User talk:Cis-101

Wikipedia Our project that we are doing is on wikipedia. Wikipedia is on online encyclopedia that not only you but others can change and add to a certain discussion. It is a growing web based portal that ranks among the top ten most- visited sites in the world today. Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia who created a non-profit organization called the wikimedia foundation which operates Wikipedia. We have several different parts of this subject which have been divided amongst our group. The group consists of Angela Carosella, Julia styles, Erica Smith, Andrew Jones, and myself William Torres. The different aspects of Wikipedia that we have to cover are the commercial status, technology, blogging, the history and I will be making a demo page on Wikepedia. Angela Carrosella will be handling the commercial status of Wikepedia. Julia styles is covering the history from the beginning to present and everything in between. Erica Smith will be doing the technology part of the project. She will write on the software and basically on how it works. Andrew Jones will be talking on the blogging aspect of Wikipedia. He will be talking about the impact of blogging and how it has helped. I will be doing a demo Wiki in which I will have everyone’s info on the page and a couple of other things.

In my report I will be basically writing how to open your own Wiki and and explain the process from beginning to end.

The first thing you would have to do is go to www.Wikipedia.com and click on the “English” link. Then the main page will pop up. From here you can perform a search or sign in to anything that you have posted. Since we are starting a new page right know we have to click on the create account link. It will then ask you to create any username as long as no one else has it yet and also a password which can be anything that you like. After you hit submit it will give you a confirmation page where you can now access your account.

After you have successfully logged in you should be at the main page and you should see your username at the top of the page. If you click your username it will bring you to your user page. Here you can edit your page and start a discussion. while editing you can add text, change the fonts and colors of your text, add pictures, tables, graphs, and anything else that will be more visually stimulating for you discussion.

On your user page you can talk about yourself or post pictures and let people know if you’re a credible source or not. This is important because you can go on to other peoples discussions and add your own opinion or a fact and people are going to want to know where this info is coming from. After your account is set and you know how to edit and customize your page you are ready to go and join the wonderfull world of Wikipedia one of the largest places on the web to get info.

technology We divided all the parts of the project between us all. I will be looking up and describing the “technology” of wikipedia. Talking about software and explaining how it works and some of the host and servers of wikipedia. Julia Park is covering the history from the beginning to present and everything in between. Angela Carrosella will be handling the commercial status of Wikepedia. Andrew Jones will be talking on the blogging aspect of Wikipedia. William Torres made a demo of a “wiki” and applied some of our info on the page.

Wikipedia uses the MediaWiki software. It's an open-source program that is used on all Wikimedia projects, also widely used on other third party websites on the internet. The hardware supporting the various projects is based on almost 100 servers, hosted in various hosting centers around the world. Wikimedia projects are run from several racks full of servers. The following is were host are for Wiki, 89 machines in Florida, 3 near Paris, 11 in Amsterdam and  23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility. At present all DBs(databases), and most Apaches and Squids, are hosted at the Florida Power Medium data center. France is providing hosting and bandwidth and Netherlands is providing hosting and bandwidth for eleven servers since June 2005. Wiki technology is primarily used to allow groups of nonprogrammers to create applications. Groups that create wiki applications can customize the rules for how people participate. Wiki groups typically divide users into subgroups to work on different parts of the application typically the point of a wiki is to let multiple people collaborate. Some types of Wiki software are, PHP-based, Python-based, Ruby-based, Squeak (Smalltalk) based, Personal, Peer-To-Peer Explanation of Some Software, JavaScript Based- HTML/JavaScript-based server-less wiki in which the entire site is contained in a single file. PascalBased- PasWiki is a CGI based wiki using FreePascal. Squeak- super-portable and easy to set up and use". It runs on common platforms, including Mac, Windows, *nix, as well as others.

Commercial Status When it comes to wiki over the past several years it has become very popular. Millions of people use wiki every day and do not even know it. The most popular and most popularized wiki is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where people can edit the articles that on the internet encyclopedia. One of the major problems though is that anyone can edit an article on Wikipedia and because of that many teachers and professors do no allow their students to use Wikipedia as a source on their papers. Another problem is that anyone can write what they please in these articles and sometimes they will write false information or edit an article just for the fun of it. Besides Wikipedia there are also several other wikis that many people do not know about that are free too. There is Wikibooks which is a website that has free textbooks and free manuals. Wikiversity is a website that offers teachers and students free learning tools. Wiktionary is a free dictionary and thesaurus. There is also Wikiquote which has a collection of quotations. Wikispecies is a collection of different kinds of species. Wikinews is a free content news source. Wikisoure is a site with free source documents. City Wiki is a site with geographically localized information. OpenWetWare is a wiki that promotes sharing of knowledge related to biological research. Javapedia is a wiki focused on all aspects of Java. Mac Guide is a wiki about Mac issues. WikiWikiWeb is the oldest wiki, and is devoted to computer programing. Congresspedia is an encyclopedia about the United States Congress. Jurispedia is an academic encyclopedia about law. Lostpedia is a wiki dedicated to â€œLostâ€ the television series. â€œ A Million Penguinsâ€ is a wiki that is a novel being written by several people. Lyricwiki is a wiki listing lyrics by album. Wikitravel is a travel guide. These websites are all a major part of the huge commercial status of wiki. The reason that I mention the different types of wikis related to Wikipedia is that many of them have free. So for them to be able to continue to be free they need some kind of support. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 15 most visited websites in the world. Some of the major donations that help keep Wikipedia and the other wikis free are some popular companies and some other people and companies. The Virgin Foundation, also know as Virgin Unite, has donated over $50,000 dollars towards Wikipedia. Dell Computers offered generous donations and major discounts on computer software valuing over $50,000 too. Another big part of the commercial status of wiki is software. Many wikis are designed for concurrent use by multiple users. However, given sufficient skill and motivation, an individual user can install and run any of them for personal use. This may require installing additional software, for example a Web server, a DBMS, or a WAMP or LAMP software bundle. The user can prevent access to the wiki from outside the local computer. Some individuals use password protected wikis running either on their own webservers or hosted by third parties. This has the advantage that the personal space can be accessed from any web browser, at home, at work, on a PDA, at an internet cafe etc. Edits made on one machine are immediately accessible on the others. There are also wikis specifically for personal use. The major advantage they offer currently is drag and drop support for images, text and video. Two example products are VoodooPad, which was designed for Mac computer, and StoneNotes, which was designed for the use of Windows operating systems. VoodooPad is a personal wiki designed by a company called flyingmeat for the Mac OS X platform. This product also has a free "lite" version. flyingmeat also make a lightweight wiki server available for use with VoodooPad. ZuluPad is a personal wiki designed by Tom Gersic for Windows and Mac OS X platforms. This product is available in both an opensource and a for-purchase version. Some features include automatic linking of wiki words, automatic linking of URLs, exporting of HTML files, and syncing files to a central server with web-access. StoneNotes is a Windows based personal wiki system. StoneNote's core concept is an intuitive linking interface. ConnectedText is a Windows-based non-free personal wiki system with many advanced features, including: full text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, image and file control, CSS-based page display, and plug-ins.

History Wikipedia Every year there are new programs coming out and then new programs based off of those and so on and so fourth. Technology knows no bounds and will just keep getting more and more advanced, one such program is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, multi-lingual, web-based encyclopedia project whose primary servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul. It is written collectively by volunteers; its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the web site and its co- founders are Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. In leaning about Wikipedia I think its a great idea making it so anyone can post facts about whatever they choose and add onto already posted definitions, facts etc. The name Wikipedia is a combination of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wiki Wiki originates from the Hawaiian word for fast doubled, meaning extra fast. The term wiki that is used to refer to other similar groups of modifiable Web pages, such as Wikipedia, came from the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb, which was developed by Ward Cunningham. Wiki Wiki Web contains various topics and discussions about software engineering. Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository. Although Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly-editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki, fast website, to reach that goal. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on March 25, 1995. An original site called 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. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. The site was launched as the English Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, as a brother to Nupedia. Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view" was arranged systematically in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. There were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. 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 2001, 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. The Simple English Wikipedia, was created on September 18, 2001 in order to let people who are learning English use Wikipedia. In May 2001, the first wave of non-English Wikipedias were launched in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, German, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September, a further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, Africans, Norwegian, and Serbocroatian versions were announced. On December 18, 2003, the Simple English Wikipedia began using the MediaWiki software which is the software that runs most of the Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until Nupedias former servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. Its amazing how fast Wikipedia rose up and so easily took all over Nupedias users plus gained millions of others. Seeing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia split from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that the English version of Wikipedia would not display advertisements. The project is now operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, created on June 20, 2003 and a non-profit educational program set up by Jimmy Wales. As of 2007b Wikipedia has approximately six million articles in 250 languages, 1.7 million of which are in the English edition. Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity since its creation, and currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide. Which makes it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (created in 1407), which held the record for nearly 600 years. In my opinion Wikipedias ability to top many other websites was because of the fact that a regular person can just add their own facts and information on millions of topics and people searching for answers and explanations can find more than one. Every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the amount of knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia Critics have questioned Wikipedia's credibility due to an Average Joe being able to put information for all to read even if its false. The site has also been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies, and for favoring numbers and no facts in its editorial process. Wikiepedia and Wikipedia users have been working on projects to eliminate vandals. Two studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived because another user or site employee corrects the false/inappropriate information and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other encyclopedias. If people know and care about possible false information they should browse other sites as well. When searching for answers on a topic for a paper or just reliable information you never use just one source. On Monday, March 27, 2007 there was a very interesting, and I though, kind of funny article posted online saying that Larry Sanger is now creating a new site called Citizendium and it will be nonprofit, devoid of ads, and free to read and edit, just like Wikipedia. One thing that will be different with Citizendium is that contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in specific fields will then be asked to check articles for accuracy. I really dont think that this will stop people from posting false information. Im sure people, if youre posting information on a public site, already know that they can be traced without using their real names by using the IP address. Also in the article Jimmy Wales claims that Larry Sanger is not a co-founder of Wikipedia and is actually one of 21 of his employees that the company started out with when Wikipedia was Nupedia. It seems as if Wales and Sanger have some personal issues that are making them start to part ways and make their own similar non-profit sites. On the contrary Jimmy Wales believes that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. But he says most Wikipedians who adopt fake personas want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would their names. He also says that an online identity - or none at all, since participants can easily be found merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses, frees contributors to leave their baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content. Personally I think that Wikipedia is one of the easiest and most efficient ways, next to Google, to get certain information. I have also never come across horribly false, or should I say noticeably false, articles. When it comes down to it I believe you should just use what site you feel most comfortable with. There are so many to choose from with all facts and not some fact and fiction that it should not be too hard to find a suitable one for you. The history of Wikipedia will just keep getting greater and there is no predicting when the site will morph into another like Nupedia or just shut down.