Wikipedia (IPA: , or , else ) is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia project. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows visitors to edit its content; the word Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia's main servers are located in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

The project began on January 29, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written (and now defunct) Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Midway through 2006, Wikipedia had more than 4,600,000 articles in many languages, including more than 1,200,000 in the English-language version. There were more than 200 language editions of Wikipedia, fifteen of which had more than 50,000 articles each. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there were also proposals for an English DVD or paper edition. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,See plots at "Visits per day", Wikipedia Statistics, January 1, 2005 and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranked in the top 20 most visited websites, and many of its pages had been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.

Wikipedia's co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has called Wikipedia "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."Jimmy Wales, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", March 8, 2005, However, 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. Nevertheless, its free distribution, constant and plentiful updates, diverse coverage, and versions in numerous languages have made it one of the most-used reference resources on the Internet.

Characteristics

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Wikipedia's slogan is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"; developed using a type of software called a "wiki", a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb and derived from the Hawaiian wiki wiki, which means "quick", one of the encyclopedia's main advantages is its ability to update quickly as events unfold and new information becomes available.

Although other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet, none has achieved Wikipedia's size or popularity. Traditional multilingual editorial policies and article ownership are used in particular, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the now-defunct Nupedia, and the more casual h2g2 and Everything2. Projects such as Wikipedia, 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. Wikipedia has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word count. Unlike many encyclopedias, it 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 "neutral point of view", presenting all noteworthy perspectives on an issue along with the evidence supporting them. Wikipedia articles do not attempt to determine an objective truth on their subjects, but rather to describe them impartially balancing all significant viewpoints. Following the introduction of a more user friendly cite functionality (cite.php, early 2006), articles increasingly include an extensive reference sections to support the information presented in 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. Material on Wikipedia may thus be distributed multilingually to, or incorporated from resources which also use this license.

Wikipedia's content has been reflected and forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Wikipedia's images and sounds are not free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use."Wikipedia as a press source (2005)", Wikipedia (March 28, 2005) Wikipedia content has also been used in academic studies, books and conferences, albeit more rarely. Wikipedia was once used in a United States court case,Bourgeois et al v. Peters et al. and the Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Civil Marriage Act."C-38", LEGISINFO (March 28, 2005) Some Wikipedia users, or Wikipedians, maintain (noncomprehensive) lists of such uses.Wikipedia as a source

Language editions

Wikipedia encompasses 151 "active" language editions (ones with 100+ articles) as of July 2006."List of Wikipedias", Meta-Wiki, April 15, 2006 In total, Wikipedia contains 229 language editions of varying states, with a combined 4 million articles."Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta-Wiki, April 15, 2006

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to manually translate articles. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.For example, "Translation into English," Wikipedia. (March 9, 2005)

The following is a list of the largest editions—the ones with 100,000+ articles—sorted by number of articles as of June 18, 2006. (Note that the article count, however, is a limited metric for comparing the editions, for a variety of reasons. In some Wikipedia versions, for example, nearly half of the articles are short articles created automatically by robots. Further, many editions that have more articles also have fewer contributors. Although the Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish and Italian Wikipedias have more articles than the Spanish Wikipedia, they have fewer users.)

According to Alexa.com's audience measurement service, the English sub-domain (en.wikipedia.org) gets just over 60% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining 40% being splintered between the numerous other languages that Wikipedia is offered in.

1. English (Statistics)
2. German (Special:Statistics)
3. French (Special:Statistics)
4. Polish (Special:Statistics)
5. Japanese (Special:Statistics)
6. Dutch (Special:Statistics)
7. Italian (Special:Statistics)
8. Swedish (Special:Statistics)
9. Portuguese (Special:Statistics)
10. Spanish (Special:Statistics)

Editing

Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's content, and registered users can create new articles and have their changes 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","Wikipedia sociology", Meta-Wiki, 23:30 March 24, 2005 but this description is not accepted by most Wikipedians.

Although many viewers take advantage of Wikipedia's openness to add nonsense to the encyclopedia, most deliberately disruptive edits and comments are quickly found and deleted by other editors. 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."Edit war", Wikipedia (March 26, 2005)

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 formal 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 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."Power structure", Meta-Wiki, 10:55 April 4, 2005

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 which have been deleted, and many individual edits which contain libelous statements, copyright violations, and other content which could incur legal liability or be otherwise detrimental to Wikipedia; these edits may only be viewed by Wikipedia administrators.

History

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Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, 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, in not having size limitations, due to being on the Internet, and in being free of bias, due to its public nature and potentially broad base of contributors.Larry Sanger, "Q & A about Nupedia", Nupedia, March 2000 Nupedia had a seven-step review process by appointed subject-area experts, but later came to be viewed as too slow for producing a limited number of articles. Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by the use of advertisements. It was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GFDL prior to Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:

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Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at http://www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. It had been, from January 10, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model. Wikipedia thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbias" policy. There were otherwise few rules initially. 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 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."Multilingual statistics", Wikipedia, March 30, 2005 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 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,Jimmy Wales, "Re: Sanger's memoirs", April 20, 2005, but it was after Sanger heard of its existence in January 2001 from Ben Kovitz, a regular at the wiki, that he proposed the creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales and Wikipedia's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki-based production, the 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.

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. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia 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".

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003.Jimmy Wales: "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", June 20, 2003, Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", was created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks;The "In Memoriam: September 11" site is not widely considered a "sister project" as of 2006; there has been calls to close the site, or move it to Wikia. "Proposals for closing projects", a page of the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, discusses this process. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, 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 fewer new articles per day; by 2004, this had accelerated to a total of 1,000 to 3,000 per day (counting all editions). The English Wikipedia reached its 100,000-article milestone on January 22, 2003."Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, reaches its 100,000th article", Wikimedia Foundation, January 21, 2003 Wikipedia reached its one millionth article, among the 105 language editions that existed at the time, on September 20, 2004,"Wikipedia Reaches One Million Articles", Wikimedia Foundation, September 20, 2004 while the English edition alone reached its 500,000th on March 18, 2005."Wikipedia Publishes 500,000th English Article", Wikimedia Foundation, March 18, 2005 This figure had doubled less than a year later, with the millionth article in the English edition being created on March 1, 2006"English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article", Wikimedia Foundation, March 1, 2006; meanwhile, the millionth user registration had been made just two days before.Note that this user count includes both sockpuppets, accounts solely used for vandalism, and unused accounts. The number of true accounts is significantly less.

The Wikimedia Foundation 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".

There are currently plans to license the usage of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs. The German Wikipedia will be printed in its entirety by Directmedia, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each, beginning in October 2006, and publishing will finish in 2010.

Software and hardware

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Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida and four other locations around the world. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required camel case 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 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 Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world.

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. In spite of all this, Wikipedia page load times remain quite variable. The ongoing status of Wikipedia's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.

Funding

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Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were States dollar|US$" target="_blank" >^*321,000, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.

Bomis, an online advertising company that hosts mostly adult-oriented web rings, played a significant part in the early development of Wikipedia and the network itself.

Criticism and controversy

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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, that it exhibits severe systemic bias and inconsistency, and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals. Wikipedia has also been criticized for its use of dubious sources, its disregard for credentials, and its vulnerability to vandalism and special interest groups. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of articles.

A web-based survey conducted from December 2005 to May 2006 assessed the "accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles". Fifty people (a fairly low response rate) accepted an invitation to assess an article. Of the fifty, thirty-eight agreed or strongly agreed that the article was accurate, and twenty-three agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete. Eighteen people compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Six of those people found the Britannica article more or substantially more accurate and seven found the Britannica article to be more or substantially more complete. The survey did not attempt random selection of the participants, and it is not clear how the participants were invited.See http://bpastudio.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/wikieval/ for detailed results of the survey.

Reliability

Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time , while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality.

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. Many university lecturers discourage their students from using any encyclopedia as a reference in academic work, preferring primary sources instead.Wide World of WIKIPEDIA A website called Wikipedia Watch has been created (by Daniel Brandt) to denounce Wikipedia as having "…a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."www.wikipedia-watch.org/

Critics of Wikipedia often charge that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work, and that some editors may employ clever use of semantics to make possibly biased statements sound more credible.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 are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."Simon Waldman, "The Guardian, October 26, 2004. Although Wikipedia has a policy of citing primary sources, this is only sometimes adhered to. 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." On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Wikipedia?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, Danah Boyd said in 2005 that "^*t" target="_blank" >will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes."Danah Boyd, "[http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php Academia and Wikipedia", Many-to-Many, January 4, 2005.

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", (subscription access only) 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.

Some critics have suggested that Wikipedia cannot justifiably be called an "encyclopedia", a term which (it is claimed) implies a high degree of reliability and authority that Wikipedia, due to its open editorial policies, may not be able to maintain. However, Wikipedia does meet all the criteria for the basic definition of the word encyclopedia. One difference from book encyclopedia is online web editing with wikipedia's history function. A deleted text will remain in the history tab and others users can look up an individual's work history to gauge the author's merit.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing:

In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles."Wikipedia:Provenance", Wikipedia (May 9, 2006). 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". 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".Aaron Krowne, "The FUD-based Encyclopedia", Free Software Magazine, March 1, 2005.

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.Larry Sanger, "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism", Kuro5hin, December 31, 2004.

The English-language website at times also suffered from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative effect on Wikipedia's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information.

At the end of 2005, controversy erupted after journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax about Seigenthaler. This led to the decision to restrict the ability to start articles to registered users.

Ultimately, the reliability of Wikipedia depends upon the articles that it is composed of. While some pages have their content brought into disrepute due to strong opinions (such as George W. Bush), many articles cover subjects that do not produce such emotive responses and therefore are more reliable (such as nitrogen). Full use of referencing to recognised academic sources, several rounds of editing and discussions of the page can add to the credibility of sources.

Coverage

Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in improved accuracy. Referencing Linus' law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."Larry Sanger, "Wikipedia is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn't it full of nonsense?", Kuro5hin, September 24, 2001. Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "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."Joi Ito, "[http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/08/29/wikipedia_attacked_by_ignorant_reporter.html#c014592 Wikipedia attacked by ignorant reporter", Joi Ito's Web, August 29, 2004. Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.Anonymous blogger, "How Authoritative is Wikipedia", Dispatches from the Frozen North, September 4, 2004.

Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances was five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." (As of December 2005, this is no longer the case.) Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."

Wikipedia has been 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. 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:Replies to common objections", Wikipedia, 22:53 April 13, 2005.

The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Multimedial, 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-")Michael Kurzidim: Wissenswettstreit. Die kostenlose Wikipedia tritt gegen die Marktführer Encarta und Brockhaus an, in: c't 21/2004, October 4, 2004, S. 132-139. In an analysis of online encyclopedias, 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."William Emigh and Susan C. Herring, "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias", paper presented at the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004.. The journal Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Wikipedia were comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia had an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contained three.

On March 24, 2006, Britannica provided a rebuttal labeling the study "fatally flawed". However, Kenneth Kister's Kister's Best Encyclopedias, 2nd edition (1994) compared the accuracy of Britannica to several other encyclopedias. Britannica — although more accurate than many — was ranked lower than Encyclopedia Americana, World Book Encyclopedia, and Compton's Encyclopedia, all of which received perfect scores. It is unclear how Wikipedia would fare if it is compared to those works.

In January 2006, The Christian Science Monitor published an article describing the reach of Wikipedia, taking into account its accuracy and editing process.

Community

The 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, its authors argue 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:Researching with Wikipedia", Wikipedia (March 28, 2005). Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

Authors

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.Paragraph's statistics taken from "Active wikipedians" (Wikipedia Statistics, April 13, 2006). 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."Wikipedia", Meta-Wiki, 08:02 March 30, 2005.

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. 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. Many 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 Arbitration Committee.

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."Larry Sanger, "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias", Kuro5hin, July 25, 2001. 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.Andrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia", First Monday December 2003. 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.Jimmy Wales, "Re: Illegitimate block", January 26, 2005, . Critics of Wikipedia have also viewed it as an oligarchy which is controlled primarily by its Administrators, Stewards, and Bureaucrats, or simply by a small number of its contributors. Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch has referred to Jimbo Wales as the "dictator" of Wikipedia; however, most Wikipedians either do not consider Wales to be a dictator, or consider him to be one who rarely gives non-negotiable orders.

Awards

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Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004:"Trophy Box", Meta-Wiki (March 28, 2005). The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a EU€10,000 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, 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 popular culture

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See also

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• Internet encyclopedia project
• List of encyclopedias
• Open Site

References

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• http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp

Further reading

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Find more information on Wikipedia by searching Wikipedia's Sister projects:
Special:Search/Wikipedia from Wiktionary
Special:Search/Wikipedia from Wikibooks
Special:Search/Wikipedia from Wikiquote
Special:Search/Wikipedia from Commons
Special:Search/Wikipedia from Wikinews

• Introduction to Wikipedia
• Wikipedia FAQ

Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations", CHI 2004 April 24–April 29, 2004. Preliminary report "History Flow" available on the IBM website.

Wikipedia in academic studies

Wikipedia press releases

Press coverage of Wikipedia

Why Wikipedia is not so great

Replies to common objections

Statistics