Wikipedia

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For the English edition, see English Wikipedia. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from various writing

systems

show
Screenshot

Type of site Online encyclopedia

Available in 319 languages

Country of United States

origin

Owner Wikimedia Foundation

Jimmy Wales
Created by
Larry Sanger[1]

URL wikipedia.org

Commercial No
 Registration Optional[note 1]

Users >357,322 active users[note

 and >94,471,140 registered users
2]

1,112 administrators (English)

Launched January 15, 2001; 20 years ago

Current status Active

Content license CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0

Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media

licensing varies

Written in LAMP platform[2]

OCLC number 52075003

Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ ( listen) wik-ee-) is a

free, multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by
a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. It is one of the 15
most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of January 2021[3] and The
Economist newspaper placed it as the "13th-most-visited place on the web". [4] Featuring
no advertisements, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit
organization funded primarily through donations.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
Sanger coined its name[5][6] as a portmanteau of "wiki" and "encyclopedia". It was initially
an English-language encyclopedia, but versions in other languages were quickly
developed. With 6.3 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the 319
Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles,
[7]
 attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month.[8][9]
Wikipedia has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and for exhibiting systemic bias,
including gender bias, with the majority of editors being male.[4][undue weight?  –  discuss] Edit-a-
thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of
women's topics.[10] In 2006, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing
anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in
the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales. [11] The project's reputation
improved further in the 2010s as it increased efforts to improve its quality and reliability,
based on its unique structure, curation and absence of commercial bias. [4] In
2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake
news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles.[12]
 Contents

 1History
o 1.1Nupedia
o 1.2Launch and early growth
o 1.3Milestones
 2Openness
o 2.1Restrictions
o 2.2Review of changes
o 2.3Vandalism
o 2.4Edit warring
 3Policies and laws
o 3.1Content policies and guidelines
 4Governance
o 4.1Administrators
o 4.2Dispute resolution
 5Community
o 5.1Studies
o 5.2Diversity
 6Language editions
o 6.1English Wikipedia editor decline
 7Reception
o 7.1Accuracy of content
o 7.2Discouragement in education
o 7.3Quality of writing
o 7.4Coverage of topics and systemic bias
o 7.5Explicit content
o 7.6Privacy
o 7.7Sexism
 8Operation
o 8.1Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates
o 8.2Software operations and support
o 8.3Automated editing
o 8.4Hardware operations and support
o 8.5Internal research and operational development
o 8.6Internal news publications
 9Access to content
o 9.1Content licensing
o 9.2Methods of access
 10Cultural impact
o 10.1Trusted source to combat fake news
o 10.2Readership
o 10.3Cultural significance
o 10.4Sister projects – Wikimedia
o 10.5Publishing
 o 10.6Research use
 11Related projects
 12See also
 13Notes
 14References
 15Further reading
o 15.1Academic studies
o 15.2Books
o 15.3Book review-related articles
o 15.4Learning resources
o 15.5Other media coverage
 16External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger

Nupedia
Main article: Nupedia

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia

Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none
were as successful.[13] 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.[14] 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. [15][16] Nupedia
was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before
Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at
the urging of Richard Stallman.[17] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a
publicly editable encyclopedia,[18][19] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using
a wiki to reach that goal.[20] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia
mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. [21]
Launch and early growth
The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001,
[22]
 and January 13, 2001,[23] respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15,
2001,[14] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, [24] and announced
by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. [18] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-
view"[25] was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules
initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. [18] Originally, Bomis intended
to make Wikipedia a business for profit. [26]

The Wikipedia home page on December 17, 2001

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search

engine indexing. Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of
2004.[27] 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.[28]
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of
the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in
February 2002.[29] Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display
advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
[30][31]
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 contributors, appears to
have peaked around early 2007.[32] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the
encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. [33] A team at the Palo Alto
Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity
and resistance to change.[34] 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. [35][36][37]

A promotional video of the Wikimedia Foundation that encourages viewers to edit Wikipedia, mostly reviewing
2014 via Wikipedia content

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that

the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in
comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. [38][39] The
Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to
such content among the reasons for this trend.[40] Wales disputed these claims in 2009,
denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study. [41] Two years later, in
2011, Wales acknowledged the presence of 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, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". [42] A
2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia" in MIT Technology Review questioned this
claim. The article revealed that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer
editors, and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae. [43] In July 2012, The
Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline. [44] In the November
25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-
most-used website, is facing an internal crisis".[45]
Milestones

Cartogram showing number of articles in each European language as of January 2019. One square represents
10,000 articles. Languages with fewer than 10,000 articles are represented by one square. Languages are
grouped by language family and each language family is presented by a separate color.
In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular
websites in the US, according to comscore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors,
Wikipedia was ranked at number 9, surpassing The New York Times (No. 10)
and Apple (No. 11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the
rank was 33rd, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors.[46] As of
March 2020, Wikipedia ranked 13th[3] among websites in terms of popularity according
to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight billion page views every month. [47] On
February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia has 18 billion page
views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm
comScore".[8] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long
tradition of historical encyclopedias that accumulated improvements piecemeal through
"stigmergic accumulation".[48][49]

Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012

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.[50] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that
temporarily replaced Wikipedia content. [51][52]
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." [53] Varma added that "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."[53] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at
New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet &
Society indicated 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]." [53] By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia
was ranked fifth in the most popular websites globally. [54]
In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia; in October
2014, Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument; and, in July 2015, 106 of
the 7,473 700-page volumes of Wikipedia became available as Print Wikipedia. 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.[55][56] In June 2019, scientists
reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia have been encoded
into synthetic DNA.[57]

Openness
Number of English Wikipedia articles[58]

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month [59]

Differences between versions of an article are highlighted

Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination principle[note

3]
 regarding the security of its content.[60] It started almost entirely open—anyone could
create articles, and any Wikipedia article could be edited by any reader, even those who
did not have a Wikipedia account. Modifications to all articles would be published
immediately. As a result, any article could contain inaccuracies such as
errors, ideological biases, and nonsensical or irrelevant text.
Restrictions
Due to the increasing popularity of Wikipedia, 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.[61] On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial,
sensitive or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. [62][63] A
frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or "extended confirmed protected",
meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended confirmed" editors are able to modify it.
[64]
 A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators are able to
make changes.[65] A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified
Wikipedia's page protection policies as "[p]erhaps the most important" means at
Wikipedia's disposal to "regulate its market of ideas". [66]
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,[67] which have passed certain reviews.
Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced
the "pending changes" system in December 2012. [68] Under this system, new and
unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are
reviewed by established users before they are published. [69]
The editing interface of Wikipedia

Review of changes
Although changes are not systematically reviewed, the software that powers Wikipedia
provides tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. The "History" page
of each article links to each revision.[note 4][70] On most articles, anyone can undo others'
changes by clicking a link on the article's history page. Anyone can view the latest
changes to articles, and anyone may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them
so they can be notified of any changes. "New pages patrol" is a process whereby newly
created articles are checked for obvious problems.[71]
In 2003, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction
costs of participating in a wiki create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that
features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favor "creative
construction" over "creative destruction".[72]
Vandalism
Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia

Any change or edit that manipulates content in a way that purposefully compromises the
integrity of Wikipedia is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of
vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor. Vandalism can also
include advertising and other types of spam. [73] 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 to an article can be
more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page
semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the underlying code of
an article, or use images disruptively. [74]

American journalist John Seigenthaler (1927–2014), subject of the Seigenthaler incident.

Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time
to detect and fix vandalism is a few minutes.[75][76] However, some vandalism takes much
longer to repair.[77]
In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false
information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May
2005. Seigenthaler was falsely presented as a suspect in the assassination of John F.
Kennedy.[77] The article remained uncorrected for four months. [77] 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 replied that he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced. [78][79] After
the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research
tool".[77] This incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia, specifically targeted at
tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people. [80]
In 2010, Daniel Tosh encouraged viewers of his show, Tosh.0, to visit the show's
Wikipedia article and edit it at will. On a later episode, he commented on the edits to the
article, most of them offensive, which had been made by the audience and had
prompted the article to be locked from editing.[81][82]
Edit warring
Wikipedians often have disputes regarding content, which may result in repeatedly
making opposite changes to an article, known as "edit warring". [83][84] The process is
widely seen as a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added.
[85]
 This practice is also criticized as creating a competitive, [86] conflict based[87] editing
culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles,[88] which contributes to
the gender bias on Wikipedia.

Policies and laws

"Wikipedia policy" redirects here

External video
  Wikimania, 60 Minutes, CBS, 20

minutes, April 5, 2015, co-founder Jimmy

Wales at Fosdem

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. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in
the "five pillars" and in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately
shape content. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and
revise the website's policies and guidelines.[89] Editors can enforce these rules by
deleting or modifying non-compliant material. 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. [67]
Content policies and guidelines
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia must be about
a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.[90] A topic
should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",[91] 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. Further, Wikipedia intends to convey only
knowledge that is already established and recognized. [92] It must not present original
research. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable
source. 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. [93] This can
at times lead to the removal of information that, though valid, is not properly sourced.
[94]
 Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides.[95] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to
external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article. This is
known as a "neutral point of view" (NPOV).
Governance
Further information: Wikipedia:Administration

Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time.[96]

[97]
 An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the
subject of the article.[98]
Administrators
Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer
stewardship: this begins with "administrator",[99][100] privileged users who can delete pages,
prevent articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes (setting
protective measures on articles), and try to prevent certain people from editing. Despite
the name, 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 certain persons from making disruptive edits (such as vandalism). [101]
[102]

Fewer editors become administrators than in years past, in part because the process of
vetting potential Wikipedia administrators has become more rigorous. [103]
Bureaucrats name new administrators solely upon the recommendations from the
community.
Dispute resolution
Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semi-formal dispute resolution process to assist
in such circumstances. To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at
appropriate community forums,[note 5] or seek outside input through third opinion requests
or by initiating a more general community discussion known as a "request for
comment".
Arbitration Committee
Main article: 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. Statistical analyses suggest that the
committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are
conducted,[104] 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. 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). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63% of
cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia
(16%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of
impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-
social, but rather anti-consensus or in violation of editing policies, remedies tend to be
limited to warnings.[105]

Community
Main article: Wikipedia community

Video of Wikimania 2005—an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by
the Wikimedia Foundation, was held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 4–8.

Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated "talk" page. These form the
primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. [106]

Wikipedians and British Museum curators collaborate on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010

Wikipedia's community has been described as cultlike,[107] although not always with

entirely negative connotations.[108] The project's preference for cohesiveness, even if it
requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as
"anti-elitism".[109]
Wikipedians sometimes award one another "virtual barnstars" for good work. These
personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far
beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of
articulation work.[110]
Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. [111] As
Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked
on the project.[112] 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". [113] 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." [114] 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. [115]
The English Wikipedia has 6,256,030 articles, 41,010,686 registered editors,
and 146,245 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or
more edits in the past 30 days.
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". [116] Editors who do not
log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia, [116] 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", [117] but the
contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP
addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.
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".[118] Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out
over 50% of all the edits are done by just .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."[113] However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009
that in a random sample of articles, most content in Wikipedia (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". [113]
A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious
than others,[119][120] 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.[121] According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing
resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content". [122]
Diversity
Several studies have shown that most of the Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably,
the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of
Wikipedia editors were female.[123] Because of this, universities throughout the United
States tried to encourage females to become Wikipedia contributors. 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. [124] Andrew Lih, a professor
and scientist, wrote in The New York Times 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". [125] Data has
shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors. [126]