Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001¹, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most read reference work in history. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia has grown to over 300 languages and is one of the world's most visited websites . The English Wikipedia, with over million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about five edits per second on average) over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia each represent around 5%. Wikipedia has been praised for its internal structure and culture, enabling the democratization of knowledge, and for its extensive coverage on various topics. The encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.…

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer editors, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most read reference work in history. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia has grown to over 300 languages and is one of the world's most visited websites . The English Wikipedia, with over  million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about five edits per second on average) over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia each represent around 5%. Wikipedia has been praised for its internal structure and culture, enabling the democratization of knowledge, and for its extensive coverage on various topics. The encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. The reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, but has received greater praise from the late 2010s onward. Censorship of Wikipedia by national governments has ranged from censoring specific pages to the entire site, sometimes due to its criticism of the government, or for content considered blasphemous. Wikipedia articles on breaking news are accessed as sources for up-to-date information by many.

History

Policies and content

Wikipedia is composed of 11 different namespaces, with its articles being present in mainspace. Other namespaces have a prefix before their page title and fulfill various purposes. For example, the project namespace uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-governance-related discussions. Most readers are not aware of these other namespaces. The fundamental principles of the Wikipedia community are embodied in the "Five Pillars", while the detailed editorial principles are expressed in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately shape content. The five pillars are: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility Wikipedia has no firm rules The rules developed by the community are stored in the Wikipedia namespace, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website's policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. They have since diverged to some extent. In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each ( , , , , , , , , , , , and ), seven more have over 500,000 articles ( , , , , , , and ), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000. The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over  million articles. the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. The top 10 editions represent approximately 85% of the total traffic. File:Wikipedia page views by language over time.png|Most viewed editions of Wikipedia, 2008–2024 File:Wikipedia editors by language over time.png|Most edited editions of Wikipedia, 2001–2024 Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. colour versus color) or points of view. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use. The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia, and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles. Articles available in more than one language may offer "interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. A study published by PLOS One in 2012¹ also estimated the cumulative share of edits to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world, based on time-of-day. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the Simple English Wikipedia.

Methods of access

Since Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or redistribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website. Thousands of "mirror sites" exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones that also include content from other reference sources are Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did. Some web search engines make special use of Wikipedia content when displaying search results: examples include Microsoft Bing (via technology gained from Powerset) and DuckDuckGo. Collections of Wikipedia articles have been published on optical discs. An English version released in 2006¹ contained about 2,000 articles. The Polish-language version from 2006 contains nearly 240,000 articles, the German-language version from 2007/2008 contains over 620,000 articles, and the Spanish-language version from 2011 contains 886,000 articles. Additionally, "Wikipedia for Schools", the Wikipedia series of CDs / DVDs produced by Wikipedia and SOS Children, is a free selection from Wikipedia designed for education towards children aged eight to seventeen. There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form. Since 2009¹, tens of thousands of print-on-demand books that reproduced English, German, Russian, and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM. The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia. Wikimedia has created the Wikidata project with a similar objective of storing the basic facts from each page of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects and make it available in a queryable semantic format, RDF. it has over 101 million items. WikiReader is a dedicated reader device that contains an offline copy of Wikipedia, which was launched by OpenMoko and first released in 2009. Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged. Wikipedia publishes "dumps" of its contents, but these are text-only; there is no dump available of Wikipedia's images. Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this. Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. According to a study by Pnina Shachaf in the Journal of Documentation, the quality of the Wikipedia reference desk is comparable to a standard library reference desk, with an accuracy of 55 percent.

Mobile access

Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection. Although Wikipedia content has been accessible through the mobile web since July 2013, The New York Times on February 9, 2014, quoted Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stating that the transition of internet traffic from desktops to mobile devices was significant and a cause for concern and worry. The article in The New York Times reported the comparison statistics for mobile edits stating that, "Only 20 percent of the readership of the English-language Wikipedia comes via mobile devices, a figure substantially lower than the percentage of mobile traffic for other media sites, many of which approach 50 percent. And the shift to mobile editing has lagged even more." In 2014 The New York Times reported that Möller has assigned "a team of 10 software developers focused on mobile", out of a total of approximately 200 employees¹ working at the Wikimedia Foundation. One principal concern cited by The New York Times for the "worry" is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment. By 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation's staff had grown to over 700 employees¹. Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service. In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009, a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since. Many devices and applications optimize or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata like geoinformation. The Android app for Wikipedia was released in January 2012, to over 500,000 installs and generally positive reviews, scoring over four of a possible five in a poll of approximately 200,000 users downloading from Google. The version for iOS was released on April 3, 2013, to similar reviews. Wikipedia Zero was an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to expand the reach of the encyclopedia to the developing countries by partnering with mobile operators to allow free access. It was discontinued in February 2018 due to lack of participation from mobile operators. Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain that editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult, and this discourages new potential contributors. Lih states that the number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years, and Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this. Lih fears for Wikipedia's long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain, and rival encyclopedias will not replace it.

Cultural influence

The Great Book of Knowledge, Part 1: A Wiki is a Kind of Bus, Ideas, with Paul Kennedy, CBC Radio One, originally broadcast January 15, 2014. The webpage includes a link to the archived audio program (also found here). The radio documentary discusses Wikipedia's history, development, and its place within the broader scope of the trend to democratized knowledge. It also includes interviews with several key Wikipedia staff and contributors, including Kat Walsh and Sue Gardner (audio, 53:58, Flash required). "So Is Wikipedia Cracking Up?" The Independent, February 3, 2009. Wikipedia's Year-End List Shows What the Internet Needed to Know in 2019. Alyse Stanley, December 27, 2019, Gizmodo.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378894537 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.