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Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia's 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 multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". Currently Wikipedia has more than 5 million articles in many languages, including more than 1.4 million in the English-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 17 of them have more than 50,000 articles each. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Since inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity, and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top 20 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 proper sources that, in the eyes of most Wikipedians, is 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 Encyclopædia Britannica, who described it as "fatally flawed".•
Characteristics Wikipedia uses a type of software called a "wiki", allowing visitors to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change its content. It is therefore possible for large numbers of people to create articles and update them quickly as new information becomes available; it also means vandalism and disagreement about content are common. Many other internet encyclopedia projects use traditional multilingual editorial policies and article ownership such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nupedia, h2g2 and Everything2. Projects such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre and WikiZnanie are other wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal process of review. Unlike many encyclopedias, Wikipedia has licensed its content under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Wikipedia has a set of policies identifying types of information appropriate for inclusion. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, revised, transferred to a sister project, or removed. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that articles must be written from a "", presenting all noteworthy perspectives on an issue along with the evidence supporting them. The project also forbids the use of original research. Wikipedia articles do not attempt to determine an objective truth on their subjects, but rather to describe them impartially from all significant viewpoints. Following the introduction of a more user friendly citation functionality (cite.php, early 2006), articles increasingly include an extensive reference section to support the information presented in the article and to allow verification of the article. Free content The GFDL, the license through which Wikipedia's articles are made available, is one of many "copyleft" licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content, provided that 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 by them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. However, a significant proportion of images and sounds on Wikipedia are not free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. Wikipedia's content has been reflected and forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Wikipedia content has also been used in academic studies, books and conferences, albeit more rarely, and very recently, in movies. Wikipedia was once used in a United States court case, and the Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Civil Marriage Act. Some Wikipedia users, or Wikipedians, maintain (noncomprehensive) lists of such uses. Language editions Image:He-Wikipedia.png|right|thumb|300px|An example of Wikipedia's range in language editions: Wikipedia in Hebrew. Editing Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's content: registered users can also create new articles. Changes made to pages are instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the expectation that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Some of Wikipedia's editors have explained its editing process as a "socially Darwinian evolutionary process". Some take advantage of Wikipedia's openness to add nonsense to the encyclopedia. This real-time, collaborative model allows editors to rapidly update existing topics as they develop and to introduce new ones as they arise. However, this collaboration also sometimes leads to "edit wars" and prolonged disputes when editors do not agree. Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time due to the aforementioned vandalism or revert wars. Wikipedia does not declare any of its articles to be "complete" or "finished". The authors of articles need not have any expertise or qualifications in the subjects that they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who wishes to do so. Its articles are not controlled or copyrighted by any particular user or editorial group; decisions on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia are instead made largely through consensus decision-making and, occasionally, by vote. Jimmy Wales retains final judgement on Wikipedia policies and user guidelines. Regular users often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles, including new updates, discussions, and vandalism. Most past edits to Wikipedia articles also remain viewable after the fact, and are stored on "edit history" pages sorted chronologically, making it possible to see former versions of any page at any time. The only exceptions are the entire histories of articles that have been deleted, and many individual edits that contain libelous statements, copyright violations, and other content that could incur legal liability or be otherwise detrimental to Wikipedia. These edits may only be viewed by Wikipedia administrators. Wikipedia in other formats For some articles there is a spoken version available in ogg format. The encyclopedia is also available on a CD from SOS Children, and an editorial team is working on creating , a collection of Wikipedia articles that have been verified, ready for printing or burning to CD. Published copies of selected Wikipedia articles are also available from PediaPress, a Print on Demand service. History
Software and hardware
Funding Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.• Bomis, an online advertising company that caters to a generally male audience and has hosted soft-core pornography, played a significant part in the early development of Wikipedia and the network itself. • Authorship and management process During December 2005, Wikipedia had about 27,000 users who made at least five edits that month; 17,000 of these active users worked on the English edition. A more active group of about 4,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the English edition. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Wikipedia's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors. Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, , and , which number just over a thousand. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Any editor with a significant history of positive contributions and a firm understanding of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines can be to become an administrator. Some users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected . Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia". In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Wikipedia has been viewed as an experiment in a variety of social, political, and economic systems, including anarchy, democracy, and communism. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence. Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch has referred to Jimbo Wales as the "dictator" of Wikipedia; however, most either do not consider Wales to be a dictator, or consider him to be one who rarely gives non-negotiable orders.• Future directions for authoring content An experimental feature planned for the German version of Wikipedia has been reported which could eventually improve the quality of editing for Wikipedia and protect it from vandalism. The concept being tested is to still allow anyone to make article edits, but to only allow editors judged as "trustworthy" to make edits live on the public site. The process by which trustworthiness would be established is yet to be determined. Jimbo Wales stated "We want to let anybody edit but we don't want to show vandalized versions. It would be fun for me to announce to the press that the front page of Wikipedia is open for public editing for the first time in five years". Criticism and controversy Wikipedia has become increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence and popularity, with critics alleging that Wikipedia's open nature makes it unauthoritative and unreliable, with unconfirmed information that is often without any proper sources, that it exhibits severe systemic bias and inconsistency. Wikipedia has also been criticized for its use of dubious sources, its biased but neutrally written perspective towards certain point of views, its disregard for credentials, its lack of understanding and international nature, and its vulnerability to vandalism and special interest groups.• Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia's own editors (and ex-editors), representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of articles, especially those that find information presenting them in a bad light. At the end of 2005, controversy arose after journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax, which had gone undetected for almost four months; this discovery led to several policy decisions within Wikimedia regarding creation of articles and the overview process, intended to address some of the flaws which had allowed the hoax to go undetected for that time. The Wikipedia model Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality. Because contributors usually submit edits, rewriting small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority. It is criticised as having no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. Many university lecturers discourage their students from using any encyclopedia as a reference in academic work, preferring primary sources instead. A critical website, Wikipedia Watch, was created by Daniel Brandt, accusing Wikipedia of having "…a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information." Supporters argue that Wikipedia does meet all the criteria for the basic definition of the word 'encyclopedia'. One difference from book encyclopedias is online web editing with Wikipedia's history function. A deleted text will remain in the history tab and other users can look up an individual's work history to gauge the author's merit. Emigh and Herring (2005) in a study of Wikipedia, note that there are not yet many formal studies of Wikipedia or its model. Their main conclusions regarding style and encyclopedic quality were: Reliability Wikipedia can be assessed for reliability in several areas, including:
Accuracy and comprehensiveness A variety of studies to date have tended to suggest that some Wikipedia articles (scientific articles most notably) are of a similar degree of accuracy to Encyclopædia Britannica, that Wikipedia provides a good starting point for research, and that articles are in general reasonably sound. However, these studies also suggest that due to its novel editorial model, it suffers omissions and inaccuracies which can sometimes be serious. A separate study suggests that in many cases, vandalism is reverted fairly quickly, but that this does not always happen. One of the studies, by Nature, identified that among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not significant: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. In the pairs of articles reviewed, eight serious errors such as misinterpretations of important concepts were detected, four from each encyclopaedia. Reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica. Additionally, it was found that Wikipedia articles are 2.6 times as long as Britannica articles, meaning that there is a lower error/omission per word ratio in Wikipedia.• and former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach on the grounds that "What a user certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him". Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light",• and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves. Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise. It is possible that articles subject to strong opinions (such as George W. Bush) are more prone to be edited poorly, but this is uncertain — often such articles receive extra attention and strong consensus exactly because they are the subject of heated debate. Other articles that do not produce such emotive responses may tend to be more stable. Other commentators have drawn a middle ground, that it contains much valuable knowledge and has some reliability, even if the degree is not yet assessed with certainty. People taking such a view include Danah Boyd, Larry Sanger (re-applying Eric Raymond's "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow") and technology figure Joi Ito, who wrote, "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." Bill Thompson, a well known technology writer, commented that the debate is probably symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today, arguing that: Coverage A common criticism is that editors, being volunteers, write on what interests them, and what they are aware of. Therefore coverage both within topics, and across the encyclopedia, is uneven and may at times be seriously unbalanced, with obvious and notable omissions. Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. For example, like any Internet group, the site can become dominated by cliques of habitual users who express both condescension and hostility to users not involved in the "in-group" — habitual users also feel a sense of "ownership" over "their" pages, leading to edit wars. Encyclopædia Britannica's editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued this case, as has former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger who stated in 2004 that "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven." The same fluidity that allows articles to be patchy has also led to Wikipedia being praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident.Cited by Workers World (January 8 2005) and Chicago Times (January 16 2005) Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may."", Wikipedia, 22:53 April 13 2005. Community The Wikipedia community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing."Critical views of Wikipedia", Wikinfo, 07:28 March 30 2005. Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article (a common complaint about open-source software development as well).Andrew Orlowski, "Wiki-fiddlers defend Clever Big Book", The Register, July 23 2004. It has also been described as "cult-like", although, as these instances demonstrate, not always with entirely negative connotations. In a page on researching with Wikipedia, the community view is argued that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen."", Wikipedia (March 28 2005). Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions. Responses to criticisms In an interview with BusinessWeek on December 13 2005, Wales discussed the reasons that the Seigenthaler hoax had gone undetected, and steps being taken to address them. He stated that one problem was that Wikipedia's use had grown faster than its self-monitoring system could comfortably handle, and that therefore new page creation would be deliberately restricted to account-holders only, addressing one of Seigenthaler's main criticisms. He also gave his opinion that encyclopedias as a whole (whether print or online) were not usually appropriate for primary sources and should not be relied upon as authoritative (as some were doing), but that nonetheless on balance Wikipedia was more reliable as "background reading" on subjects than most online sources. He stated that Wikipedia was a "work in progress". In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security". For example, Cross proposes a temporal provenance scheme which colors text based how many edit sessions a piece of text has survived (red for new text, yellow for text that has survived 50 edits, green if 100, black if more than 150 edits). However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial. Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD", the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". Awards Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a €10,000 ($12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby award for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project. Wikipedia has received plaudits from sources including BBC News, The Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Science, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Irish Times, Reader's Digest, and The Daily Telegraph. Founder Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006. In 2006, in a Multiscope research, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated third best Dutch language site (after Google and Gmail), with a score of 8.3. In popular culture With increased usage and awareness, there has been an increasing number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalising or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Still others feature characters using the references as a source, or positively comparing a character's intelligence to Wikipedia. See also Further reading
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