Wikimedia has created the Wikidata project with a similar objective of storing the basic facts from each page of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects and make it available in a queryable semantic format, RDF. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did. Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or re-distribute it at no charge.

Internal news publications

A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University’s College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University found significant gender differences in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. Prior to winning the award, Strickland’s only mention on Wikipedia was in the article about her collaborator and co-winner of the award Gérard Mourou. Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation said that such checks would run counter to the website’s commitment to minimal data collection on its contributors and readers.

• In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.W 56 Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, becoming the third woman to ever receive the award.
• Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased).f Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%).
• Featured articles are articles of the highest quality that can be found on Wikipedia.

Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.W 9 A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to “increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits”. After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors appears to have peaked around early 2007. Wikipediac is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).

Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine,W 94 while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law). When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by the 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.W 87 The GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs licensed under the GPL. Wikipedia editors sometimes struggle to access paywalled sources needed to improve a subject. Two projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and the “Thank” tab in the edit history, which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.W 75 According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government.

Wikipedia/WikiBasics

An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 33 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them. 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”. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia’s earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous.

English Wikipedia editor numbers

Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article’s subject. According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page’s title or categorization, manipulate the article’s underlying code, or use images disruptively. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the “pending changes” system in December 2012.

Chinese access

For example, the project namespace uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-governance related discussions. Once an article is nominated for deletion, the dispute is typically determined by initial votes (to keep or delete) and by reference to topic-specific notability policies. He relied instead on “mutually reverting edit pairs”, where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor.

Disputes and edit warring

A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia’s page-protection policies as “perhaps the most important” means at its disposal to “regulate its market of ideas”. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content. Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”.

Use in templates

Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning “together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”. Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users. This is while Wikipedia faces “a more concerning problem” than funding, namely “a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website”. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”.

The number of articles and contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around the spring of 2007. The English Wikipedia reached 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever. It grew to about 20,000 articles and 18 languages by the end of 2001.

According to the TechCrunch website, on 23 January 2020, Wikipedia reached vegas casino more than 6 million articles on the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a “feeder” project for Nupedia. Nupedia’s articles were written and owned by Bomis, Inc which was a web portal company. It is a wiki that uses the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia Foundation projects). Wikipedia was started on January 9, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier online encyclopedia named Nupedia.

One principal concern cited by The New York Times for the “worry” is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment. Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.W 48In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased).f Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%).

URLs on other Wikimedia projects

In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The English Wikipedia’s three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad. The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. Each article’s History page links to each revision.e On most articles, anyone can view the latest changes and undo others’ revisions by clicking a link on the article’s History page.

Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, “the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created”.

The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from the German rock band Scorpions—features a picture of the album’s original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven, with Africa being the most underrepresented. There are two broad types of bias, which are implicit (when a topic is omitted) and explicit (when a certain POV is over-represented in an article or by references). This systemic bias in editor demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia. An editorial in The Guardian in 2014 claimed that more effort went into providing references for a list of female porn actors than a list of women writers.

• In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate’s anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.
• By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.
• The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia.
• A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications.
• Wikipedia’s name is a combination of two words, wiki and encyclopedia.

Many parodies target Wikipedia’s openness and susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project’s articles. Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as “verifiability, not truth” to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.

On 13 January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit was made by Steven Pruitt. In October 2014, the Wikipedia Monument was unveiled to the public in Poland to honor all the contributors of Wikipedia. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and from people who looked it up. Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales’ goal. The important people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the person in charge of Bomis, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief of Nupedia.

Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.

“My Number One Doctor”, a 2007 episode of the television show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide. Viewers of the show tried to add the episode’s mention of the page as a section of the actual Wikipedia article on negotiation, but this effort was prevented by other users on the article’s talk page. A working group led by Peter Stone (formed as a part of the Stanford-based project One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence) in its report called Wikipedia “the best-known example of crowdsourcing … that far exceeds traditionally-compiled information sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, in scale and depth”. Wikipedia’s content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.W 117 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.

Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses). One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, said that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to “ugly, intimidating behavior”.citation needed Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.

Edit

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name ,W 4 and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. By replacing “en” with the code for another language, you can reach the Main Page of the wikipedia in that language, if it exists. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. In February 2022, civil servants from the UK’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities were found to have used Wikipedia for research in the drafting of the Levelling Up White Paper after journalists at The Independent noted that parts of the document had been lifted directly from Wikipedia articles on Constantinople and the list of largest cities throughout history. A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used on Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications.

A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, “The Decline of Wikipedia”, questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.W 7 Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia’s domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.W 8 The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.