Wikipedia
URL http://www.wikipedia.org/
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Registration Optional
Available language(s): 188 active editions (252 in total)[1]
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2]
Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwikiˈpiːdi.ə/, /ˌwikiˈpeːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ (Audio
(U.S.) (help·info)) is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia
project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; the vast
majority of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the
Internet. Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of
collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its primary servers are in Tampa,
Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul. Wikipedia's English
edition was launched on January 15, 2001, as a complement to Nupedia, an
expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia.
The project is currently operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit
organization created by Jimmy Wales, who claims to be the sole founder of
Wikipedia. This is disputed by Larry Sanger, who also claims to be a founder
of Wikipedia.[2][3][4][5][6] Wikipedia has approximately 7.5 million
articles in 253 languages,[1] 1.865 million of which are in the English
edition. This makes it the largest, most extensive, and fastest growing
encyclopedia ever compiled. It has steadily risen in popularity since its
inception,[7] and currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites
worldwide,[8]
Wikipedia's open nature has critics questioning its reliability and
accuracy.[9] The site has also been criticized for its susceptibility to
vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information,[10] uneven
quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[11] and for favoring consensus
over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Wikipedia's content
policies[13] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these
concerns.[14] Two scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is
generally short-lived[15] and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as
other encyclopedias.[16]
Authorship and management
Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteers; these include
developers, who work on the MediaWiki software, and other trusted users with
various permission levels including "steward", "bureaucrat" and
"administrator."[17] Administrators are the largest group of specially
privileged users, and have the ability to delete (remove) pages, lock
articles from being changed, and deter users from editing.[18] 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.[19] The
Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and
holds regular fundraisers;[20] the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over
$1 million.[21]
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. The software incorporates modern 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 runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers in Florida and in four
other locations.[23] 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 Apache HTTP
Server, 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 first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching
servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to
load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in
turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering
from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing
page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. 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. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle
much of Wikipedia's traffic load.
Language editions
Wikipedia has been described as "an effort to create and distribute a free
encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the
planet in their own language".[25] There are presently 252 language editions
of Wikipedia; of these, the top 14 have over 100,000 articles and the top
136 have over 1,000 articles.[1]
Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same
language edition may use different dialects or may come from different
countries (this is the case for the English edition). These differences may
lead to some conflicts about spelling[26] or points of view.[27] According
to Alexa Internet's audience measurement service, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org)
receives approximately 51% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the
remaining 49% split among the other languages (Spanish: 15%, Japanese 5%,
German: 5%, French: 4%, Polish: 3%, Portuguese: 2%, Arabic: 2%).[7]
Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as
"neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice.
It is most notably the case for the use of non-free images.[28]
Coordination and translation
Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some
efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by
Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its
projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important
statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia and maintain a list of
articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by
subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science,
technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for
articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts
in another edition. For example, articles about small townships of the
United States might only be available in English.
Multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to translate
articles manually; automated translation of articles is explicitly
disallowed.[29] Translated articles represent only a small portion of
articles in most editions.[30] Articles available in more than one language
may offer "InterWiki" links, usually in their left margin, which link to the
counterpart articles in other editions. Images and other non-verbal media
are shared among the various language editions through the Wikimedia Commons
repository. Beyond translations, some multingual efforts are also realised
thanks to the Multilingual coordination.
Reliability and bias
Wikipedia appeals to the authority of peer-reviewed publications rather than
the personal authority of experts. Wikipedia does not require that its
contributors give their legal names or provide other information to
establish their identity. Although some contributors are authorities in
their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported
by published sources.
Wikipedia tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with
zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a
biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view. The English-language
Wikipedia has introduced a scale against which the quality of articles is
judged; other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1200 articles 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.
Academic evaluation
Some studies suggest that Wikipedia provides a good starting point for
research, but sometimes suffers from significant omissions and
inaccuracies.[31] On the other hand, an investigation by Nature comparing
Wikipedia to the Encyclopædia Britannica suggested a comparable level of
accuracy in its natural science articles.[32] Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.
disagreed and described this study as "fatally flawed",[33] to which Nature
later responded, stating that its study was perfectly neutral.[34] Other
studies have concluded that Wikipedia's coverage of history is significantly
broader and deeper than that of Encarta, while being just as accurate,[16]
and that obvious vandalism is usually reverted quickly.[15]
In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics PhD 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.[35]
In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that
some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their
syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[36]
In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael
Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, for contributing to the
creation of a generation of “intellectual sluggards”.[37] He also stated
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 stated 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 the academics
who cite Wikipedia that:
“You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the
internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she
said. “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.”[38]
Criticism and controversy
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[9]
critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature, and favouring consensus over
credentials in its editorial process, makes it unauthoritative, and that a
lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[39]
Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is usually reliable, but that it is
not always clear how much.[12] The project's preference for consensus over
credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[11] Editors of traditional
reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the
project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[40] Many university
lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work,
preferring primary sources;[41] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia
citations.[42] 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.[43] Technology writer Bill Thompson commented
that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information
which is happening in society today."[44]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that
results from users' anonymity,[45] and that it is vulnerable to vandalism
and Internet trolls.[46] For example, false information was introduced into
the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four
months.[47]
Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[48] although not
always with entirely negative connotations,[49] and criticised for failing
to accommodate inexperienced users.[50] The addition of political spin to
articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and
special interest groups[10] has been noted,[51] and organizations such as
Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[52]
Wikipedia has been parodied by its critics, notably by Stephen Colbert in
The Colbert Report.[53]
In 2007, the Wikipedia article on then-Montana senator Conrad Burns was
edited by his own staff, causing political scandal among his
constituents.[54]
Wikipedia's content policies[13] and sub-projects set up by contributors
seek to address these concerns.[55] Several scholarly studies have concluded
that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15] and that Wikipedia is roughly
as accurate as other online encyclopedias.[16]
Due to Wikipedia's openness, it is a prime target for trolls who, with
intent, add misleading, sometimes biased information to articles or delete
or reword neutral in tone information from articles, occasionally, carry on
a seemingly never ending conversation in article discussion rooms, and draw
undue attention to themselves.[56][57]
Wikipedia has also caused concern according to Entertainment Tonight over
incidents such as the murder-suicide of Chris Benoit, in which the death of
Benoit's wife Nancy was reported on the site before the incident occurred,
leading to a police investigation. [58]
Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[59] The first was a Golden globe
for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this
came with a US$10,000 (£5,035.16) eBay account and an invitation to present
at the Piracy Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges'
Webby Award for the "community" category.[60] 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.
In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third
best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.[61]
On 26 January 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand
ranking by the readers of, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the
question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[62] Founder
Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by
TIME Magazine in 2006.[63] In 2006, the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science
and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award,
supervised[64] by the Russian government agency FAPMC.
In the media
Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by many sites including
database dumps.There is even a free downloadable DVD
version[65] developed by Linterweb which contains "1964 + articles".[66][67]
Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books,
conferences, and court cases.[68][69] The Canadian Parliament website refers
to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section
of its "further reading" list for Civil Marriage Act.[70] The encyclopedia's
assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the
U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Office[71] — though
mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a
case.[72] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[73]
sometimes without attribution; several reporters have been dismissed for
plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[74][75]
With increased usage and awareness, there have been an increasing number of
references to Wikipedia in popular culture. Many parody Wikipedia's
openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia
project's articles. Uncyclopedia is the largest such website; its Main Page
claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[76]
parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its Main Page.
In the episode "Wikiality" of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert has
instigated his viewers to vandalize articles in humorous ways, once doing so
on the Wikipedia article on elephants.[77] On the May 24, 2007 broadcast,
the guest was Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia. Stephen Colbert
referred to Wikipedia as a "battlefield for information", a tool that
"brings democracy to information," and moves away from the original views of
the "elite who study things and got to say what is or is not real." During
the interview, Stephen Colbert issued a challenge to Wales by showing a
phrase on the screen "Librarians are hiding something." - a phrase that
Jimmy Wales could not see, with the implication that Wales was powerless to
stop a critical mass of individuals from editing a page according to the
dictates of one influential individual, as Stephen put it, when "groupthink
being brought to information can be controlled and manipulated in wonderful
ways." Jimmy Wales' response was that "the interesting thing about your show
is that Wikipedians watch it." Almost immediately, the Wikipedia entry for
"librarian" was protected from vandalism, and edits to other pages were
rapidly undone. References were also made in the discussion to "Albert
Einstein was an alpaca farmer" and "oxygen being a poison", as Colbert
challenges the audience to edit these Wikipedia entries, and editing Spanish
Wikipedia to say "Learn English".[78] In another episode, when discussing
Wikipedia, Colbert urged his viewers (even going so far as to offer a small
monetary incentive) to edit the page on reality to read "reality has become
a commodity".
"Weird Al" Yankovic's character in his video 'White & Nerdy' is seen
vandalising the entry for the Atlantic record label with the exclamation
"You suck!," after they rescinded permission for a parody.[79]
In a recent episode of American Dad (entitled Black Mystery Month),
protagonists Stan Smith and Steve Smith fail to reveal to the world that
George Washington Carver was not the person who invented peanut butter, then
create a Wikipedia page entitled "The Truth About Peanut Butter" to inform
the world, citing that it is the one place you can put crazy information out
with no evidence and still have millions of people believe it to be true.
In "The Negotiation" episode of The Office, Michael prints out a list of
negotiation tactics and praises Wikipedia, calling it "the best thing ever."
However, his comment that, "anyone anywhere in the world can edit it, so you
know you're getting the best information possible," can be seen as sarcasm
on the part of the show's writers.
On page 132 of the August 2007 magazine of PC PRO, a UK computer magazine
contained a several-page article benchmarking Wikipedia against other more
traditional publications. PC PRO believed Wikipedia had exceeded
expectations in terms of accuracy, vandal prevention tools, and depth of
coverage. Indeed some deliberate attempts of tampering with existing
articles by PC PRO (as published in the August 2007 magazine) were corrected
in the main by voluntary Wikipedia contributors within hours.
In the July 2007 issue of National Geographic Magazine, Wikipedia gained
praise in an article titled “Swarm Theory.” The writer of the article Peter
Miller discusses how colonies of ants, flights of birds, swarms bees and
schools of fish all have amazing abilities to coordinate all their
activities despite having no single leader. Regarding bees, Miller notes
that a colony of bees have no single leader in the hive (not even the queen,
whose only function is to lay eggs) yet they have a communication system
that seek a diversity of options, encourages free competition among ideas,
and uses an effective mechanism to narrow choices. In essence, each member
of the group is smarter by being part of a group. Miller writes, “Almost any
group that follows the bees’ rules will make itself smarter.’’
Miller relates this phenomenon to humans and cites Wikipedia as one example.
“Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia has also proved to be a big
success, with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about
everything under the sun, each which can be contributed by anyone or edited
by anyone.” Miller, however, writes that collective intelligence is
successful only if individual members act responsibly, “A group won’t be
smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for
someone to tell them what to do.” [80]
Related projects
A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries
written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first
of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on
BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the
UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the
first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major
multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of
articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The
user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been
emulated on a website[81]. One of the most successful early online
encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also
created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted,
focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these
projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial
freedom to public users.
Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam:
September 11 Wiki",[82] created in October 2002,[83] detailed the September
11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006.[84] Wiktionary, a
dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[85] 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.[86]
A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia
early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator,
free-software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.[87]
Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have
drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu,
Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process,
whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as the expert-written
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, h2g2 and Everything2.
Another wiki project, the Conservapedia, is based on the Wikipedia software
platform (Mediawiki), and it draws from the basic principles of the
Wikipedia, but it is intended to address what is perceived and denounced as
Wikipedia's liberal bias. This is achieved by restricting the users who are
allowed to edit articles.
Also, a satirical parody of Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia, was created in 2005.
Designed to be the complete opposite of Wikipedia, most of the articles are
either fictional or parodied to such an extent that almost little or no
original factual accuracy remains.
Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[88] said in an interview in
regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts
in their respective fields:[89] "We welcome a diversity of efforts. If
Larry's project is able to produce good work, we will benefit from it by
copying it back into Wikipedia."[90]
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