Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
|
 Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal. |
|
| URL | www.wikipedia.org |
|---|---|
| Slogan | The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | 236 active editions (253 in total)[1] |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2] |
| Launched | January 15, 2001 |
| Alexa rank | #8[3] |
| Current status | perpetual work-in-progress[4] |
Wikipedia (pronunciation 
) is a free,[5] 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 'fast') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website.[6] Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,[7] it is currently the largest and most popular[3] general reference work on the Internet.[8][9][10]
Critics of Wikipedia target its systemic bias and inconsistencies[11] and its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue.[13] Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information.[14] Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.[15][16]
Jonathan Dee, of The New York Times,[17] and Andrew Lih, in the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism,[18] have cited the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently-updated news resource.
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 three examples of "Web 2.0" services, along with YouTube and MySpace.[19]
Contents |
History
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[20]
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of 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 counter-intuitive 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]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 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 went 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 neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia and Google's Knol[citation needed] — have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research and commercial advertising.
The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003.[33] It applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia on September 17, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004, and in the European Union on January 20, 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet."[citation needed] There are plans to license the use of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.[34]
Nature of Wikipedia
Editing model
Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Wikipedia undergoes formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority. 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). Consequently, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content.[35] Being a general reference work, Wikipedia also contains materials that some people, including Wikipedia editors,[36] may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.[37] 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.[38] (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia)
Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) in Florida, United States, 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"[39] 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.[40] 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.[41] Finally, Wikipedia does not take a side.[42] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[43] Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[44] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags or modifying article materials failing to meet them. (See also deletionism and inclusionism.[45][46])
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 bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, at any point, a reader of an article cannot be certain, without consulting its "history" page, whether or not the article she is reading has been vandalized. 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."[50] All of these led to the question of the reliability of Wikipedia as a source of accurate information.
In 2008 two researchers theorized that the growth of Wikipedia is sustainable.[51]
Reliability and bias
- See also: Criticism of Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[13] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[52] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.[12] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[53] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[54] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[55] 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.[56]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[58] the insertion of spurious information, vandalism, and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[57] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[59][47] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[60] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[61] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[62]
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. But he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[63]
In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[64] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[65] 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."[65]
There have been efforts within the Wikipedia community to improve the reliability of Wikipedia. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[66] other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 2000 articles in English have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.[67] In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing—but the community has been unable to form a consensus in favor of such changes, partly because they would require a major software overhaul.[68][69] However a similar system is being tested on the German Wikipedia, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version at some future time.[70][71] Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz is now being tested that will assign "trust ratings" to individual Wikipedia contributors, with the intention that eventually only edits made by those who have established themselves as "trusted editors" will be made immediately visible.[72]
Wikipedia community
The community has a power structure.[73][74] Wikipedia's community has also been described as "cult-like,"[75] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[76] and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[77] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator",[78] a group of privileged users (1,594 Wikipedians for the English edition on September 30, 2008), 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 and are prohibited from using their powers to settle content disputes. The roles of administrators, often described as "janitorial", are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors in order to minimize disruption, as well as banning users from making disruptive edits such as vandalism. While these administrators are very much needed and respected for their work, they can be seen by some users as disruptive; removing legitimate material by their own discretion.
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.[79] 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.[80] 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.[81] 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".[11]
In August 2007, a website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia by editors who are not logged in, which reveals that many of these edits come from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and are attempts to remove criticism.[82]
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.[83] 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.[84]
A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were lower in agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness than non-Wikipedia users.[85][86]
Signpost
The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia, and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the current chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.[87] It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.[88]
Operation
Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
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 Wikipedians, 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.[89] 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.
Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu[90][91]), with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of February 2008, there were 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam, and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul.[92] 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 located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the ^ Cohen, Noam (2007-03-05). "A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side", New York Times. Retrieved on 18 October 2008.
References
Academic studies
- See also: Academic studies about Wikipedia
- Nielsen, Finn (August 2007). "Scientific Citations in Wikipedia". First Monday 12 (8). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/nielsen/index.html. Retrieved on 22 February 2008.
- Pfeil, Ulrike (2006). "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (1): 88. doi:. http://jcmc.indiana.edu./vol12/issue1/pfeil.html. Retrieved on 26 December 2008.
- Priedhorsky, Reid, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia". Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: 1316624.131663.
- Reagle, Joseph M., Jr. (2005). "Do As I Do: Leadership in the Wikipedia" (Web). Wikipedia Drafts. Retrieved on 2008-12-26.
- Wilkinson, Dennis M. (April 2007 accessdate=2008-02-22). "Assessing the Value of Cooperation in Wikipedia". First Monday 12 (4). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/wilkinson/index.html.
Books
- Ayers, Phoebe, 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.)
Book reviews and other articles
- Baker, Nicholson. "The Charms of Wikipedia". The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008. Accessed December 17, 2008. (Book rev. of The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, as listed above.)
- Rosenzweig, Roy. Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. (Originally published in The Journal of American History 93.1 (June 2006): 117-46.)
Learning resources
- Wikiversity list of learning resources. (Includes related courses, Web-based seminars, slides, lecture notes, text books, quizzes, glossaries, etc.)
Media debate
- {{cite news|url=http://www.delta-sky.com/sections/index.php/lifestyle/wikipedia_vs_encyclopedia/|title=Thought Leader: Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia|work=Delta-Sky: The Official Inflight Magazine of Delta Air Lines|format=Web|date=December 2008|Keen]] and [Jimmy] Wales appeared at Inforum, a division of the Commonwealth Club of California, which is the largest and oldest public forum in the United States. Following is a portion of their discussion, moderated by National Public Radio's David Ewing Duncan.)|accessdate=2008-12-17|quote=(Earlier this year, [Andrew] [[Andrew Keen}}}
Other media coverage
- Dee, Jonathan (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out" (Web), The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Company. Retrieved on 22 February 2008.
- "For Music Fans: Wikipedia; MySpace", The Houston Chronicle (Blog) (March 2008). Retrieved on 17 December 2008.
- Freeman, Sarah (2007-08-16). "Can We Really Trust Wikipedia?" (Web), Yorkshire Post, yorkshirepost.co.uk. Retrieved on 20 September 2008.}
- Giles, Jim (2007-09-20). "Wikipedia 2.0 - Now with Added Trust", New Scientist. Retrieved on 22 February 2008.}
- Miliard, Mike (2007-12-02). "Wikipedia Rules", The Phoenix. Retrieved on 22 February 2008.
- Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved on 22 March 2008.
- Taylor, Chris (2005-05-29). "It's a Wiki, Wiki World" (Web), Time, Time, Inc. Retrieved on 22 February 2008.
- "Technological Quarterly: Brain Scan: The Free-knowledge Fundamentalist" (Web and Print), The Economist (2008-06-05). Retrieved on 5 June 2008. "Jimmy Wales changed the world with Wikipedia, the hugely popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. What will he do next? [leader]."}
External links
- Wikipedia – multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
- Wikipedia and why it matters - Larry Sanger's talk in 2002 at Stanford University about Wikipedia (video archive and transcript of the talk)
- Wikipedia at the Open Directory Project
- CBC News: I, editor
- Help Edit Wikipedia A wikiHow article.
- Class assignment: Write an original Wikipedia article
- #Wikipedia on freenode
- "Intelligence in Wikipedia" Google TechTalk at YouTube - Describing an intelligence project utilizing Wikipedia, and how Wikipedia articles could be auto-generated from web content
- Video of TED Talk by Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia
| ||||||||||||||