Wikipedia
From Wikipedia
Template:Selfref
 Wikipedia |
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 Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal |
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| URL | http://www.wikipedia.org |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Intanet ensaiklopedia projekt |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | 236 active editions (253 in total)[1] |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2] |
Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwikiˈpiːdi.ə/, /ˌwikiˈpeːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/) (Template:Audio) is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.
As of September 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 8.2 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9 2007 with a total of over 615 million words, roughly fifteen times as many as the largest edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.[1] Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception,[3] it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[4] Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers located in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Due to Wikipedia's open nature, critics have questioned its reliability and accuracy.[5] The site has been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information,[6] uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[7] and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[8] Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[10] Two scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived[11] and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as other encyclopedias.[12]
When creators of on-line content were collectively named Time Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.[13]
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[edit] Content redistribution
Because of the nature of Wikipedia Copyright, Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by many sites including database dumps.Template:Fact There is a free downloadable DVD version[14] developed by Linterweb which contains "1964 + articles".[15][16]
[edit] Reliability and bias
Wikipedia appeals to the authority of peer-reviewed publications rather than the personal authority of experts. Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources.
Wikipedia tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced a scale against which the quality of articles is judged; other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1500 articles have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.
In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.[17]
In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[18]
In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, for contributing to the creation of a generation of “intellectual sluggards”.[19] He also stated that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are “the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything,” He also stated that “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the internet” was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on the academics who cite Wikipedia that:
“You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she said. “The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the internet in a critical and appropriate way.”[20]
[edit] Criticism and controversy
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[5] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[21] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is usually reliable, but that it is not always clear how much.[8] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[7] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[22] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[23] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[24] Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[25] Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."[26]
In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing-- but these efforts have proven unsuccessful due to community disagreement and the fact that such a system would require a major software overhaul.[27][28] However a similar version is being tested on the German Wikipedia, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version in a few months.[29]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[30] and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[31] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[32][33] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[6] has been noted,[34] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[35] Some claim that Wikipedia's political articles have been taken over by left-wing partisans.[36] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[37]
Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[38] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[39] and criticised for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[40]
Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[41] Several scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived,[11] and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other online encyclopedias.[12] With nearly hundreds of thousands of contributors, over 2 million articles in English, hundreds of thousands of articles in other languages, the sheer scope of Wikipedia dwarfs traditional encyclopedias in size of content, human investigative resources, peer-review and editorial efforts and is unrivaled in human history as a collaborative effort in the written language.
In August 2007, a new website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia by editors who are not logged in, and has revealed some interesting and controversial edits its first few days of use. Many of these edits came from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and were attempts to remove criticism.[42]
Wales called WikiScanner "a very clever idea," and said that he was considering some changes to Wikipedia to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them. "When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’" he said. "That might make them stop and think." [42]
Due to the large number of links and content citations it contains, Wikipedia is highly incompatible with screen reading technology.Template:Fact
[edit] Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[43] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.[44] 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.
In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.[45] On January 26 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[46] Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006.[47] In 2006, the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised[48] by the Russian government agency FAPMC.
In November 2006, Turkish Wikipedia was nominated under the Science category for the Altın Örümcek Web Ödülleri (Golden Spider Web Awards), which are commonly known as the "Web Oscars" for Turkey. In January 2007, Turkish Wikipedia was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. The award was given in a ceremony on January 25 2007 at Istanbul Technical University.
[edit] Cultural significance
Template:See also
Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[49][50] The Parliament of Canada website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for Civil Marriage Act.[51] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Office[52] — though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[53] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[54] sometimes without attribution; several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[55][56][57] In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30 minute documentary on BBC Radio 4[58] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st Century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th Century terms as hoovering or coke. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".[37] Websites such as Uncyclopedia have also been set up parodying Wikipedia; its Main Page claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[59] parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its Main Page.
The first documentary film about Wikipedia, entitled Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, is scheduled for 2008 release. Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Wikipedia and feature interviews with Wikipedia editors around the world.[60][61]
[edit] Related projects
A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been emulated on a website[62]. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users.
Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki",[63] created in October 2002,[64] detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006.[65] Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[66] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects.[67]
A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.[68]
Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, h2g2 and Everything2.
Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[69] said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields:[70] "We welcome a diversity of efforts. If Larry's project is able to produce good work, we will benefit from it by copying it back into Wikipedia."[71]
[edit] See also
Template:Meta
- Wikipedia:10 things you did not know about Wikipedia
- Congressional staffer edits to Wikipedia
- List of encyclopedias
- List of Wikipedias
- List of wikis
- Open content
- User-generated content
- Wikipedia community
- Uncyclopedia
- Template:Srlink
[edit] References
Template:Reflist
[edit] External links
Template:Sisterlinks Template:Spoken Wikipedia
- Wikipedia - multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
- Wikipedia at the Open Directory Project
- CBC News: I, editor
- Help Edit Wikipedia A wikiHow article.
Template:Wikimedia Foundation Template:Wikipediahisteri Template:Ol Wikipedia
