Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwikiˈpiːdi.ə/, /ˌwikiˈpeːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ (Audio (U.S.) ) is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.
As of August 1, 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 7.9 million articles in 253 languages, 1.932 million of which are in the English edition.[1] This makes it the largest, most extensive, and fastest growing encyclopedia ever compiled.[citation needed] It has been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception,[3] it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[4] Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers located in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Due to Wikipedia's open nature, critics have questioned its reliability and accuracy.[5] The site has been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information,[6] uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[7] and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[8] Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[10] Two scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived[11] and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as other encyclopedias.[12]
Wikipedia, along with other interactive websites such as YouTube and Facebook, won the Time Person of the Year, awarded to the most influential of that year in 2006. The award praised the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world made possible through the World Wide Web.[13]
Founding
Wikipedia's English edition was launched on January 15, 2001, as a complement to Nupedia, an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were identified as co-founders of Wikipedia in 2001. Wikipedia's official personnel page from September 2001 states that Wales and Sanger were the two co-founders, and that there was no editor-in-chief.[2][14][15][16][17] Wales, creator of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, today claims to be the sole founder of Wikipedia and has told The Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder.[18] However, Sanger strongly contests that description. He was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia at least as early as September 2001 and referred to himself that way as early as January 2002.[2][19][20]
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."[21] 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.[22] 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.[23] The Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and holds regular fundraisers;[24] the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over $1 million.[25]
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.[27] 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.[27]
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
- See also: List of Wikipedias
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".[29] There are presently 253 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, the top 14 have over 100,000 articles and the top 139 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[30] or points of view.[31] 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%).[3]
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—most notably in their use of non-free images.[32][33]
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.[34] Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.[35] 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 multilingual efforts are also realised thanks to the Multilingual coordination.
Content redistribution
Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by many sites including database dumps.[citation needed] There is a free downloadable DVD version[36] developed by Linterweb which contains "1964 + articles".[37][38]
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.
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.[39]
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.[40]
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”.[41] 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.”[42]
Criticism and controversy
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[5] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[43] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is usually reliable, but that it is not always clear how much.[8] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[7] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[44] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[45] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[46] 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.[47] Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."[48]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[49] and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[50] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[51][52] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[6] has been noted,[53] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[54] Some claim that Wikipedia's political articles have been taken over by left-wing partisans.[55] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[56]
Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[57] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[58] and criticised for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[59]
Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[60] Several scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived,[11] and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other online encyclopedias.[12]
Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[61] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.[62] 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.[63] On 26 January 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[64] Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006.[65] In 2006, the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised[66] by the Russian government agency FAPMC.
In November 2006, Turkish Wikipedia was nominated under the Science category for the Altın Örümcek Web Ödülleri (Golden Spider Web Awards), which are commonly known as the "Web Oscars" for Turkey. In January 2007, Turkish Wikipedia was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. The award was given in a ceremony on January 25, 2007 at Istanbul Technical University.
Cultural significance
- See also: Wikipedia in culture
Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[67][68] 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.[69] 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[70] — though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[71] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[72] sometimes without attribution; several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[73][74][75] In July 2007 Wikipedia was the focus of a 30 minute documentary on BBC Radio 4 [76] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st Century nouns that are so familiar (Google,Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation[77]. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".[56] Websites such as Uncyclopedia have also been set up parodying Wikipedia; its Main Page claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[78] parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its Main Page.
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[79]. 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",[80] created in October 2002,[81] detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006.[82] Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[83] 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.[84]
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.[85]
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.
Conservapedia is a wiki encyclopedia project with goals similar to Wikipedia, but attempts to write articles from a socially and economically conservative perspective. It was started in late 2006 by Andrew Schlafly, a son of Phyllis Schlafly, who felt Wikipedia had a liberal bias in its articles. Conservapedia is not affiliated with Wikipedia or Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, although both use the free MediaWiki software to power their site.
Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[86] said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields:[87] "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."[88]
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