Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of encyclopedias in every major language. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia grew exponentially in its first 4 to 5 years. Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia project and one of the most popular sites on the Internet.[1] The English Wikipedia is the world's largest single wiki and it contains more than one million articles.
Main features
Wikipedia refers to two of its pivotal features in its slogan, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit." Indeed, virtually any person on the Internet may create or edit a Wikipedia article, thanks to computer software known as wiki. Contributors may edit Wikipedia anonymously or register permanent "user" accounts. Currently, Wikipedia has more than ten thousand users.[2]
Wikipedia keeps fastidious track of its participants' editing and much of its internal activities using the wiki software. All edits are tracked and the editing history for every Wikipedia page is available.[3] As a result, when anonymous (or registered) users make inappropriate revisions to an encyclopedia article (i.e., Wikipedia "vandalism"), Wikipedia volunteers can readily restore the prior version.This transparency also enables visitors to examine both the history of substantive articles and the deliberations of Wikipedia's policy and organizational decisions, which are often effectuated through wiki webpages.
Wikipedia judges certain articles to be important enough and well-written enough to be considered featured articles, as of 9 May 2007, there are 1391 "Featured Articles" out of 1,776,624 articles on the English Wikipedia.[4] In addition, various groups of users collaborate within topical "projects" (e.g., law) to rate the quality of articles and upgrade weaker articles.
Wikipedia may be said to be free insofar as its articles provide free and open access to all content, thereby creating public domain products. All contributions of text are licensed under the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL).
History
The project was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001 as an accidental spin-off of Nupedia.[5]
The project wrote its own wiki software called MediaWiki and released this software under the GPL, so anyone may copy it and modify it freely. In addition, Wikipedia has established a series of related projects, such as a dictionary and a news service.
Criticisms
While anyone may contribute anonymously, anonymous contributors may be identified by the IP address from which they contributed.
Wikipedia articles include both knowledge typical of general knowledge encyclopedias as well as relatively trivial subjects, such as information on small towns, sports figures, celebrities and popular culture. For example, each of the 493 Pokemon characters has an individual article.
Notes
- ↑ Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in terms of article size and number of related encyclopedias.Template:Fact
- ↑ [1]. A small number of users are blocked or temporarily banned from using the Wikipedia site, mainly due to repeated tampering with the site.
- ↑ This tracking exceeds the documentation requirements of the GFDL.
- ↑ Wikipedia:Featured articles. Retrieved on 2007-05-09.
- ↑ Wales no longer considers Sanger a co-founder of Wikipedia.