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. 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.W 27 A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in reliable sources that are independent of the article’s subject.
Help:URL
In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called “wikification”, and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote in Nature that the “wisdom of crowds” approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes. Nicholas Carr’s 2005 essay “The amorality of Web 2.0” criticizes websites with user-generated content (like Wikipedia) for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers’ going out of business, because “free trumps quality all the time”.
A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes.W 20 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”. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page.
Wikipedia is composed of 11 different namespaces, with its articles being present in mainspace. Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia’s inception. In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s sister projects
BOXThe prefix “en” in the url is the for English language. We begin WikipediaAcademy by acquainting you first as a user and later as an editor. However, if you have sensitive teeth, look for gentler options or alternate with a sensitivity toothpaste like Sensodyne. As consumers become more ingredient-conscious, fluoride-free toothpaste options are gaining traction. From well-known names like Colgate, Crest, and Sensodyne to newer trends like fluoride-free and nano hydroxyapatite toothpaste, today’s toothpaste market offers something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for teeth whitening, cavity protection, or relief from sensitivity, the right toothpaste can make a noticeable difference in your oral health and confidence.
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. 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. It was launched as an English-language edition at , and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
Internal research and operational development
People can choose to give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. Research published in 2024 determined that several groups of connected accounts had coordinated to promote Russian propaganda narratives and state-controlled media sources in articles, related to Russian-Ukrainian relations and Russia’s war with Ukraine. A 2013 study from Oxford University found that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tend to address broader, global issues.
English varieties
On 13 January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit was made by Steven Pruitt. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Wikipedia’s policy of “neutral point-of-view” was enforced in its initial months and was similar to Nupedia’s earlier “nonbiased” policy. 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. As of September 2011, Wikipedia had about 18 million pages in about 300 languages and more than 3.50 billion words across all Wikipedias.
The English Wikipedia has 7,118,730 articles, 50,949,695 registered editors, and 267,535 active editors. The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website’s policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages.
Methods of access
This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project.W 55 He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing-list that this action was “in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted”. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger’s accusation, saying that Wikipedia did not have “material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it.” Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom after the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) decided the album cover was a potentially illegal indecent image and added the article’s URL to a “blacklist” it supplies to British internet service providers. 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.
Kinds of dead links
Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black alleged (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) that articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an “ax to grind” on the topic. No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively improving substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the Simple English Wikipedia. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles. Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia 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”.W 41 Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all.
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. 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. By replacing “en” with the code for another language, you can reach the Main Page of the wikipedia in that language, vegas casino download if it exists. According to the TechCrunch website, on 23 January 2020, Wikipedia reached more than 6 million articles on the English Wikipedia. The number of articles and contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around the spring of 2007.
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. The encyclopedia is home to 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003). English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium.
- The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia.
- Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service.W 97 In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices.
- Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted.
- We begin WikipediaAcademy by acquainting you first as a user and later as an editor.
In November 2013, New York magazine stated, “Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis.” The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively. 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 name, proposed by Sanger to forestall any potential damage to the Nupedia name, originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.
Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 61 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 62 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.W 57 The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.W 58 The foundation’s 2020 Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million, with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost $11 million.W 59 “Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men.”
- 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.
- It is a wiki that uses the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia Foundation projects).
- The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative.
- 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.
In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by “sharp” comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. These ideas include “featured articles”, the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short “stub” articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.
For example, the German Wikipedia maintains “stable versions” of articles which have passed certain reviews.W 21 Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the “pending changes” system in December 2012. Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors. A frequently vandalized article can be “semi-protected” or “extended confirmed protected”, meaning that only “autoconfirmed” or “extended confirmed” editors can modify it. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only users with 10 edits that have an account that is four days old may create a new article.W 19 On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. 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.
As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia “makes no guarantee of validity” of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.W 47 Concerns have been raised by PC World in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that results from users’ anonymity, the insertion of false information, vandalism, and similar problems. Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a “western cultural bias” (or “pro-western bias”) or “Eurocentric bias”, reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, “similar biases that are found in the ‘ivory tower’ of academic historiography”. In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appeared to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much “leftist bias”. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.