   #copyright

Wikipedia

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet

   CAPTION: favicon of Wikipedia Wikipedia

   Wikipedia logo.
   Detail of Wikipedia's multilingual portal. Here, the project's largest
   language editions are shown.
   URL http://www.wikipedia.org/
   Commercial? No
   Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
   Registration Optional
   Available language(s): multi-lingual (171 active editions)
   Owner Wikimedia Foundation
   Created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales

   Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia
   project. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia.
   Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most
   articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the Web site.
   Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in
   Amsterdam and Seoul.

   Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15,
   2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia,
   and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was
   created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both
   Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia
   as "an effort to create and distribute a multi-lingual free
   encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on
   the planet in their own language".

   Currently Wikipedia has more than five million articles in many
   languages, including more than 1.5 million in the English-language
   version and more than half a million in the German-language version.
   There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 18 of them have more
   than 50,000 articles each. The German-language edition has been
   distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English
   DVD or print edition. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen
   in popularity, and has spawned several sister projects. According to
   Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top fifteen most visited sites, and
   many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as
   Answers.com.

   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. Information is sometimes
   unconfirmed and questionable, lacking the proper sources that, in the
   eyes of most Wikipedians, are necessary for an article to be considered
   "high quality". However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science
   journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica
   found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their
   articles on the natural sciences. This study was challenged by
   Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., who described it as "fatally flawed".

Characteristics

   Image depicting the article relation characteristics of a wiki; note
   that Wikipedia here refers to the article itself, not to the project as
   a whole.
   Enlarge
   Image depicting the article relation characteristics of a wiki; note
   that Wikipedia here refers to the article itself, not to the project as
   a whole.

   Wikipedia uses a type of software called a " wiki", which allows for
   content to be authored by multiple people easily. Visitors are allowed
   to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change its content to help build
   the encyclopedia. Such contributions can be made without the need to
   register a user account. It therefore is possible for large numbers of
   people to create articles and update them quickly as new information
   becomes available; it also means online vandalism of and disagreement
   about content are common.

   Many other Internet encyclopedia projects use traditional multi-lingual
   editorial policies and article ownership such as the expert-written
   Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nupedia, h2g2 and Everything2.
   Projects such as 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. Unlike many encyclopedias,
   Wikipedia 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 often are 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 note-worthy perspectives on an issue along with the
   evidence supporting them. The project also forbids the use of original
   research. Wikipedia articles do not attempt to determine an objective
   truth on their subjects, but rather to describe them impartially from
   all significant viewpoints. Following the introduction of a more user
   friendly citation functionality, since early 2006, articles
   increasingly include an extensive reference section to support the
   information presented in the article and to allow verification of the
   article.

Free content

   As a large and collaborative project that requires users to create and
   edit content en masse, it is imperative that all contributions be
   freely modifiable legally. Normally the creator of a work retains
   copyright over it, disallowing others from copying it or creating
   derivative works. It is for this reason that Wikipedia's articles are
   released under a license that permits anyone to build upon them. The "
   GNU Free Documentation License", or "GFDL", one of the many " copyleft"
   licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works,
   and commercial use of content, was chosen for this purpose. The license
   also states that, as a condition for the use of the information, its
   authors be attributed and any redistributed content remain available
   under the same license. Despite this free nature, the contributions of
   original material to the project by authors are still their rightfully
   theirs, and the copyright over their work is retained by them; but they
   agree to make the work available so that others may benefit from it.
   Contributors may choose to multi-license their content as well, which
   allows it to be used by third parties under any of the licenses, or
   simply release them into the public domain, although few contributors
   opt to do so.

   A significant proportion of images, sound and video files on Wikipedia,
   however, do not fall under the GFDL license. Items such as corporate
   logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim
   of fair use under the United States copyright law. There is also
   content released under different copyleft terms or licenses that are
   compatible with the GFDL, such as images under Creative Commons
   licenses.

Language editions

   An example of Wikipedia's range in language editions: Wikipedia in
   Hebrew.
   Enlarge
   An example of Wikipedia's range in language editions: Wikipedia in
   Hebrew.

   Currently Wikipedia encompasses 171 "active" language editions (ones
   with 100+ articles). In total, Wikipedia contains 250 language editions
   of varying states, with a combined 5 million articles.

   Language editions operate independently from 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.
   Wikipedia's article count has shown rapid growth in some of the major
   language editions.
   Enlarge
   Wikipedia's article count has shown rapid growth in some of the major
   language editions.

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

   The following is a list of the largest editions — those containing over
   100,000 articles — sorted by number of articles as of November 28,
   2006.
    1. English ( 1,505,875)
    2. German ( 502,487)
    3. French ( 400,577)
    4. Polish ( 319,239)
    5. Japanese ( 292,358)
    6. Dutch ( 242,773)
    7. Italian ( 218,432)
    8. Portuguese ( 199,157)
    9. Swedish ( 195,779)
   10. Spanish ( 173,746)
   11. Russian ( 118,600)
   12. Chinese ( 102,925)

Editing

   Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference
   between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.
   Enlarge
   Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference
   between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

   Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's content: registered users can
   also create new articles. Changes made to pages are 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".

   Some take advantage of Wikipedia's openness to add nonsense to the
   encyclopedia. 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.

   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
   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
   or copyrighted 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.

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

Wikipedia in other formats

   For some articles, there is a spoken version available in ogg format
   (using the Vorbis audio codec). The reason for the use of this format
   in favour of the more ubiquitous and well-known MP3 format is due to
   the decision to provide exclusively content that may be accessed with "
   Free software" — MP3 fails this criteria as it is covered by multiple
   software patents.

   As the encyclopedia is available online and released under an
   unrestrictive license, it is very easy to download its content for use
   on containers other than the Web, which it is still predominantly
   served with. Even so, some projects that utilize the content
   differently have sprung up. For example, the encyclopedia is also
   available on a CD from SOS Children. Additionally, an editorial team is
   working on creating " Wikipedia 1.0", a collection of Wikipedia
   articles that have been verified for accuracy and are ready for
   printing or burning to CD. Published copies of selected Wikipedia
   articles are also available from PediaPress, a Print on Demand service.

History

   Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder and current head of the Wikimedia
   Foundation
   Enlarge
   Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder and current head of the Wikimedia
   Foundation

   The Wikipedia concept was not novel — Everything2 (in 1998-1999) had
   used similar ideas before Wikipedia was founded — and 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.
   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 before 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:


   Wikipedia

     No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little
   feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the
  idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki,
    this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content.
       We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open
   projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis
   can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance,
     and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great
       source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can
                                 determine.


   Wikipedia

   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. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the
   former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was
   incorporated into Wikipedia.
   Wikipedia's English edition on March 30, 2001, two and a half months
   after its founding.
   Enlarge
   Wikipedia's English edition on March 30, 2001, two and a half months
   after its founding.

   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, 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 favour of
   multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic
   point-of-view".

   Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", was
   created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; The
   Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20,
   2003. Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this
   non-profit organization. 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 reached its
   one millionth article, among the 105 language editions that existed at
   the time, on September 20, 2004, while the English edition alone
   reached its 500,000th on March 18, 2005. This figure had doubled less
   than a year later, with the millionth article in the English edition,
   Jordanhill railway station, being created on March 1, 2006; meanwhile,
   the millionth user registration had been made just two days before. The
   1.5 millionth article was created on November 25, 2006 about the Kanab
   Ambersnail.

   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.

Software and hardware

   Wikipedia receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100
   servers have been set up to handle the traffic.
   Enlarge
   Wikipedia receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100
   servers have been set up to handle the traffic.

   Wikipedia itself runs on its own in-house created software, known as
   MediaWiki, a powerful, open source wiki system written in PHP and built
   upon MySQL. As well as allowing articles to be written, it includes a
   basic internal macro language, variables and transcluded templating
   system for page enhancement, and features such as redirection.

   Wikipedia runs on a cluster of dedicated Linux 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.
   Overview of system architecture, May 2006 (see also: meta:Server layout
   diagrams
   Enlarge
   Overview of system architecture, May 2006 (see also: meta:Server layout
   diagrams

   Wikipedia was served from 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 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, which can lead to a
   lag. To further increase response times, Wikimedia began building a
   global network of caching servers with the addition of three caching
   servers in France. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now
   take much of Wikipedia's traffic load. 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

   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.

   Bomis, an online advertising company that caters to a generally male
   audience and has hosted soft-core pornography, played a significant
   part in the early development of Wikipedia and the network itself.

Authorship and management process

   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. 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.

   Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers,
   stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number just over a
   thousand. 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. Any
   editor with a significant history of positive contributions and a firm
   understanding of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines can be nominated
   to become an administrator.

   Some 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". 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. 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. Daniel Brandt of
   Wikipedia Watch has referred to Jimbo Wales as the " dictator" of
   Wikipedia; however, most Wikipedia users either do not consider Wales
   to be a dictator, or consider him to be one who rarely gives
   non-negotiable orders.

Future directions for authoring content

   An experimental feature planned for the German version of Wikipedia has
   been reported which could eventually improve the quality of editing for
   Wikipedia and protect it from vandalism. The concept being tested is to
   still allow anyone to make article edits, but to only allow editors
   judged as "trustworthy" to make edits live on the public site. The
   process by which trustworthiness would be established is yet to be
   determined. Jimbo Wales stated "We want to let anybody edit but we
   don't want to show vandalized versions. It would be fun for me to
   announce to the press that the front page of Wikipedia is open for
   public editing for the first time in five years".

Criticism and controversy

   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, with unconfirmed
   information that is often without any proper sources, that it exhibits
   severe systemic bias and inconsistency. Wikipedia has also been
   criticized for using dubious sources, having a biased but neutrally
   written perspective towards certain points of view, for disregarding
   credentials, for lacking understanding and international nature, and
   for being vulnerabile to vandalism and special interest groups. Critics
   of Wikipedia include Wikipedia's own editors (and ex-editors),
   representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of articles,
   especially those that find information presenting them in a bad light.

   At the end of 2005, controversy arose after journalist John
   Seigenthaler, Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as
   a hoax, which had gone undetected for almost four months; this
   discovery led to several policy decisions within Wikimedia regarding
   creation of articles and the overview process, intended to address some
   of the flaws which had allowed the hoax to go undetected for that time.

The Wikipedia model

   Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to
   editing by anyone. Critics allege that non-expert editing undermines
   quality. Because contributors usually submit edits, rewriting small
   portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high-
   and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry.

   Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability,
   comprehensiveness and authority. It is criticised as having 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. A
   critical website, Wikipedia Watch, was created by Daniel Brandt,
   accusing Wikipedia of having "…a massive, unearned influence on what
   passes for reliable information."

   Supporters argue that Wikipedia does meet all the criteria for the
   basic definition of the word 'encyclopedia'. One difference from book
   encyclopedias is online web editing with Wikipedia's history function.
   A deleted text will remain in the history tab and other users can look
   up an individual's work history to gauge the author's merit.

   Emigh and Herring (2005) in a study of Wikipedia, note that there are
   not yet many formal studies of Wikipedia or its model. Their main
   conclusions regarding style and encyclopedic quality were:
    1. Statistically speaking, "the language of Wikipedia entries is as
       formal as that in the traditional print encyclopedia".
    2. Wikipedia entries are "stylistically homogenous, typically describe
       only a single, core sense of an item, and are often presented in a
       standard format" (attributed partly to policies and partly to the
       norms of conventional print encyclopedias "which Wikipedia
       effectively emulates").
    3. Wikipedia achieves its results by social means, including
       self-norming, a core of active and vigilant users watching for
       problems, and editors' expectations of encyclopedic text drawn from
       the wider culture.

Reliability

   Wikipedia can be assessed for reliability in several areas, including:
     * Accuracy of information provided within articles;
     * Comprehensiveness, scope and coverage within articles and in the
       range of articles;
     * Susceptibility to, and exclusion and removal of, false information
       (a criterion specific to the Wikipedia process);
     * Susceptibility to editorial and systemic bias;
     * Identification of reputable third party source references
       (citations).

Accuracy and comprehensiveness

   A variety of studies to date have tended to suggest that some Wikipedia
   articles (scientific articles most notably) are of a similar degree of
   accuracy to Encyclopædia Britannica, that Wikipedia provides a good
   starting point for research, and that articles are, in general,
   reasonably sound. However, these studies also suggest that due to its
   novel editorial model, it suffers omissions and inaccuracies which can
   sometimes be serious. A separate study suggests that in many cases,
   vandalism is reverted fairly quickly, but that this does not always
   happen.

   One of the studies, by Nature, identified that among 42 entries tested,
   the difference in accuracy was not significant: the average science
   entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica,
   about three. In the pairs of articles reviewed, eight serious errors
   such as misinterpretations of important concepts were detected, four
   from each encyclopaedia. Reviewers also found many factual errors,
   omissions or misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in
   Britannica. Additionally, it was found that Wikipedia articles are 2.6
   times as long as Britannica articles, meaning that there is a lower
   error/omission per word ratio in Wikipedia.

   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, leading to criticism that its contents lack
   authority, and according to Danah Boyd, that "[i]t will never be an
   encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite
   valuable for different purposes."

   Although Wikipedia has a policy of citing reputable sources, this is
   only sometimes adhered to. 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." and former Britannica editor Robert
   McHenry criticized the wiki approach on the grounds that "What [a user]
   certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him".

   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", 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.

   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. It is possible that articles subject
   to strong opinions (such as George W. Bush) are more prone to be edited
   poorly, but this is uncertain — often such articles receive extra
   attention and strong consensus exactly because they are the subject of
   heated debate. Other articles that do not produce such emotive
   responses may tend to be more stable.

   Other commentators have drawn a middle ground, that it contains much
   valuable knowledge and has some reliability, even if the degree is not
   yet assessed with certainty. People taking such a view include Danah
   Boyd, Larry Sanger (re-applying Eric Raymond's "Given enough eyeballs,
   all errors are shallow") and technology figure Joi Ito, who wrote, "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."

   Bill Thompson, a well known technology writer, commented that the
   debate is probably symptomatic of much learning about information which
   is happening in society today, arguing that:


   Wikipedia

   It is the same with search engine results. Just because something comes
   up in the top 10 on MSN Search or Google does not automatically give it
   credibility or vouch for its accuracy or importance... One benefit that
       might come from the wider publicity that Wikipedia is currently
    receiving is a better sense of how to evaluate information sources...
       The days when everything you saw on a screen had been carefully
   filtered, vetted, edited and checked are long gone. Product placement,
   advertorials and sponsorship are all becoming more common. An educated
     audience is the only realistic way to ensure that we are not duped,
   tricked, fleeced or offended by the media we consume, and learning that
   online information sources may not be as accurate as they pretend to be
    is an important part of that education. I use the Wikipedia a lot. It
   is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept
                something that I read there without checking.


   Wikipedia

                — Bill Thompson, What is it with Wikipedia?

Coverage

   A common criticism is that editors, being volunteers, write on what
   interests them, and what they are aware of. Therefore coverage both
   within topics, and across the encyclopedia, is uneven and may at times
   be seriously unbalanced, with obvious and notable omissions.

   Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because
   of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its
   contributors. For example, like any Internet group, the site can become
   dominated by cliques of habitual users who express both condescension
   and hostility to users not involved in the "in-group" — habitual users
   also feel a sense of "ownership" over "their" pages, leading to edit
   wars.

   Encyclopædia Britannica's editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued this
   case, as has former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger who stated in
   2004 that "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of
   the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility
   is very uneven."

   The same fluidity that allows articles to be patchy has also led to
   Wikipedia being 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.

Bias

   Wikipedia has been criticized as having a systematic bias. There are
   several forms of this criticism.

   First, there could be an unintentional bias due to the overall makeup
   of the community of Wikipedian editors. For instance, because
   Wikipedia's basic model is popular and nonmonetary, this could lead to
   a shortage of editors with elitist or strongly pro-capitalist views.
   There is no doubt that Wikipedia includes a wide diversity of editors,
   and important articles which are the focus of a controversy generally
   receive input from editors on both sides of this controversy; but this
   weak bias would tend to show up in more secondary articles.

   Second, there could be an intentional bias within a given article due
   to the focused efforts of a single editor or a small group of editors.
   This would also tend to be confined to secondary articles which receive
   less editorial attention. In general, this bias would be more-or-less
   strong, and thus possibly detectable by a critical reader.

   Third, there could be a bias introduced by some other aspect of
   Wikipedia. The tendency to use web-based sources (or even the
   "background knowledge" of editors), the policies against original
   research, and the injunction to maintain a "neutral point of view"
   could all be sources of bias, especially if overapplied.

Citations

   Perhaps the most clear-cut criticism of Wikipedia is that it fails to
   live up to its ideal of well-cited articles. While there are clearly
   many articles which are rich in citations, and while efforts to improve
   are ongoing, it is clear that the majority of information in Wikipedia
   has no cited source.

Community

   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. 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). 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, the community view is argued
   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 editions also often contain reference desks in
   which the community answers questions.

   Professor James H. Fetzer criticized Wikipedia in that he could not
   even change the article about himself in Wikipedia; it has a policy
   that prohibits the editing of biographies by the subjects themselves.

Responses to criticisms

   In an interview with BusinessWeek on December 13, 2005, Wales discussed
   the reasons that the Seigenthaler hoax had gone undetected, and steps
   being taken to address them. He stated that one problem was that
   Wikipedia's use had grown faster than its self-monitoring system could
   comfortably handle, and that therefore new page creation would be
   deliberately restricted to account-holders only, addressing one of
   Seigenthaler's main criticisms. He also gave his opinion that
   encyclopedias as a whole (whether print or online) were not usually
   appropriate for primary sources and should not be relied upon as
   authoritative (as some were doing), but that nonetheless on balance
   Wikipedia was more reliable as "background reading" on subjects than
   most online sources. He stated that Wikipedia was a "work in progress".

   In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide
   various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles. 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". For example, Cross proposes a
   temporal provenance scheme which colors text based how many edit
   sessions a piece of text has survived (red for new text, yellow for
   text that has survived 50 edits, green if 100, black if more than 150
   edits). 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".

Awards

   Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica
   for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came
   with a €10,000 ($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. 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, The 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 2006, in a Multiscope research, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the
   third best Dutch language site (after Google and Gmail), with a score
   of 8.3.

In popular culture

   Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by hundreds of sites
   including database dumps. Wikipedia content has also been used in
   academic studies, books and conferences, albeit more rarely, and very
   recently, in movies .As of 2006, Wikipedia has been used once in a
   United States court case, and the Parliament of Canada website refers
   to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading"
   list of Civil Marriage Act. Some Wikipedia users, or Wikipedians,
   maintain (non-comprehensive) lists of such uses.

   With increased usage and awareness, there has been an increasing number
   of references to Wikipedia in popular culture. Many parody Wikipedia's
   openness, with characters vandalising or modifying the online
   encyclopedia project's articles. Still others feature characters using
   the references as a source, or positively comparing a character's
   intelligence to Wikipedia.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
