to 30.[140] The results were 75.8% "Yes", 10.5% "No", and 13.7% "No opinion".[141] In consequence of the referendum, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees voted to change to the Creative Commons license, effective June 15, 2009.[141] The position that Wikipedia is merely a hosting service has been successfully used as a defense in court.[142][143]

Percentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest language editions (blue). As of July 2007, less than 23% of Wikipedia articles are in English.

The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to. This is in part because of the difference in copyright laws between countries; for example, the notion of fair use does not exist in Japanese copyright law. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' cc-by-sa) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are currently 262 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, 24 have over 100,000 articles and 81 have over 1,000 articles.[144] According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 54% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Japanese: 10%, German: 8%, Spanish: 5%, Russian: 4%, French: 4%, Italian: 3%).[2] As of July 2008, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish, and Japanese Wikipedias.[145]

Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour)[146] or points of view.[147] Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.[148][149][150]

Contributors for English Wikipedia by country as of September 2006.[151]

Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".[152] Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others).[153] For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia,[154] and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have.[155] The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed.[156] Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.

Cultural significance

Graph showing the number of days between every 10,000,000th edit.
Wikipedia shown in Weird Al's music video for his song "White & Nerdy".
Main article: Wikipedia in culture

In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,[157] Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.[158] According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide.[9][159] Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit website. The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results;[160] about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google,[161] a good portion of which is related to academic research.[162] In April 2007 the Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia.[163] In October 2006, the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran advertisements.[164]

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[165][166][167] The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act.[168] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization[169] – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[170] Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency reports.[171] In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.[172]

The Onion satirical newspaper headline "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence"

Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[173] often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[174][175][176] In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4[177] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st-century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th-century terms as Hoovering or Coca-Cola. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".[61]

The site has created an impact upon several forms of media. Some media sources satirize Wikipedia's susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, such as a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006 with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence".[178] Others may draw upon Wikipedia's statement that anyone can edit, such as "The Negotiation," an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott said that "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information". Other media sources parody Wikipedia's policies, such as the xkcd strip named "Wikipedian Protester."

An xkcd strip titled "Wikipedian Protester"

Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen premiered his 45-minute television documentary The Truth According to Wikipedia in April, 2008.[179]

On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Wikipedia, "the seventh most consulted website" to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.[180]

Jimmy Wales receiving the Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award

On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 U.S. election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day."[181] An October 2007 Reuters article, titled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.[182]

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[183] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.[184] Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. On January 26, 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fourth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[185]

In September 2008, Wikipedia received Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadić, Eckart Höfling, and Peter Gabriel. The award was presented to Jimmy Wales by David Weinberger.[186]

In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.[187]

Related projects

A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008.[188] One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams and is run by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users. A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.[20]

Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects, which are also run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki",[189] created in October 2002,[190] detailed the September 11 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[191] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, including Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities.[192] None of these sister projects, however, has come to meet the success of Wikipedia.

Some subsets of Wikipedia's information have been developed, often with additional review for specific purposes. For example, Wikipedia for Schools, the Wikipedia series of CDs/DVDs, produced by Wikipedians and SOS Children, is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia targeted around the UK National Curriculum and intended to be useful for much of the English speaking world.[193] The project is available online; an equivalent print encyclopedia would require roughly 20 volumes. There has also been an attempt to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.[194][195]

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, Hudong, Baidu Baike, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2, and Everything2. The online wiki-based encyclopedia Citizendium was started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in an attempt to create an "expert-friendly" Wikipedia.[196][197][198]

See also

Wikipedia portal

Notes

  1. ^ Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041206/news_mz1b6encyclo.html. Retrieved 2006-10-15.  
  2. ^ a b c "Five-year Traffic Statistics for Wikipedia.org". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t. Retrieved 2009-10-13.  
  3. ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a work in progress". Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_in_progress. Retrieved 2008-07-03.  
  4. ^ Some versions, such as the English language version, contain non-free content.
  5. ^ In some parts of the world, the access to Wikipedia had been blocked.
  6. ^ Mike Miliard (2008-03-01). "Wikipediots: Who Are These Devoted, Even Obsessive Contributors to Wikipedia?". Salt Lake City Weekly. http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-5129-feature-wikipediots-who-are-these-devoted-even-obsessive-contributors-to-wikipedia.html. Retrieved 2008-12-18.  
  7. ^ Bill Tancer (2007-05-01). "Look Who's Using Wikipedia". Time. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1595184,00.html. Retrieved 2007-12-01. "The sheer volume of content [...] is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category"   Cf. Bill Tancer (Global Manager, Hitwise), "Wikipedia, Search and School Homework", Hitwise: An Experian Company (Blog), March 1, 2007. Retrieved December 18, 2008.
  8. ^ Alex Woodson (2007-07-08). "Wikipedia remains go-to site for online news". Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN0819429120070708. Retrieved 2007-12-16. "Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings."  
  9. ^ a b "Top 500". Alexa. http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none. Retrieved 2009-10-13.  
  10. ^ a b Larry Sanger, Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, Kuro5hin, December 31, 2004.
  11. ^ a b Danah Boyd (2005-01-04). "Academia and Wikipedia". Many 2 Many: A Group Weblog on Social Software. Corante. http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php. Retrieved 2008-12-18. "[The author, Danah Boyd, describes herself as] an expert on social media[,] ... a doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley [,] and a fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society [at Harvard Law School.]"  
  12. ^ a b Simon Waldman (2004-10-26). "Who knows?". Guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/oct/26/g2.onlinesupplement. Retrieved 2007-02-11.  
  13. ^ a b Ahrens, Frank (2006-07-09). "Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/08/AR2006070800135.html. Retrieved 2006-11-01.  
  14. ^ a b Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave (2004). "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations" (PDF). Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (Vienna, Austria: ACM SIGCHI): 575–582. doi:10.1145/985921.985953. ISBN 1-58113-702-8. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf. Retrieved 2007-01-24.  
  15. ^ a b c Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl (GroupLens Research, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota) (2007-11-04). "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" (PDF). Association for Computing Machinery GROUP '07 conference proceedings (Sanibel Island, Florida). http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf. Retrieved 2007-10-13.  
  16. ^ a b Jim Giles (December 2005). "Internet encyclopedias go head to head". Nature 438: 900–901. doi:10.1038/438900a. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html.   The study (that was not in itself peer reviewed) was cited in several news articles, e.g.,
  17. ^ "Time's Person of the Year: You". TIME (Time, Inc). 2006-12-13. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html. Retrieved 2008-12-26.  
  18. ^ Jonathan Dee (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01WIKIPEDIA-t.html. Retrieved 2007-12-01.  
  19. ^ Andrew Lih (2004-04-16). "Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for Evaluating Collaborative Media as a News Resource" (PDF). 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism (University of Texas at Austin). http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/utaustin-2004-wikipedia-rc2.pdf. Retrieved 2007-10-13.  
  20. ^ a b Richard M. Stallman (2007-06-20). "The Free Encyclopedia Project". Free Software Foundation. http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/encyclopedia.html. Retrieved 2008-01-04.  
  21. ^ Jonathan Sidener (2004-12-06). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041206/news_mz1b6encyclo.html. Retrieved 2006-10-15.  
  22. ^ Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E5D6123BF933A1575AC0A9679C8B63&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fC%2fComputer%20Software. Retrieved 2007-11-22. " 'I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph,' said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales."  
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  31. ^ "[long] Enciclopedia Libre: msg#00008". Osdir. http://osdir.com/ml/science.linguistics.wikipedia.international/2003-03/msg00008.html. Retrieved 2008-12-26.  
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  33. ^ BBC News
  34. ^ Bobbie Johnson. "Wikipedia approaches its limits". http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist.  
  35. ^ "The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia". the International Symposium on Wikis. Orlando, Florida. 2009. http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/procfiles/p108-suh.pdf.  
  36. ^ Evgeny Morozov. "Edit This Page; Is it the end of Wikipedia". Boston review. http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.6/morozov.php.  
  37. ^ New York Times
  38. ^ Jenny Kleeman. "Wikipedia falling victim to a war of words". Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/wikipedia-losing-disgruntled-editors.  
  39. ^ (PDF) Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis. http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/thesis-wkp-quantanalysis.  
  40. ^ "Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales denies site is 'losing' thousands of volunteer editors". Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/6660646/Wikipedias-Jimmy-Wales-denies-site-is-losing-thousands-of-volunteer-editors.html.  
  41. ^ UX and Usability Study
  42. ^ Wikipedia:Ownership of articles
  43. ^ Birken, P. (2008-12-14). "Bericht Gesichtete Versionen" (in German). Wikide-l mailing list. Wikimedia Foundation. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikide-l/2008-December/021594.html. Retrieved 2009-02-15.  
  44. ^ "Wikimedia blog » Blog Archive » A quick update on Flagged Revisions". http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/26/a-quick-update-on-flagged-revisions/. Retrieved 2009-08-30.  
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  48. ^ The Japanese Wikipedia, for example, is known for deleting every mention of real names of victims of certain high-profile crimes, even though they may still be noted in other language editions.
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  50. ^ First Monday
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  109. ^ Yair Amichai–Hamburger, Naama Lamdan, Rinat Madiel, Tsahi Hayat Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members CyberPsychology & Behavior December 1, 2008, 11(6): 679–681. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.0225
  110. ^ Wikipedians are 'closed' and 'disagreeable'
  111. ^ Jim Giles After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust? New Scientist 04 August 2009
  112. ^ http://www.infoq.com/presentations/vibber-community-perf-opt
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  159. ^ "comScore Data Center". October 2007. http://www.comscore.com/press/data.asp. Retrieved 2008-01-19.  
  160. ^ Petrilli, Michael J. "Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?". Hoover Institution 8 (2). http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/16111162.html. Retrieved 2008-03-21.  
  161. ^ "Google Traffic To Wikipedia up 166% Year over Year". Hitwise. 2007-02-16. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/02/wikipedia_traffic_sources.html. Retrieved 2007-12-22.  
  162. ^ "Wikipedia and Academic Research". Hitwise. 2006-10-17. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2006/10/wikipedia_and_academic_researc.html. Retrieved 2008-02-06.  
  163. ^ Rainie, Lee (2007-12-15). "Wikipedia users" (PDF). Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew Research Center. Archived from the original on 2008-03-06. http://web.archive.org/web/20080306031354/http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Wikipedia07.pdf. Retrieved 2007-12-15. "36% of online American adults consult Wikipedia. It is particularly popular with the well-educated and current college-age students."  
  164. ^ Karbasfrooshan, Ashkan (2006-10-26). "What is Wikipedia.org's Valuation?". http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=626. Retrieved 2007-12-01.  
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  166. ^ "Bourgeois et al. v. Peters et al." (PDF). http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200216886.pdf. Retrieved 2007-02-06.  
  167. ^ "Wikipedian Justice" (PDF). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1346311_code835394.pdf?abstractid=1346311. Retrieved 2009-06-09.  
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  170. ^ Cohen, Noam (2007-01-29). "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29wikipedia.html. Retrieved 2008-12-26.  
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  181. ^ Jose Antonio Vargas (2007-09-17). "On Wikipedia, Debating 2008 Hopefuls' Every Facet". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601699_pf.html. Retrieved 2008-12-26.  
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  187. ^ "Interview With Nick Doody and Matt Kirshen". British Comedy Guide. http://www.comedy.org.uk/guide/radio/bigipedia/interview/. Retrieved 31 July 2009.  
  188. ^ Website discussing the emulator of the Domesday Project User Interface for the data from the Community Disc (contributions from the general public) - the site is currently out of action following the death of its creator
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Further reading

Academic studies
Main article: Academic studies about Wikipedia
Books
  • Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates (September 2008). How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.  
  • Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia - The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-51516-2.   (See book rev. by Baker, as listed below.)
  • Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia Reader's Guide. Sebastopol: Pogue Press. ISBN 059652174X.  
  • Lih, Andrew (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 1401303714.  
  • Dalby, Andrew (2009). The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality. Siduri. ISBN 978-0956205209.  
Book reviews and other articles
Learning resources
Other media coverage

External links

This audio file was created from a revision dated 2005-06-25, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)
More spoken articles


Travel guide

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

From Wikitravel

Wikipedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia project started in 2001.

Relationship

There's a lot of indebtedness from Wikitravel to Wikipedia:

  • We use the software developed specifically for Wikipedia to run Wikitravel.
  • Wikitravel's format, policies, and style were largely inspired by Wikipedia's.
  • People familiar with Wikipedia are more receptive and familiar with the idea of what we're doing; they blazed the way for collaborative development of reference texts.
  • Many contributors to Wikitravel are also regular contributors to Wikipedia.

Note, however, that Wikitravel is not a Wikimedia project.

Welcome, Wikipedians

We have a special Welcome, Wikipedians page to introduce our project to people familiar with Wikipedia.

Sharing content

Wikipedia and Wikitravel have compatible licensing, and it is technically possible to share content between the two provided the license requirements are followed; in general this entails providing attribution indicating the source from which the content was taken using the Wikipedia attribution template.

However, think carefully before doing this, and discuss it with others. Wikipedia and Wikitravel have distinct goals, and forking large amounts of content from one project to the other creates wasteful duplication. In most cases, linking from one to the other would be a better choice.

As a rule, any significant copy-pasting of Wikipedia text to Wikitravel is not permitted, while borrowing the odd single turn of phrase when your writers' brain is stalling is allowed.

Linking

Linking to Wikipedia allows people to access encyclopedic information that doesn't fit into the framework of a travel guide. For example, the entry on the United Kingdom should have a thumbnail sketch of the country's history, but detailed information on Henry VIII is inappropriate. A link to Wikipedia's UK article would allow readers to find non-travel related information about their destination of choice, without stretching Wikitravel beyond recognition into an "everything you need to know about everything" guide.

If there's a page on Wikipedia that covers the exact same subject as a page on Wikitravel, but from an encyclopedic rather than travel guide point of view, consider making a twin link to the page. And if you link to Wikipedia, it's also nice to link back from Wikipedia to Wikitravel as well. See links to and from Wikipedia for how to do this.

However, don't use links as an excuse to be lazy. Wikitravel entries should be useful and self-contained; links should provide additional information. Writing "Everything you need to know about France is here, except that there's a good bagel place in Lyon" is not helpful.

Specific projects

There are always various projects in the works at Wikipedia, similiar to Wikitravel's concept of Expeditions. Some of these could be used by both Wikipedia and Wikitravel. See, for example, the work being done on maps.

MediaWiki

All Wikimedia wikis use the same software as Wikitravel. The software is called MediaWiki, and it's Free Software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It's written in PHP, and uses the MySQL database engine to store page and user information. It was originally created by Wikipedia developers, but it's now used for a number of other projects (see sites using MediaWiki for a list).

Helping out with the MediaWiki software means that Wikitravel works better. It also shows that we're grateful for this great software, and that we want to give something back to the people who worked so hard to make it. It builds up goodwill, since anything we do for MediaWiki will help users for all the sites using MediaWiki.

Some things to do to help with MediaWiki:

  • Report bugs. MediaWiki has a bug tracker; you can use that tool to submit new bugs. Make sure that it's a problem with the software and not with Wikitravel first, of course, and check to make sure that the bug you've identified isn't already in the tracker. But identifying bugs helps developers improve the quality of the software.
  • Suggest enhancements. If you have a good idea for how to enhance the MediaWiki software, submit a Request For Enhancement ("RFE") on the SourceForge site. Again, try to make sure that the request hasn't already been made in the tracker. Identifying new features for MediaWiki can make it easier for users of all MediaWiki sites to make great content.
  • Submit patches. If you know PHP, you can review the features and bugs that have been submitted, and try to create patches for them. Patches for MediaWiki should be submitted to the Wikimedia developers mailing list.
  • Write documentation. There's a Wiki-based, user-edited user's guide for MediaWiki on the Wikipedia meta-site. You can contribute to the user's guide, which will help all users of the software.
  • Join the MediaWiki project. If you know PHP, you can join the MediaWiki SourceForge project and help with the maintenance of the MediaWiki codebase and its further development.

See also

List of related projects


Quotes

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

From Wikiquote

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Wikipedia is a Web-based, freely editable encyclopedia by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Sourced

  • [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.
  • Wikipedia's promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge - both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. This is a radically popular idea.
    • The Economist, 20 April 2006
  • When I visited the offices [in St. Petersburg, Florida] in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
  • Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.
  • You just can't put something with commercial motive into Wikipedia. Admitting it is hardly better; it is still a crime. The Wikipedians and bloggers will attack hard and they will deserve what they get.
  • You set up this fantastic site, with people sending information all around the world, and you don't make any money of it! It's practically an un-American activity!
  • Hofstadter: The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
    Solomon: So fix it.
    Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back.
  • It seems that Wikipedia.com, that splendid source for all kinds of information, is no longer dedicated to the truth, assuming it ever was.
    Individuals who have tried to edit the pages about Barack Obama — to reflect the incontrovertible fact that he is not God, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan — report that their contributions have vanished within minutes of posting them, and that they, themselves, have been suspended for three days following each 'infraction'.
    When some sort of official at Wikipedia was contacted about this, she stonewalled, claiming that this censorship was the work of 'volunteers', implying they were somehow beyond control of Wikipedia itself.
    Like the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge were 'volunteers'.
  • Even the founders of Wikipedia had no clue when they started the project of what it would accomplish. They dug a hole to find water, and struck oil instead.
  • We now see the strong emergence of the Social Web instead of the Semantic Web, and a proposal has been made to use Wikipedia, the largest hierarchical collection of information in the world, as bottom-up input for the ontologies required to give shape to the Semantic Web.

Unsourced

  • The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in theory.
  • Possibly the greatest idea of the Computer Age.
    • BritishWebWorld magazine
  • The real problem is not Wikipedia, but reporters who fail to check their facts.
  • The big secret of course is that Wikipedia is not really about an encyclopedia, it's just a big game of nomic.
  • We don't know how many unique users visit the site because we're lame and don't keep track of it - we don't sell advertising, so we don't have to.
  • Our mission is to document human knowledge, no matter how unpleasant or offensive it may be to some people.
    • szyslak
  • Wikipedia functions much like an iceberg: for every page of supposedly factual information one sees peeking out, hidden below are countless thousands of pages on debate, argument, and vandalism.
  • The best thing about Wikipedia is that you can make up your own information to put on it!
    • David Smith
  • Wikipedia:The Yoda of the Internet!
    • Katy Chase in "In The Real World" (www.intherealworld.moonfruit.com)
  • With Wikipedia, everyone can read anything anyone wrote on everything!
    • Unknown source
  • I love Wikipedia. It's the first place I go when I'm looking for knowledge, or when I want to create some.

External links


Study guide

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

From Wikiversity

Wikimedia Community Logo.svg Wikipedia-logo.svg Wiktionary-logo-en.svg Wikibooks-logo.svg Wikiquote-logo.svg Wikisource-logo.svg Wikinews-logo.svg Wikiversity-logo-Snorky.svg Wikispecies-logo.svg Commons-logo.svg

Shortcut: WP

These learning resources aim at providing knowledge that all Wikipedia and Mediawiki users, authors and administrators should possess. It aims at answering questions such as:

  • How can wikis and Wikipedia as phenomenon be understood?
  • How to edit and administrate Wikipedia and Mediawiki sites?
  • How can students, teachers, librarians, journalists, etc, use and relate to Wikipedia and other wikis?
  • What are the main criticisms of Wikipedia?
  • What research exists related to Wikipedia as phenomenon?
  • What are the current wiki technology development trends?

Contents

List of interested course developers

Please add your name and state how you intend to contribute, for example with Beta testing, fact-checking, development of quizzes, discussion problems, practical exercises, etc. See also the to-do list at the talk page.

  • Mange01 13:33, 17 November 2008 (UTC) - has developed the quizzes and translated and extended some of these learning resources to a Swedish university course on Wikipedia that started in September 2009. Originally I intended to develop most of the course materials here, but since so little input appeared here I gave up that strategy. But thanks for the fact-checking - it was helpful.
  • Jtneill - Talk - c 09:31, 18 November 2008 (UTC) - interested onlooker; maybe help with organisation
  • --JoliePA 13:58, 18 November 2008 (UTC)Jolie - interested onlooker; currently focusing on understanding what activities create a good wikiversity course.
  • Piotrus 21:18, 20 November 2008 (UTC) - interested in teaching this in a year or so, will try to continuously update/expand/improve it.
  • Simpy3 of wikipedia Interested in fact checking
  • Copyleft 10:57, 3 August 2009 (UTC) Interessed in interlanguage courses.

About Wikipedia

See more at Wikipedia article on Wikipedia.

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 almost anyone with access to the Web site and is a free site for all types of ages . Its main 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 multi-lingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".

Wikipedia has more than six million articles in many languages, including more than 1.5 million articles in the English-language version and more than half a million in the German-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 18 of them 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. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,[2] and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top fifteen most visited sites, 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 inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking the proper sources that, in the eyes of most "Wikipedians" (as Wikipedia's contributors call themselves), are necessary for an article to be considered "high quality". However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their articles on the natural sciences. This study was challenged by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., who described it as "fatally flawed".

Learning resources

The following is a list of learning resources that may be useful as course material on courses about Wikis and Wikipedia. The list is organized after resource type, and includes resources developed within this project and related Wikiversity projects as well as external links.

Syllabi

  • Suggested syllabus for a university level course named Wikis and Wikipedia - Authoring, Reliability and Technology

Assignments and exercises

Videos

These are recorded seminars, lectures, webinars and instructions videos related to Wikipedia:

Slides

See also: Commons:Category:Wikimedia_presentations_in_English and meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations.

These are slide show presentations, lecture notes and handouts related to Wikipedia:

Scientific publications

These are peer-reviwed acedemic papers related to Wikipedia, that students may review and use as references:

Text books

These text books may be used as course literature:

Glossaries

These glossares may serve as lists of terms that a student should understand after a course about Wikipedia:

  • Wikipedia:Glossary
  • Wikiversity:Glossary

Wikipedia articles

These are articles, essays and help pages available at en.wikipedia.org, that may be useful as course materials on a course about Wikipedia:

Case studies

Statistical sources

University level courses

Other courses, workshops, conferences and events

Other lists of learning resources

See also

See also other wikiversity resources and pages:

Wiki

Wikipedia

Wikipedia-logo.png Run a search on Wikipedia at Wikipedia.

MediaWiki

Wikimedia


Wiktionary

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary

See also Wikipédia, and Wikipèdia

Contents

English

Wikipedia-logo.png
Wikipedia has an article on:

Wikipedia

Etymology

Blend of wiki and encyclopedia, coined by Larry Sanger.

Pronunciation

Proper noun

Singular
Wikipedia

Plural
Wikipedias

Wikipedia (plural Wikipedias)

  1. An open-content online encyclopedia, collaboratively developed over the World Wide Web.
    • 2005, Financial Times, December 14.
      Work in the open-source software community or contribute to wikipedias on your favourite subjects.
  2. (Wiktionary and WMF jargon) A version of this encyclopedia in a particular language.
    There are over three million articles on the English Wikipedia.

Quotations

  • 2006, Cindy Long, "Getting WIKI With It", NEAToday 25 (2): 40 (October)
    It’s because of this open editing feature that Wikipedia draws praise, criticism, and, at times, vandals.
  • 2007, The Time Team, Doctor Who Magazine 384: 57 (June)
    "He probably looked them up on Wikipedia," suggests Peter.
    "That would explain why it’s so inaccurate," sighs Jac.

Derived terms

Related terms

Related terms

Translations

online encyclopedia

Noun

Singular
Wikipedia

Plural
Wikipedias

Wikipedia (plural Wikipedias)

  1. (figuratively) A source of abundant encyclopedic knowledge; a modern encyclopedia.
    • 2009, Baze Mpinja, "Six Beauty Secrets Every Model Knows", Glamour magazine on Msn.com
      Rules and insights from some of the hottest new faces in the biz—they’re walking Wikipedias of hair, skin and makeup knowledge.

Verb

Infinitive
to Wikipedia

Third person singular
Wikipedias

Simple past
Wikipediaed

Past participle
Wikipediaed

Present participle
Wikipediaing

to Wikipedia (third-person singular simple present Wikipedias, present participle Wikipediaing, simple past and past participle Wikipediaed)

  1. (transitive) To search for information on a topic in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia.
    I wikipediaed the article on science and learned about the scientific method.
  2. (Can we verify(+) this sense?) (transitive) To add or edit an article of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia.
    I am going to wikipedia the article on my favorite actor.

Quotations

2004
2005
ME: [[{{{enm}}}]] « 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. 19th c. 20th c. 21st c.

External links

See also

Dutch

Wikipedia-logo.png
Dutch Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Wikipedia nl

Etymology

Borrowed from English.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: [ʋɪkiˈpedia]

Proper noun

Wikipedia

  1. Wikipedia

Limburgish

Etymology

From English Wikipedia.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: [wi˧gəˈpeːədia]

Proper noun

Wikipedia

  1. Wikipedia

Wikibooks

Up to date as of January 23, 2010

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit".

Project

  • Ideals
  • Criticisms

History

  • Before Wikipedia -- Jimbo Wales, Nupedia and other artifacts
  • The Early Days
  • Developments
  • When Wikipedia Became Popular
  • Wikipedia Today
  • Wikipedia Tomorrow

Culture

  • Policies
  • Wikiprojects
  • Wikimoney
  • Vandalism
  • The Cabal
  • The Village Pump
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Wikitruth
  • Wikilawyering
  • Spam
  • Mirror Sites

Usage


Gaming

Up to date as of January 31, 2010
(Redirected to Wikia Gaming:Wikipedia article)

From Wikia Gaming, your source for walkthroughs, games, guides, and more!

Wikipedia is a free, online, encyclopedia that anyone can edit. This very site you're using, the Wikia Gaming? It runs off of the free engine that Wikipedia distributes. That's why you and I can edit this stuff and add our information. We're like an offshoot of Wikipedia. Anyway, Wikipedia is a huge source of information on the internet that is available in many languages.

Why Use Wikia Gaming over Wikipedia?

A common criticism of Wikia Gaming is that people might as well use Wikipedia. While true, there are benefits to WG and differences between the two.

  • WG is game focused. When you type Frog into Wikipedia, you will not get the Chrono Trigger character right away. When you type Rupee you will not get the Zelda currency.
  • While WG may not be very useful, at the moment, for looking up game information, it is a great place to go if you want to write about your favorite games.
  • WG is that fun-loving smart guy that you used to know. You won't find things like Three Yard Elf on Wikipedia. They don't dig those offbeat shenanigans. Wikipedia is the really smart guy you used to know, but he's strict and wears a bow tie.
  • WG tends to have a more casual writing style. While there are excellently written pieces here, there are also a lot of aloof, easier-to-read articles. They're fun, warm, and can be just as informative.

External Links


Genealogy

Up to date as of February 01, 2010

From Familypedia

Wikipedia is the world's biggest encyclop[a]edia. With over 100 active versions in various languages, there are over 9 million articles, extensively linked, categorised, and referenced.

Wikipedia is a good source of information of genealogical interest. A growing number of such pages have been reproduced in this wiki and generally enhanced with more genealogical material.

Links to and from Wikia

(See further detailed information at Project:Wikipedia.)

Material on Wikipedia can be summarised here where desired or (subject to proper acknowledgment) copied.

It uses the same software as Wikia. Links to Wikipedia pages can be created here simply by prefixing "wikipedia:" to the page name contents inside the standard double brackets.

This page is a "stub" and could be improved by additions and other edits.

Facts about WikipediaRDF feed







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