User:Mohammed oribi/sandbox

Wikipedia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the Internet encyclopedia. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation). For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About. For the main page, see Main Page. Wikipedia

Wikipedia ( i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia's 26 million articles in 286 languages, including over 4.2 million in the English Wikipedia, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[5][6][7][8][9] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.[5][10] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[11] Sanger coined the name Wikipedia,[12] which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick")[13] and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[14] Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source due to articles related to breaking news often being rapidly updated.[15][16][17] The open nature of Wikipedia has led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing,[18] the amount of vandalism[19][20] and the accuracy of information. Some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information,[21] though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[22] Britannica replied that the study's methodology and conclusions were flawed,[23] but Nature reacted to this refutation with both a formal response and a point-by-point rebuttal of Britannica's main objections.[24] Name: mohammed alsir abshar E.mail: moh.oribi@gmail.com Who owns Wikipedia? Wikipedia has as one of its defining characteristics, its openness. Anyone can edit it. Anyone can reverse someone else’s edits. And that process has led to the encyclopaedic resource we have today. How Wikipedia works is still a bit of a mystery. But what appears to be the case is that a core group of volunteers have taken a disproportionately large interest in protecting the integrity of the site. I found that out with a little experiment a few years back. Basically, the volunteers protect entries from vandalism. They also ensure that certain rules are adhered to in Wikipedia such as the prohibition on original work and proper citations. But there is a long-term issue as to how to ensure that openness leads to a diversity of contributions. Put simply, contributors to Wikipedia are hard to find and there is still plenty of work to be done. For the past two years in my course I have required students to make one edit to a Wikipedia entry. They have done so and done a good job. The only mischief was the inevitable vandalism of my own entry. But it turned out that I was protected by a small scale. Only 40 students each year. What happens when you ask a class of 1900 to do the same? That is what happened to my University of Toronto colleague, psychologist, Steve Joordens. Steve Joordens urged the 1,900 students in his introductory psychology class to start adding content to relevant Wikipedia pages. The assignment was voluntary, and Joordens hoped the process would both enhance Wikipedia’s body of work on psychology while teaching students about the scientist’s responsibility to share knowledge. So far so good. This seems like a nobel effort to engage students. As it turns out, not everyone agreed: But Joordens’s plan backfired when the relatively small contingent of volunteer editors that curate the website’s content began sounding alarm bells. They raised concerns about the sheer number of contributions pouring in from people who were not necessarily well-versed in the topic or adept at citing their research. Discussions in the Wikipedia community became very heated with allegations that articles were being updated with erroneous or plagiarized information. Some community members called for widespread bans on university IP addresses and decried the professor’s assignment as a needless burden on the community. Joordens issued a statement defending his students, saying only 33 of the 910 articles edited were tagged for potential problems. As it turned out, Joordens had not understood that there was a core group who ‘guarded’ Wikipedia. There was much friction that followed. In reading this account, it is hard to be anything but disappointed with the reaction of those who are dedicated to protecting Wikipedia. To be sure, it may have been overwhelming. But it was overwhelming in a good way: people were become engaged and the pool of contributors was expanding. Moreover, the appropriate response would have been to take the educational challenge seriously and reverted edits with politeness; the sort of politeness I encountered a few years ago and that I appreciated. This was, as they say, a “teachable moment.” Instead, the reputation of Wikipedia has been tarnished. A group of students who were themselves volunteering have been discouraged and now that story is spreading. Of course, I have to wonder whether the bad outcome will be students becoming cynical and retreating from contributing. A better outcome may be that they organise themselves to continue to contribute in large numbers and to force the issue of who owns Wikipedia. For, at the moment, it appears to be owned — a commons becoming fenced in — and that somehow seems like the wrong direction to be heading.

Who is responsible for the articles on Wikipedia?

You are! Actually, you could even edit this very FAQ, so long as each edit is helpful. This is a collaborative effort. Millions of people have contributed information to different parts of this project, and anyone can do so, including you. All you need is to know how to edit a page, and have some encyclopedic knowledge, which you would like to share. The encyclopedia provides users with a certain amount of freedom. You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the "Page history" link. Nevertheless, if you spot an error in the latest revision of an article, you are highly encouraged to be bold and correct it. This practice is one of the basic review mechanisms that maintains the reliability of the encyclopedia. As a result, Wikipedia has become one of the most extensive information libraries available on the Internet. If you are uncertain, or find the wording confusing, quote the material on the associated talk page and leave a question for the next person. This helps reduce errors, inaccuracies, or misleading wording more quickly and is highly appreciated by the community itself.

Your wikipedia pege URL ? Help:URL From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This page is about various URLs of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia servers. For how to markup links, see Help:Link. "WP:URL" redirects here. For the user rights log, see Special:Log/rights. Like all pages on the World Wide Web, the pages delivered by Wikimedia's servers have URLs to identify them. These are the addresses that appear in your browser's address bar when you view a page. Wikipedia editors also have the ability to create hyperlinks to chosen URLs, pointing to pages either within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, or elsewhere on the Web.