Wikipedia
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Wikipedia[note 3] is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of the wiki-based editing system MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.[3][4] It is consistently ranked as one of the ten most popular websites in the world, and as of 2024 is ranked the fifth most visited website on the Internet by Semrush.[5] Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employs a staff of over 700 people.[6]
Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
---|---|
Available in | 326 languages |
Country of origin | United States |
Owner | |
Created by | |
URL | wikipedia.org |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional[note 1] |
Users | >296,131 active editors[note 2] >112,930,763 registered users |
Launched | January 15, 2001 (23 years ago) (2001-01-15) |
Current status | Active |
Content license | CC Attribution / Share-Alike 4.0 Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies |
Written in | LAMP platform[2] |
OCLC number | 52075003 |
Initially only available in English, editions in other languages have been developed. Wikipedia's editions, when combined, comprise more than 62 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 14 million edits per month (about 5.2 edits per second on average) as of November 2023[update].[7][W 1] Roughly 26% of Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.9%, the United Kingdom at 5.4%, Germany at 5%, Russia at 4.8%, and the remaining 54% split among other countries, according to data provided by Similarweb.[8]
Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against the Global South (Eurocentrism).[9][10][failed verification] While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward[3][9][11] while becoming an important fact-checking site.[12][13]
Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.[14][15] Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events.[16][17]
Nupedia
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success.[18] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.[19] It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.[1][20] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[W 2] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[21][W 3] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[W 4] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[W 5]
Launch and growth
The domains wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com (later redirecting to wikipedia.org) were registered on January 13, 2001,[W 6] and January 12, 2001,[W 7] respectively. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001[19] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[W 8] and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[21] The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.[22][23] Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view"[W 9] was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia.[21] Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business.[24]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.[W 10][W 11] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.[25]
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[W 12] Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[26][W 13]
Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[27] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[W 14] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[28] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively.[29][30][31]
In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[32][33] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[34] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology.[35] Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable".[36] A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Wikipedia", questioned this claim, revealing that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae.[37] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators was also in decline.[38] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis."[39]
The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline.[40][41]
Milestones
In January 2007, Wikipedia first became one of the ten most popular websites in the United States, according to Comscore Networks.[42] With 42.9 million unique visitors, it was ranked #9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11).[42] This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 million unique visitors.[43] In 2014, it received eight billion page views every month.[W 15] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore".[7] As of March 2023[update], it ranked 6th in popularity, according to Similarweb.[44] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[45][46]
On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[47] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.[48][W 16]
In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia;[49] in October 2014, Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument;[50] and, in July 2015, 106 of the 7,473 700-page volumes of Wikipedia became available as Print Wikipedia.[51] In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash.[52][53] In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA.[54]
On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There was a decline of about two billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by twelve percent, those of German version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost nine percent."[55] Varma added, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."[55] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said that he suspected much of the page-view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."[55] By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular website globally.[56]
As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals,[57] from which cloud computing was the most cited page.[58]
On January 18, 2023, Wikipedia debuted a new website redesign, called "Vector 2022".[59][60] It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool.[60][W 17] The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes.[59][61]
Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination principle regarding the security of its content, meaning that it waits until a problem arises to fix it.[62]
Restrictions
Due to Wikipedia's increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article.[W 18] On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees.[W 19][63] A frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or "extended confirmed protected", meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended confirmed" editors can modify it.[W 19] A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes.[W 20] A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia's page-protection policies as "perhaps the most important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas".[64]
In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles which have passed certain reviews.[W 21] Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012.[65] Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.[66]
Review of changes
Although changes are not systematically reviewed, Wikipedia's software provides tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. Each article's History page links to each revision.[note 5][67] On most articles, anyone can view the latest changes and undo others' revisions by clicking a link on the article's History page. Registered users may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes.[W 22] "New pages patrol" is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.[W 23]
In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored "creative construction" over "creative destruction".[68]
Vandalism
Any change that deliberately compromises Wikipedia's integrity is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and other types of spam.[69] Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the article's underlying code, or use images disruptively.[W 24]
Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes.[70][71] However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect and repair.[72]
In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[72] It remained uncorrected for four months.[72] Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.[73][74] After the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".[72] The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people.[75]
Edit warring
Wikipedians often have disputes regarding content, which may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit warring".[W 25][76] It is widely seen as a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added,[77] and criticized as creating a competitive[78] and conflict-based editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles.[79][80]
Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study.[81][82] Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive work behavior at Wikipedia. He relied instead on "mutually reverting edit pairs", where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor. The results were tabulated for several language versions of Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia's three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad.[82] By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories.[82]
External videos | |
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Jimmy Wales, The Birth of Wikipedia, 2006, TED talks, 20 minutes | |
Katherine Maher, What Wikipedia Teaches Us About Balancing Truth and Beliefs, 2022, TED talks, 15 minutes |
Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, copyright laws) of the United States and of the US state of Virginia, where the majority of Wikipedia's servers are located.[W 26][W 27] By using the site, one agrees to the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use and Privacy Policy; some of the main rules are that contributors are legally responsible for their edits and contributions, that they should follow the policies that govern each of the independent project editions, and they may not engage in activities, whether legal or illegal, that may be harmful to other users.[W 28][W 29] In addition to the terms, the Foundation has developed policies, described as the "official policies of the Wikimedia Foundation".[W 30]
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.[W 31] 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 wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website's policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus.[83] Editors can enforce the rules by deleting or modifying non-compliant material.[W 32] 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.[W 21]
The two most commonly used namespaces across all editions of Wikipedia are: The article namespace (which are the articles of the encyclopedia) and the category namespace (which are a collection of pages such as articles). In addition, there have been various books and reading list that are composed completely of articles and categories of a certain Wikipedia.
Content policies and guidelines
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.[W 33] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability", which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject.[W 34] Further, Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized.[W 35] It must not present original research.[W 36] A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source, as do all quotations.[W 33] Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[W 37] This can at times lead to the removal of information which, though valid, is not properly sourced.[84] Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides.[W 38]
Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time.[85][86] An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.[W 39]
Administrators
Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. In particular, editors can choose to run for "adminship",[87] which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes.[W 40] Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive editors from making unproductive edits.[W 40]
By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia's earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous.[88] In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.[89]
Dispute resolution
Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semiformal dispute resolution process. To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a "request for comment".[W 25]
Wikipedia encourages local resolutions of conflicts, which Jemielniak argues is quite unique in organization studies, though there has been some recent interest in consensus building in the field.[90] Joseph Reagle and Sue Gardner argue that the approaches to consensus building are similar to those used by Quakers.[90]: 62 A difference from Quaker meetings is the absence of a facilitator in the presence of disagreement, a role played by the clerk in Quaker meetings.[90]: 83
Arbitration Committee
The Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted.[91] Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted,[92] functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate.[91] Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased).[note 6] Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%).[91] Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior.[W 41] When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings.[91]
Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated and dedicated "talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate.[93]
Wikipedia's community has been described as cultlike,[94] although not always with entirely negative connotations.[95] Its preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".[W 42]
Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification.[96] As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked there.[97] Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization".[98] In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits."[99] This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.[100]
The English Wikipedia has 6,803,416 articles, 47,158,059 registered editors, and 124,272 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.[W 43]
Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references".[101] Editors who do not log in are in some sense "second-class citizens" on Wikipedia,[101] as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation",[102] but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.[102]
Studies
A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site".[103] Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."[98] However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Wikipedia content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders".[98]
A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others,[104] although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small.[105] According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content".[106]
Diversity
Several studies have shown that most Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female.[107] Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Wikipedia contributors.[108] Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology.[108] Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, said that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior".[citation needed][109] Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.[110]