Wikipedia
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Wikipedia is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It has editions in roughly 200 different languages (about 100 of which are active) and contains entries both on traditional encyclopedic topics and on almanac, gazetteer, and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the internet,English, more than 240,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on January 15, 2001. Having steadily risen in popularity,Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. It is edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are subject to change by nearly anyone. Wikipedia's volunteers enforce a policy of "neutral point of view" whereby views presented by notable persons or literature are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth. Because of its open nature, vandalism and inaccuracy are problems in Wikipedia.
The status of Wikipedia as a reference work has been controversial, and it is both praised for its free distribution, free editing and wide range of topics and criticized for alleged systemic biases, deficiencies in some topics, and lack of accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias. Its articles have been cited by the mass media and academia and are available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Its German language edition has been distributed on compact discs, and many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by websites.
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Characteristics
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Wikipedia's goal is to create a free, reliable encyclopedia—indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth. Wikipedia is described by its founder Jimmy Wales 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."software called a "wiki," from the Hawaiian wiki wiki ("quick"). Wales intends that Wikipedia should achieve a standard comparable to that of the "Britannica or better" and be published in print.
Several other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet. Traditional 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 whose articles 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 licenses its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Wikipedia attempts to be an encyclopedia and not a complete compilation of human knowledge. There is a set of policies identifying kinds of information that are not appropriate for inclusion, known as What Wikipedia is not. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, removed, or revised.
Free-content
The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license under 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 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 English 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. Material has also been given to Wikipedia under no-derivative or for-Wikipedia-only conditions.news media.Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Bill C-38.March 2005.English, German, Japanese, French, and Swedish. In total, Wikipedia contains 195 language editions of varying states with a combined 1.5 million articles.Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in any edition.May 2005.English (575,835)
Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's articles and have their changes be instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Its 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, and decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia is instead done by consensus and occasionally vote, though Jimmy Wales retains final judgment.openness, "edit wars" (also called "revert wars") and prolonged disputes often occur when editors do not agree.socially Darwinian evolutionary process."Ward Cunningham's Portland Pattern Repository, Wikipedians use "talk" pages to discuss changes to articles, rather than discussing changes within the article itself. Wikipedia contributors often modify, move, or delete articles that are felt to be inappropriate to an encyclopedia, such as dictionary definitions ("dicdefs") or original source texts.January 2005, Wikipedia had approximately 13,000 users who made at least five edits that month; 9,000 of these active users worked on its three largest language editions.Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia."transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.anarchy or democracy. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though it is a consequence.reference desks in which the community answers questions.
Wikipedia's claim to be or status as an encyclopedia has been controversial. 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. Wikipedia is considered to be of sufficient quality in at least some areas by others, notably winning a comparative test by c't. Much of its praise is for being both free-content and open to editing by anyone.
Critics 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."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.
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."FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."trolls of having "taken over" Wikipedia.Linus's law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."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."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."2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.May 2005 Hoiberg's examples were no longer true: the article on Chinese art was roughly three times as long as the one on Hurricane Frances, and the article on Tony Blair was roughly 50% longer than the one on Coronation Street. Clearly, the articles in question were mentioned at the time merely as examples of a tendency toward lopsided coverage; however, they may also be referenced as examples of how the Wikipedia process tends toward a reasonable equilibrium.
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.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."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.reference desks in which the community answers questions.
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004Prix 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, USA Today, The Economist, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, Time Magazine and Wired Magazine. Awards to the Wikipedia project and press clippings are listed by Wikimedia contributors on its website.
On June 1, 2005, PC World magazine released its list, "The 100 Best Products of 2005" in its July issue. It named Wikipedia one of the year's 100 best products. The magazine says that their award is for "great products [that] meld practical features with innovation." In spite of the designation, however, not all of the "products" are commercial in nature, and Wikipedia is actually one of 23 honorees that are available free of charge. Wikipedia came in at #60 overall on the ranked list, which was topped by Mozilla Firefox. The list — dominated by computer software and hardware products — included only a handful of other websites, among them Google, Flickr, and Internet Archive. Also included at #33 was the website of the The New York Times, the only other information site to appear. In the same month, the Wikipedia widget for Apple Computer's Mac OS X "Tiger" ranked #3 of the most popular Apple Dashboard widgets (based on download frequency), beating out commercial encyclopedia Britannica's widget, which did not make the Top 50.
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Wikipedia began as a complementary project of 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 final authority , 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.Richard Stallman.
Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com. It had been, from January 10, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles which could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. But it was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model.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 2004.2003, 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,January 2001,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.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.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; Wikiquotes, 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 less new articles per day. The English Wikipedia reached a 100,000 article milestone on January 22, 2003. In 2004, its article growth rate was approximately 1,000 to 3,000 per day. In all editions, it reached 500,000 articles on February 25, 2004.September 20, 2004.MediaWiki open source software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida. 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 the first week of June 2005, the server cluster had grown to more than 60 servers, and, at the request of the operator of the colocation facility in which they were located, the entire cluster was (more or less) successfully relocated into the provider's new building, across a street in downtown Tampa, at about 4:30 in the morning.
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.
The ongoing status of Wikipedia's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.
Wikipedia has free-content sister projects which fulfill non-encyclopedic roles. Its largest are: Wiktionary, a free dictionary project; Wikibooks, a free textbook project; Wikiquote, a free encyclopedia of quotations; Wikisource, a multilingual repository of free source texts; Wikimedia Commons, a shared media respository; and Wikinews, a free news source. Wikipedia and its sister projects are administered by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Editing
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Quality
Awards
History
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See also
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
See also: Wikipedia, 2000, 2001, 2003