User talk:Ched/QG

All the best
Thank you for your kind words. I thought you might like to read about the English Wikipedia community. QuackGuru (talk) 07:09, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

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The English Wikipedia community is the group of people who edit and volunteer their time to build Wikipedia    and to select what content in Wikipedia is best representative of the project's work. Prominent Wikipedians, as they are known, have commented on the importance of the communal aspects of the project and emphasized it as a major reason to help the project.

Background
Members of the community have a variety of incentives to participate. One study attempts to prove that a major incentive to contribute is the resulting prestige and respect within the community; although many Wikipedians contribute through pseudonyms, this prestige may not translate into a person's actual identity.

The community has certain guidelines and taboos that have evolved since its conception. For example, notable members of the community editing their own articles, is generally frowned upon and is considered "poor taste."

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said, in an interview with Slashdot: "The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well." Wales has described the Wikipedia editors as "The Community," and expanded by saying, "Everywhere I go it's about more or less the same: about 80 percent male, geeky. The geeky smart people." Though, a recent study by Hitwise states that 60 percent of edits are made by male editors. Larry Sanger, who is the founder of Citizendium and a co-founder of Wikipedia but left the project in 2002, wrote in part in regard to Wikipedia's oft-cited problems, that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to … academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism." The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labelled as "anti-elitism." The Wikipedia community has always had a tradition of an open-arm acceptance for anyone who has internet access to edit this ever expanding encyclopedia. Wales, the de-facto leader of Wikipedia, stated in part: "We need to maintain and improve our quality standards, while at the same time remaining open, friendly, and welcoming as a community. This is a challenge."

Open source publishing
The community works as a group to keep the encyclopedia's articles neutral in tone. The Wikipedia community also polices itself and the articles in the encyclopedia, while identifying problems and factual errors. According to Wales, the community of the encyclopedia is built on trust, and regular members of the community would not insert disinformation, such as the falsely reported death of actor Sinbad in March 2007. Wikipedians can be assinged the "administrator" status after a community review by their peers, via a "Requests for adminship" process. The New York Times stated that the community has a power structure, where the volunteer administrators have the authority to practice editorial control, delete articles that fail suitability requirements, and protect others against vandalism.

Wikipedia relies on the efforts of its community members to remove vandalism to articles. According to Theresa Knott, a Wikipedian, "Vandalism would be difficult to police if there were more vandals, but the ratio of vandal editors to non-vandals is too low." Every year, on or around April Fools' Day, the Wikipedia community prepares itself for the massive vandalism that is expected to take place because of the day's celebrations, which lasts for 48 hours instead of 24 due to its worldwide audience.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where anyone can edit and is built on consensus of the community. The Wikipedia community has adopted a policy, 'don't bite the newcomers' and editors, for the most part, remain anonymous. Newbies are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Wikipedia. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship. The beginning level is administrator. Administrators can fully protect articles when silly disputes arise among editors. Administrators have the authority to block disruptive editors. One of the tools used to keep Wikipedia on the right path is viewing the easily accessible history version of articles. The New York Times was also quoted as saying, "[Wikipedia] is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs...it's an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicised problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate." The community has certain policies and guidelines for Wikipedians to read and adhere to when publishing and editing content.

International
Wikipedia began as an English language project, and now has expanded its development into multilingual content and translations. This includes the German, Japanese, Chinese and French editions of Wikipedia in which international members of the community are contributing their knowledge wherein. For example, an informal group of Chinese volunteers are collaborating to establish an internet encyclopedia named Chinese Wikipedia to create a free source of information for Chinese surfers on the web. The Wikipedia community of the German Wikipedia, second largest only to the English Wikipedia, have plans on a new experimental approach that could help protect pages from trolling and improve the quality of articles. The idea is for edits to be delayed for a period of time before they become visible in the live page articles. In the past, Wales proposed a "Wikipedia 1.0" which the central article versions would be static and free from vandalism, similar to the direction of the German community experiments.

Recognition
The communal aspect of Wikipedia was recognized in 2004 by the Webby Award for the "community" category, and recognized along with YouTube, MySpace and other user generated content sites by Time Magazine in declaring their 2006 Time Person of the Year to be "You."

Additional sources

 * 1)  — Kristie Lu Stout.
 * 2)  — Bill Thompson.
 * 3)  — Ben Macintyre.
 * 4)  — Marshall Brain.
 * 5)  — Daniel H. Pink.
 * 6)  — Jimmy Wales.
 * 7)  — Susan Youngwood.
 * 1)  — Bill Thompson.
 * 2)  — Ben Macintyre.
 * 3)  — Marshall Brain.
 * 4)  — Daniel H. Pink.
 * 5)  — Jimmy Wales.
 * 6)  — Susan Youngwood.
 * 1)  — Ben Macintyre.
 * 2)  — Marshall Brain.
 * 3)  — Daniel H. Pink.
 * 4)  — Jimmy Wales.
 * 5)  — Susan Youngwood.
 * 1)  — Jimmy Wales.
 * 2)  — Susan Youngwood.