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Wikipedia is a Web-based free content encyclopedia that is openly edited and freely readable. It has 187 independent language editions sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Entries on traditional encyclopedic topics exist alongside those on almanac, gazetteer and current events topics. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving around 80 million hits per day.

Wikipedia contains approximately 1.3 million articles, 470,000 of which are in its English language edition. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on 15 January 2001. It runs on wiki software, and has numerous sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.

Wikipedia has been praised for being free, being openly accessible, covering a wide range of topics, and being detailed. It has been criticized for lack of authority versus a traditional encyclopedia, systemic bias, and for deficiencies in traditional encyclopedic topics. It is also a large-scale experiment of a discourse as defined in social sciences: "an institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic", in a global internet context of the early third millennium.

The idea of a free, open community, united by technology, where increasingly vast amounts of content are actively authored, reviewed, and debated for public consumption, makes the Wikipedia distinctive not only amongst encyclopedias but amongst informational resources in general. However, by its very nature of being open for anyone to edit, it is the responsibility of the individual editor and of the Wikipedia community to be on constant guard against blatant acts of vandalism and lack of objective viewpoint. The credibility of Wikipedia has often come into question, because the fact that the content can be freely edited by anyone who so chooses opens the door for a certain degree of inaccuracy and poorly researched content. Vandalism is a persistent problem, though to the community's credit it is typically caught and reverted within minutes.

Openly edited
Wikipedia's content is created by its users. Any visitor to Wikipedia can edit its articles, and many do, although in practice about half of all edits are done by just 2.5% of the users. Pages are always subject to editing, so no article is ever 'finished'. Edits made by people without a Wikipedia username make up around 18% of all edits. For editors not logged in, their IP address is used instead of a username. Wikipedia generally blocks open proxies.

Ciffolilli (2003) argues that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Former Wikipedia 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." Tech author Jon Udell created a movie documenting the revisions which Wikipedia's heavy metal umlaut article went through, available here.

Authors
Multiple levels of users exist within Wikipedia. Fundamentally, every user may edit a page in any way and is on equal footing with all others. However, there are administrative positions as well. Sysops, or administrators, the lowest level, are elected by the community and expected to lock or delete pages and block users in accordance with policies or consensus. Less prevalent are bureaucrats, who set sysop privileges; stewards, who are multi-project bureaucrats; and developers, who have direct access to the software. Edits may also be done by automated or semiautomated bots.

Policies
Wikipedia's participants (Wikipedians) commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies.
 * Neutral point of view (NPOV): Because there are potentially a huge variety of participants of all ideologies and nationalities, Wikipedia is committed to making its articles as unbiased as possible. There has been criticism that the shared systemic bias of participants can color the neutrality of an article. According to advocates of the NPOV policy, the aim is not to write articles from a single objective point of view, but rather, to fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a neutral way. However, establishing a consensus on what views should be thus attributed can require much heated discussion and debate, and at any rate the attribution never extends to every single statement within an article. Thus, some people have claimed that NPOV is more of an ideology than an actual policy.
 * No original research: Because there is no explicit peer review for content submitted to Wikipedia, submissions must be verifiable by readers and other contributors; unverifiable information, or facts newly discovered that have not been published elsewhere (and therefore cannot be qualified by "according to source, ..."), are not welcome.
 * Limit discussion to "talk" pages: Wikipedians use "talk" pages or other "out of band" methods to discuss changes to articles, rather than discussing the changes within the articles themselves. This marked a break from other wikis of the time, such as Ward Cunningham's Portland Pattern Repository.
 * Focus on encyclopedic content: There are a number of kinds of entries which are generally discouraged, because they do not, strictly speaking, constitute encyclopedia articles. For example, Wikipedia entries are not dictionary definitions, and the wholesale addition of source material such as the text of laws and speeches is generally frowned upon. However, some of Wikipedia's sister projects, such as Wiktionary and Wikisource, are designed to be repositories for many alternative forms of reference material that do not fit well into Wikipedia.

There are a variety of rules, guidelines, policies, and common practices that have been proposed and which have varying amounts of support within the Wikipedia community. When these proposed rules are violated, the community decides on a case-by-case basis whether they should be more strictly enforced or not.

There are also a number of important style conventions, particularly with respect to article naming; for example, when several names exist, the most common one in the respective Wikipedia language is preferred.

Neutral point of view
Wikipedia is grounded in the idea that all of its articles need to be written from a neutral point of view. The neutral point of view attempts to present ideas and facts in such a fashion that both supporters and opponents can agree. Of course, total agreement is not possible; there are ideologues in the world who will not concede to any presentation other than a forceful statement of their own point of view. But Wikipedia seeks a type of writing that is agreeable to essentially rational people who may differ on particular points. According to Jimbo Wales:


 * "Perhaps the easiest way to make your writing more encyclopedic, is to write about what people believe, rather than what is so. If this strikes you as somehow subjectivist or collectivist or imperialist, then ask me about it, because I think that you are just mistaken. What people believe is a matter of their perception of fact, and we can present that quite easily from the neutral point of view."

The neutral point of view policy states that one should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly. However, like all collaborative projects, Wikipedia has a built-in bias derived from the demographic make-up of its participants. In Wikipedia's case, this manifests itself in a tendency for contributors to create articles that relate to the interests of computer-literate American and British editors. An example of this effect can be seen by comparing the article on Coronation Street, a British soap opera &mdash; which at the start of 2005 totalled 6,933 words, not including the other 14 articles (4,746 words) devoted to its actors and characters &mdash; to the article on the Rwandan Genocide &mdash; 2,840 words on how 800,000 people died in 100 days. There are similarly long articles on U.S. television programs, actors, characters, pop groups, albums, and video games.

This bias has few defenders on Wikipedia. The presence of articles written from an exclusively U.S. or British point of view is largely a reflection of the fact that there are many Americans and British editors working on Wikipedia. Greater diversity can be achieved by active collaboration from people outside these areas, of whom there are many.

Disputes
Articles on Wikipedia are subject to "edit wars" as authors dispute or remove the contributions of others. Red Herring, in an October 2004 article, identified the most contentious articles on the English Wikipedia by number of edits as: George W. Bush, John Kerry, Sexual slang, Jesus, Jew, Adolf Hitler, Recent deaths and Saddam Hussein. Wikipedians have attempted to avoid disputes through semipolicies such as "assume good faith" and "work toward agreement." Reagle argues that disputes consume significant time, cause editors to leave, cause distraction, and disrupt other topics.

Vandalism
Wikipedia's open editing approach leaves it vulnerable to vandalism, defined as patently nonsensical or intentionally harmful edits. Popular and contentious articles appear to be vandalised most often, though any page can be affected. Vandalism generally consists of deleting all content on a page or inserting nonsensical remarks, often "obscene." It may be repaired by accessing the history of an article, clicking on the last unvandalised revision, and then clicking save. Ensuring that no edits are lost and that vandalism is easy to repair are principles of wiki software.

Vandalism's persistency has been shown to vary, though half of obvious vandalism is corrected within minutes. In a study of Wikipedia page histories, Viegas, Wattenberg, and Dave (2004) found the mean time to correct "mass delete" and "mass delete obscene" vandalism to be 7.7 days and 1.8 days, and the median times 2.8 minutes and 1.7 minutes respectively. In contrast, the average persistency of a revision marked "all content" was found to be 22.3 days, the median time 90.4 minutes. Researcher Martin Wattenberg was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying, "We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed."

Quality efforts
Wikipedians have created a number of voluntary committees and processes in an effort to improve article quality. Custodial tasks such as copyediting, formatting articles for use on a wiki, and merging or updating articles have various pages or categories to collaborate. Within the larger language editions, more significant work to improve an article may be proposed as community-wide collaborations through approval-voting processes. Peer review processes exist on a voluntary basis in many editions. An article felt to be of high quality, which has often entailed formal peer review, may be nominated as a "featured article" and has to undergo another review process. Successful candidates must meet specifications on neutrality, comprehensiveness, references, and version stability.

Free content
Original text, images, and sounds contributed to Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This makes it free content, allowing it to be freely used, edited, copied and redistributed subject to the terms of that license. Nearly-current copies of the database can be downloaded at any time for this purpose. Wikipedia's GFDL content has been mirrored by websites such as Wikinfo and thefreedictionary.com. Material from Wikipedia has been forked by Enciclopedia Libre, after most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia were dissatisfied with Wikipedia.

Wikipedia as a whole has not been published on physical media. WikiReader projects, begun by the German Wikipedia, have been published as a limited collection of articles on a specific subject. Mandrakesoft has proposed a DVD distribution of Wikipedia.

Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Wikipedia's images and sounds are non-free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. Material has also been given to Wikipedia under no-derivative or for-Wikipedia-only conditions.

Wikipedia has incorporated material from public domain and GFDL resources. Public domain resources of the United States federal government or encyclopedias whose copyright has expired are often mined for images and text. As the Wikimedia Foundation and its servers are located in the United States, all language editions are bound, at the least, by United States copyright law.

Web browsers that directly search Wikipedia include Internet Explorer with the Kimba Kano plugin and default Mozilla Firefox. Wikipedia's content has been used by some programs directly, for instance the instant messaging client Trillian, which underlines chat phrases that match the title of Wikipedia articles and displays this entry on request.

Language editions
Wikipedia currently encompasses 187 language editions, not all of which are active. Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, Deutsch (German), Nihongo (Japanese), Français (French), and Svenska (Swedish). In total, Wikipedia editions have 1.3 million articles.

The creation of a new language edition generally requires only a number of willing contributors and developer efforts to translate interfaces and setup software. However, Wikimedians have debated the creation of language editions on grounds of number of speakers.



See also Complete list of language Wikipedias available, Official article count of all Wikipedias.

Criticism
Main article: Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians and editors of encyclopedias.

Critics argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. In an interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor Ted Pappas said to the Guardian: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, Boyd argues that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes."

Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systematic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."

Criticism of a technical nature includes the argument that Wikipedia is effectively a "Google bomb" which disrupts search engine results by having an extremely large number of internal links. Wikipedia articles, or those hosted on its mirrors, will often be highly placed on search returns as a result.

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia was created as an openly-editable supplement to Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project written by experts through a formal peer review process. Nupedia was founded in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales with Larry Sanger hired as editor-in-chief and the project underwritten by Wales' Bomis Internet company. Wikipedia was begun as a single English edition on 15 January, 2001, under the same management arrangement. It gained a French and German version in the same year. Wikipedia and Nupedia existed side-by-side until 2003, in which time the latter's output fell dramatically and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.

Known applications of the idea of collecting all of the world's knowledge under a single roof go back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon. The modern notion of the general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' short story World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960).

With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. Free software exponent Richard Stallman articulated the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. He described Wikipedia's formation as "exciting news", and his Free Software Foundation encourages people "to visit and contribute to the site". One never-realized predecessor was the Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia.

Within Nupedia and Wikipedia, Sanger had considerable influence on the direction of the project during his tenure, until his position was abolished in February 2002. Wales remains actively involved to this day, contributing both time and resources to the project, and is a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation which now legally oversees Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Board of Trustees consists of Wales, for life; two Bomis employees; and two elected community members. There is no editor-in-chief or content arbitrator, and no paid employees.

Wikipedia reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on 20 September, 2004. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew language Wikipedia, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan.

Software and hardware


Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki open source software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida. Increasing demand has been a recurring problem for Wikipedia's servers, with slow-downs or outages resulting. Server resources and software have been regularly increased or optimized in an attempt to improve capacity.

MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required CamelCase 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 is now called MediaWiki. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used not only by all Wikimedia projects, but unaffiliated wikis as well. Brion Vibber has since taken the lead in fixing bugs and tuning the database for performance. Major work on the MediaWiki software, including a new database schema, is currently in progress. Its developers expect significant improvement in the scalability of the Wikipedia server cluster.

Server outages began to seriously diminish the productivity of Wikipedia contributors in 2003. Wikipedia was then served from a single server. During 2004, the server setup was expanded substantially into an n-tier distributed 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 7 Squid cache servers.

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. The Apache servers are connected to two NFS file servers. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France.

Wikipedia's increasing popularity has caused traffic which has often outstripped the capacity of Wikimedia's server cluster. In January 2005, the Wikipedia server cluster was serving 80 million hits and 190 million database queries per day. Extensive work, such as the further expansion of the server cluster, was underway to expand capacity. Wikipedia's status may be found on an off-site status page on OpenFacts.

In February 2005, rumours emerged that Google had offered free hosting and bandwidth for Wikipedia. The deal would have "no strings attached," not requiring Google Adwords or any other form of advertising. The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed that an offer had been made, was under consideration, and was to be further discussed in March, but did not confirm any details of the proposal.

Citations of
Wikipedia has been increasingly cited by the media, academics, and others.

An error in a Washington Post article was recently attributed to Wikipedia's article on the Lisbon earthquake.

Noncomprehensive lists are maintained by Wikipedians of Wikipedia as a source, as a press source, as a book source, as an academic source, as a court source, and as a conference paper source. Coverage of Wikipedia in the press is listed at Wikipedia's press coverage page.

Sister projects
Wikipedia has the following sister projects as part of the Wikimedia family:
 * Wiktionary, a free dictionary project
 * Wikibooks, a free textbook project
 * Wikiquote, a free encyclopedia of quotations
 * Wikisource, a multilingual repository of free source texts
 * Wikimedia Commons, a shared media respository
 * Wikinews, a free news source

There are many other conceptually related projects, including Wikitravel.

Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May of 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 Euro grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby award for "Community". 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, USA Today, The Economist, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Wired Magazine. All awards to the Wikipedia project and selected press clippings are listed on Meta.

General

 * SourceWatch: Wikipedia
 * Open Directory Project: Wikipedia
 * OpenFacts: Copies of Wikipedia content
 * The Wikipedia Cafeshop

Wikipedia

 * Wikipedia multi-lingual portal
 * Meta-Wikipedia - Policy-related and technical discussions about Wikipedia and its sister projects; includes a guide on how users can set up their own MediaWiki sites.
 * MediaWiki Phase III Software at SourceForge

Essays

 * The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource by Richard Stallman (RMS)
 * Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website, November 2002, by Lars Aronsson, founder of susning.nu.
 * Coase's Penguin by Yochai Benkler.

Reviews, endorsements, criticisms and discussion

 * 1999 FSF endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia)
 * October 2004 Simon Waldman on Wikipedia's success