Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of online encyclopedias in every major language. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia went "live" on January 15th of that year and grew exponentially in its first 4 to 5 years. It is the world's largest encyclopedia project and one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The English-language Wikipedia is the world's largest single wiki and now contains more than 3.4 million individual articles.

History

An accidental spin-off of Nupedia, a now-defunct online encyclopedia written by experts, Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (who left the project in late 2001 when funding ran dry, and later permanently distanced himself from it) in January 2001 as a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia that anyone with access to one of its project websites can edit. Changes made to Wikipedia articles undergo no formal peer review and are immediately viewable on the World Wide Web. Under this deliberately radical open model, Wikipedia's growth has been nothing short of exponential. Within only a month, Wikipedia had 600 articles, and a year later in January 2002, 20,000. On November 20, 2004, the English Wikipedia alone reached 400,000 articles, and by March 1, 2006, that number had reached 1 million. By 2010 more than 3,000,000 articles had been created on the English Wikipedia alone.

Philosophy

Wikipedia's undergirding philosophy is that most of its contributors are well-meaning, and that unmoderated collaboration among them will gradually improve the encyclopedia such that it is both reliable and reputable. Organizationally, Wikipedia is headed by the Wikimedia Foundation, which includes an eighteen-member advisory board with fewer than ten employees, working under the de facto direction of Jimmy Wales.

Main features

Wikipedia refers to two of its pivotal features in its slogan, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Indeed, virtually any person on the Internet may create or edit a Wikipedia article, thanks to the use of wiki software. Contributors may edit Wikipedia anonymously or register user accounts. As of August, 2009, Wikipedia has more than 10 million registered users, though much of the content that users see is produced by a relatively small group of people: perhaps about 4,200 users, or 0.1%. These users have been responsible for about 44% of regularly-read content, with this domination increasing, according to one 2007 research estimate based on words read.

The project wrote its own wiki software called MediaWiki, the software package on which Wikipedia runs, which makes it a dynamic wiki, capable of producing its contents through the interactions of its users. It is written in PHP and released under the GPL, permitting anyone to copy it and to modify it freely.

MediaWiki keeps fastidious track of its participants' editing and much of its internal activities. All edits are tracked and the editing history for every Wikipedia page is available. 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.

A more or less stable group of Wikipedia users judges certain articles to be important enough and well-written enough to be considered featured articles. On 24 April 2008, there were 2,024 "Featured Articles" out of 2,346,120 articles on the English Wikipedia. In addition, various groups of users collaborate within topical "projects" 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).

While anyone may contribute anonymously, anonymous contributors may be partially identified by the IP address from which they contributed.

Wikipedia articles include both knowledge typical of printed encyclopedias as well as relatively recondite subjects, such as information on small towns, minor sports figures and celebrities, and popular culture. For example, many of the Pokémon characters have individual articles.

Policies

Wikipedia requires articles and contributors to conform to a number of policies. These policies have developed by consensus over time. The neutral point of view or NPOV policy requires that articles represent a wide variety of opinions while remaining neutral. A "simple formulation" of this policy is given as: "Assert facts, including facts about opinions - but do not assert the opinions themselves". The neutrality policy also disallows moralizing, preferring to let the facts "speak for themselves". In the section on balance, the policy asserts that viewpoints should be weighted according to their prominence. On an article on the Holocaust, for instance, it would be required to point out that the opinions of Holocaust deniers (or 'revisionist scholars') make up a tiny proportion of the learned opinion on the subject. The policy also bans "POV forks", that is articles about existing topics that contain just supportive or critical material. If one were to start an article entitled "Benefits of Homeopathy" because the article on Homeopathy was considered too critical or sceptical, this would be considered a breach of the neutrality policies.

Wikipedia requires that claims in articles be verifiable, which generally means that mainstream media sources must be pointed to in order to make it so that readers can follow up and verify Wikipedia's claims. Original research and writing is not allowed on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's "Be bold" policy, which has become widely used on other wikis and collaborative projects, encourages participation by letting people just jump in, even at risk of breaking other policies.

On Wikipedia, new or proposed articles must satisfy several criteria that are enforced by the site's administrators: notability, verifiability (not 'truth'), reliability of sources and neutral point of view. In addition, new articles can be 'speedily deleted' by administrators if the author fails to assert the significance of the subject. An example of the latter occurred in September 2007, when a row erupted over the deletion of a 'stub' article started by co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Criticisms and controversies

Due to Wikipedia's practice of allowing anonymous editing by anyone with access to the Internet, it has been criticized for factual inaccuracy and for vulnerability to vandalism. A notorious incident involving Wikipedia's inaccuracies was the John Seigenthaler biography controversy, in which an anonymous Wikipedia editor wrote a biography of a John Seigenthaler alleging that Seigenthaler was involved in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. In February 2007, The New Yorker ran a rare editorial retraction that Essjay, a high ranking Wikipedia administrator, was discovered to have lied about his career, background, and academic credentials in a telephone interview to 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff of The New Yorker.

In June, 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation hit the headlines again over a false claim regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, placed on the Wikinews site. Georgia police told reporters that the information had been a significant hindrance to their investigations. The individual responsible was traced via their IP address.

Also in June, as reported in Wikipedia's own on-line newspaper, in rejecting an attempt to register a trademark, the UK Intellectual Property Office based their decision in part on the Wikipedia article on Formula One motor racing. Despite noting that Wikipedia could host "potentially libellous statements", the final ruling extensively quotes Wikipedia sources and includes a claim by author David Landau that "inherently, I cannot see that what is in Wikipedia is any less likely to be true than what is published in a book or on the websites of news organisations". As unreported on Wikipedia, Landau also noted that the material referred to contains "the history and background of F1 racing, nothing particularly controversial."

In October 2011, users of the Italian version of Wikipedia opted to suspend the site due to the possibility of a new law being passed in Italy that would possibly allow legal action over material believed offensive.

Forks and spin-offs

The concept of Wiki's collaborative projects, along with criticisms of Wikipedia, has led to the emergence of several forks and spin-offs of Wikipedia. Examples include Wikinfo, a fork created by Fred Bauder; Conservapedia, a Wiki-style encyclopedia for political conservatives; Veropedia, founded by Danny Wool, which, funded by advertising, copied and fixed selected Wikipedia articles, and New World Encyclopedia, an encyclopedia written by "editors with academic and literary qualifications" but all from the perspective of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, launched in 2008. The Citizendium, an encyclopedic project established by Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, was originally a Wikipedia fork. Sanger has criticised numerous aspects of Wikipedia, including lack of respect for expertise and the dominance of 'difficult people' or trolls. The Citizendium differs primarily from Wikipedia in that its chief goal is to have "reliable" and high-quality content. It hopes to achieve that goal by only allowing users with real-name registration to edit, while giving experts in a particular field more authority regarding its content.

Development of editing restrictions

In June 2010, the English Wikipedia introduced editing restrictions known as 'Pending Changes'. Pages under Pending Changes protection may be edited by anybody, but changes by unregistered users must be approved by a reviewer. This has been rolled out on German Wikipedia but currently sits in limbo on English Wikipedia.

Such an approach has been compared to the Citizendium, though founder Larry Sanger has stated that this approach will not solve the problems endemic to the site, such as extensive duplication from copyrighted texts and persistent disputes over edits, largely because existing contributors "act like each other's editors, forming their requests as orders and in other ways competing to outdo each other".