Wikipedia:About/old

Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia helping to create a world where everyone can freely share and access all available knowledge. It is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and consists of freely editable content. The name "Wikipedia" is a blending of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide readers to related pages with more information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers. Anyone with Internet access and in good standing can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism.

Since its creation on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has grown into the world's largest reference website, attracting 1.8 billion unique-device visitors monthly. It currently has more than articles in more than 300 languages, including  articles in English with  active contributors in the past month.

The fundamental principles of Wikipedia are summarized in its five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines, with which familiarity is not a requirement for contributing.

Anyone is allowed to add or edit words, references, images, and other media here. What is contributed is more important than who contributes it. To remain, the content must be free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. It should conform with Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source. Editors' opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research will not remain. Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia, as its software allows easy reversal of errors, and many experienced editors watch to ensure that edits are improvements. Begin by simply clicking the button at the top of any editable page!

Wikipedia differs from printed references in important ways. It is continually created and updated, with articles on new events appearing within minutes rather than months or years. Because everyone can help improve it, it has become more comprehensive than any other encyclopedia. In addition to the quantity of its articles, its contributors work on improving their quality, removing and repairing misinformation and other errors. Over time, articles tend to become more comprehensive and balanced. Because anyone can edit them, they may contain undetected misinformation, errors or vandalism. Readers who recognize this can obtain valid information (see Researching with Wikipedia) and fix the articles.

History
Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia, begun by the online media company Bomis. Because Nupedia required highly qualified contributors and had an elaborate peer review system, its content grew slowly. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, Nupedia's founder and Bomis' cofounder, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed for the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a wiki could allow public members to contribute material, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.

There was considerable resistance from Nupedia's editors and reviewers to associate it with a Wiki-format website; so Sanger gave the new project the name "Wikipedia", and it was launched on its own wikipedia.com domain on January 15 (now called "Wikipedia Day" by some users). Its server (in San Diego) and bandwidth were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have worked on Wikipedia include Tim Shell, one of Bomis' cofounders and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey.

In May 2001, Wikipedias were launched in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish, and were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian versions. Polish was added In September, and further commitment to Wikipedia's multilingual provision was made. Afrikaans, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian versions were announced by the end of that year.

When the Wikimedia Foundation was launched in 2003, Wikipedia's domain was changed to wikipedia.org, corresponding with its new parent organization's .org top-level domain denoting its not-for-profit nature. There are now Wikipedias in over 300 languages.

Contributors


Anyone with Web access can edit Wikipedia, and this openness encourages the inclusion of a tremendous amount of content. About people—from expert scholars to casual readers—regularly edit Wikipedia. These experienced editors help create a consistent style, following our Manual of Style. Contributors are called "editors" or "Wikipedians", regardless of their experience.

Several mechanisms are in place to help Wikipedia members maintain civility while carrying out the important work of crafting a high-quality resource. Editors can watch pages, and technically skilled persons can write editing programs to track or rectify bad edits. When there are disagreements on content, editors often work together to compile articles that fairly represent current expert opinion. Aspiring authors may wish to read Contributing to Wikipedia before contributing.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation owns the site, it is largely uninvolved in Wikipedia's editing or daily operation.

Trademarks and copyrights
Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which was formed in 2003 to fund the two-year old Wikipedia and has since created a family of free-content projects also built and maintained by contributing users.

Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text is identified either on the page footer, in the page history, or on the article's Talk (discussion) page. Every image has a description page indicating the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

Contributions remain their creators' property, while the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses ensure they are freely distributable and reproducible. (See content disclaimer for more information.)

Credits
Text on Wikipedia is a collaborative work, and the efforts of individual contributors to a page are recorded in that page's history, which is publicly viewable. Information on the authorship of images and other media, such as sound files, can be found by clicking on the image itself or the nearby information icon to display the file page, which includes the author and source, where appropriate, along with other information.

Exploration
Many visitors come to Wikipedia to acquire knowledge, while others come to share knowledge. As you read this, dozens of articles are being improved and new articles are being created. Changes can be viewed at the Recent changes page, and random pages at Random articles. 0 articles have been designated by the Wikipedia community as featured articles, exemplifying the encyclopedia's best content. Another 0 are designated as good articles. Some information on Wikipedia is organized into lists, the best of which are designated as featured lists. Wikipedia also has portals that organize content around topic areas. You can find articles using the Search Wikipedia box at the upper right of each page (or, if using the Monobook skin, a bit lower along the left-hand side).

Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages, including a Simple English version. Related projects include a dictionary, quotations, books, manuals, scientific reference sources, a travel guide, a data repository, and a news service (see sister projects). Each is maintained and managed by its own community, and often includes information that is hard to find elsewhere.

Basic navigation
Wikipedia articles are all cross-referenced. Highlighted text like this means "click here" for in-depth information. (Hovering is probably deep enough.) There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external websites and pages, reference material, navigational templates, and organized categories of knowledge which can be searched and traversed in a loose hierarchy for more information. Some articles may also have links to dictionary definitions, audio-book readings, quotations, the same article in other languages, and further information on our sister projects. Additional links can be easily made if a relevant link is missing—this is one simple way to contribute.

Research


As wiki documents, articles are never considered complete and may be continually edited and improved. Over time, this generally results in an upward trend of quality and a growing consensus over a neutral representation of information.

Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information. Indeed, many articles start their lives as displaying a single viewpoint; and, after a long process of discussion, debate, and argumentation, they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus. For a while, others may become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint that can take some time—months or years perhaps—to achieve better-balanced coverage of their subject. In part, this is because editors often contribute content in which they have a particular interest and do not attempt to make each article they edit comprehensive. Additional editors eventually expand and contribute to articles and strive to achieve balance and comprehensive coverage. Also, Wikipedia operates several internal resolution processes that can assist when editors disagree on content and approach. Usually, editors eventually reach a consensus on ways to improve the article.

The ideal Wikipedia article is well written, balanced, neutral, and encyclopedic, containing comprehensive, notable, verifiable knowledge. An increasing number of articles reach this standard over time, and many already have. Our best articles are called Featured Articles (and display a small star in the upper right corner of the article), and our second-best tier of articles are designated Good Articles. This process can take months or years to be achieved through editors' concerted effort. Some articles contain statements that have not yet been fully cited. Others will later be augmented with new sections. Some information will be considered by later contributors to be insufficiently founded and, therefore, may be removed.

While the overall trend is toward improvement, it is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source. Individual articles will vary in quality and maturity by their nature. Guidelines and information pages are available to help users and researchers do this effectively, as is an article that summarizes third-party studies and assessments of the reliability of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia versus paper encyclopedias

 * Main page: Wikipedia is not paper (on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki).

Wikipedia has advantages over traditional paper encyclopedias. First, it is not limited in space: it can keep growing as fast as people add.

Second, there are no qualifications required to be able to author its articles. It draws from a vast pool of contributors: the whole world. This, and the first advantage mentioned above, have enabled Wikipedia to become the most comprehensive encyclopedia on Earth.

Third, a paper encyclopedia remains static (stays the same) and falls out of date until its next edition. Wikipedia is more dynamic: You don't have to wait for the next edition to come out (there are no editions), as Wikipedia is published online as it is written online. Articles are made available as is, regardless of what stage of development they are in. You can update Wikipedia at any moment. People do so continually around the clock, thereby helping each other keep abreast of the most recent events everywhere and the latest facts in every subject.

Fourth, Wikipedia has a meager "publishing" cost for adding or expanding entries, as it is online, with no need to buy paper or ink for distribution. This has allowed it to be made available for free, making it more accessible to everyone. This has also enabled Wikipedia to be independently developed and published in many different languages simultaneously by people literate in each. Of the 290+ different language Wikipedias, 137 of them have 10,000 or more articles.

Fifth, Wikipedia has a low environmental impact in some respects, since it never needs to be printed. Computers have another environmental cost.

Sixth, Wikipedia is extra-linear (more than linear). Instead of in-line explanations, Wikipedia incorporates hypertext in the form of wikilinks. Throughout its content is a robust network of links, providing another dimension of knowledge accessibility. The encyclopedia also has correlated to tables of contents and indexes, with each entry in them hyperlinked to an article on the topic specified.

Seventh, each Wikipedia article provides an introduction summarizing the more extensive detail of its contents.

Eighth, being open to anyone to edit, articles on Wikipedia are subject to additions that might be erroneous or written poorly, which in turn are subject to being corrected or rewritten. It is a community effort, with most people involved helping to improve the work, fixing problems they encounter along the way. See more about Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses below...

Strengths, weaknesses, and article quality


Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses, and differences arise because it is open to anyone. According to editorial guidelines and policies, it has a large contributor base, and its articles are written by consensus.
 * Wikipedia is open to a large contributor base, drawing many editors from diverse backgrounds. This allows Wikipedia to reduce regional and cultural bias found in many publications significantly and makes it very difficult for any person or group to censor and impose bias. A large, diverse editor base also provides access and breadth on subject matter otherwise inaccessible or poorly documented. Many editors contributing at any moment can produce encyclopedic articles and resources covering newsworthy events within hours or days of their occurrence. Like any publication, Wikipedia may reflect the cultural, age, socio-economic, and other biases of its contributors. There is no systematic process to make sure "obviously important" topics are written about, so Wikipedia may suffer unexpected oversights and omissions. While anyone may alter most articles, in practice, editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, literate, rich enough to afford a computer, et cetera) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, others in great depth.
 * Allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia makes it easily vandalized and susceptible to unverified information, which requires removal. See Administrator intervention against vandalism. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is more subject to subtle viewpoint promotion than a typical reference work. A bias that would be unchallenged in a traditional reference work is likely to be eventually challenged or considered on Wikipedia. While Wikipedia articles generally attain a good standard after editing, it is important to note that fledgling articles and those monitored less well may be susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information. Wikipedia's radical openness also means any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state, such as in the middle of a large edit or a controversial rewrite. Many contributors do not yet comply fully with key policies or may add information without citable sources. Wikipedia's open approach tremendously increases the chances that any particular factual error or misleading statement will be relatively promptly corrected. Numerous editors at any given time are monitoring recent changes and edit articles on their watchlists.
 * Wikipedia is written by open and transparent consensus—an approach with its pros and cons. Censorship or imposing "official" points of view is complicated and usually fails after a time. Eventually, all notable views become fairly described for most articles, and a neutral point of view reached. In reality, the process of reaching consensus may be long and drawn-out, with articles fluid or changeable for a long time while they find the "neutral approach" all sides can agree on. Reaching neutrality is occasionally made harder by extreme-viewpoint contributors. Wikipedia operates a full editorial dispute resolution process that allows time for discussion and resolution in-depth. Still, it also permits disagreements to last for months before poor-quality or biased edits are removed. A common conclusion is that Wikipedia is a valuable resource and provides a good reference point on its subjects.
 * That said, articles and subject areas sometimes suffer from significant omissions, and while misinformation and vandalism are usually corrected quickly, this does not always happen. (See for example this incident in which a person inserted a fake biography linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations and Soviet Russia as a joke on a co-worker which went undetected for four months, saying afterward he "didn't know Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.")
 * Wikipedia is written largely by amateurs. Those with expert credentials are given no additional weight. Wikipedia is also not subject to any peer review for scientific, medical, or engineering articles. One advantage of having amateurs write in Wikipedia is that they have more free time on their hands to make rapid changes in response to current events. The wider the general public interest in a topic, the more likely it is to attract contributions from non-specialists.

The MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia retains a history of all edits and changes. Thus information added to Wikipedia never "vanishes" irreversibly. Discussion pages are an important resource on contentious topics. Therefore, serious researchers can often find a wide range of vigorously or thoughtfully advocated viewpoints not present in the consensus article. As with any source, the information should be checked. A 2005 editorial by a BBC technology writer comments that these debates are probably symptomatic of cultural changes that are happening across all sources of information (including search engines and the media) and may lead to "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources."

Disclaimers
Wikipedia disclaimers apply to all pages on Wikipedia, where consensus is to only link them at the end of each article. Proposals to have a warning box at the beginning have been rejected. Some do not like the way it looks or that it calls attention to possible errors in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, in common with many websites, has a disclaimer that, at times, has led to commentators citing these to support the view that Wikipedia is unreliable. A selection of similar disclaimers from places which are often regarded as reliable (including sources such as Encyclopædia Britannica, Associated Press, and the Oxford English Dictionary) can be read and compared at Non-Wikipedia disclaimers.

Contributing


Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia by clicking on the tab in an article, and editors are encouraged to be bold. To get started, the intro tutorial has helpful advice. Also, offers many benefits. Editors are expected to add only verifiable and factual information rather than personal views and opinions, and to remain civil when discussing issues. Vandals will have their edits reverted and be blocked from editing.

Most articles start as stubs, but after many contributions, they can become featured articles. All editors are unpaid volunteers, including administrators, trusted editors who are given elevated permissions. The ease of editing Wikipedia results in many people editing. That makes updating the encyclopedia very quick. Every page has an associated talk page tab, where improvements to it are discussed.

Editorial quality review


As well as systems to catch and control substandard and vandalistic edits, Wikipedia also has a full style and content manual and various positive systems for continual article review and improvement. Examples of the processes include peer review, good article assessment, and the featured article process, a rigorous review of articles that are intended to meet the highest standards and showcase Wikipedia's capability to produce high-quality work.

Besides, specific types of articles or fields often have their own specialized and comprehensive projects, assessment processes (such as biographical article assessment), and expert reviewers within specific subjects. Nominated articles are also frequently the subject of specific focus on the neutral point of view noticeboard or in WikiProject Cleanup.

Technical attributes
Wikipedia uses MediaWiki software, the open-source program used not only on Wikimedia projects but also on many other third-party websites. The hardware supporting the Wikimedia projects is based on several hundred servers in various hosting centers worldwide. Full descriptions of these servers and their roles are available on this Meta-Wiki page. For technical information about Wikipedia, check Technical FAQ. Wikipedia publishes various types of metadata; and, across its pages, are many thousands of microformats.

Feedback and questions
Wikipedia is run as a communal effort. It is a community project whose result is an encyclopedia. Feedback about the content should, in the first instance, be raised on the discussion pages of those articles. Be bold and edit the pages to add information or correct mistakes.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

 * FAQ index
 * Category:Wikipedia FAQs

Static help
The Help:Contents may be accessed by clicking help displayed under the  ► Interaction tab at the top left of all pages.
 * Help:Menu—is a menu-style page that will direct you to the right place to find information.
 * Help:Directory—is a descriptive listing of all Wikipedia's informative, instructional, and consultation pages.

Giving feedback
There is an established escalation-and-dispute process within Wikipedia and pages designed for questions, feedback, suggestions, and comments. For a full listing of the services and assistance that can be requested on Wikipedia, see Request directory.
 * Talk pages—the associated discussion page for discussion of an article or policy's contents (usually the first place to go)
 * Vandalism—a facility for reporting vandalism (but fix vandalism as well as report it)
 * Dispute resolution—the procedure for handling disputes that remain unresolved within an article's talk space
 * Village pump—the Wikipedia discussion area, part of the Community portal
 * Contact us

See also:
 * Bug tracker—a facility for reporting problems with the Wikipedia website or the MediaWiki software that runs it
 * Village pump: proposals page—a place for making non-policy suggestions
 * Help desk—Wikipedia's general help desk, if other pages have not answered the query

Research help and similar questions
Facilities to help users researching specific topics can be found at:
 * Requested articles—to suggest or request new articles.
 * Reference desk—to ask for help with any questions or find specific facts.
 * Researching with Wikipedia—for information on using Wikipedia as a research tool.

Because of Wikipedia's nature, it is encouraged that people looking for information should try to find it themselves in the first instance. If information is found to be missing from Wikipedia, please be bold and add it.

Community discussion
For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the dashboard. For specific discussion not related to article content or editor conduct, see the Village pump, which covers such subjects as milestone announcements, policy and technical discussion, and information on other specialized portals such as the help, reference and peer review desks. The Community portal is a centralized place to find things to do, collaborations, and general editing to help information and find out what is happening. The Signpost, a community-edited newspaper, has recent news and opinion regarding Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Contacting individual editors
To contact individual contributors, leave a message on their talk page. Standard places to ask policy and project-related questions are the Village pump, online, and the Wikipedia mailing lists, over e-mail. Reach other Wikipedians via IRC and e-mail.

Besides, the Wikimedia Foundation Meta-Wiki is a site for coordinating the various Wikipedia projects and sister projects (and abstract discussions of policy and direction). Also available are places for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

For a full list of contact options, see Questions.

Sister projects

 * Please note that while other sites may also use MediaWiki software and therefore look like Wikipedia [dot org]—"wiki-" or "-pedia" or anything similar—the only projects which are part of the Wikimedia Foundation are those listed above.