Wikipedia, free Internet-based encyclopedia, started in 2001, that operates under an
open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia
Foundation. Wikipedia uses collaborative software known as a wiki that facilitates
the creation and development of articles. Although some highly publicized problems
have called attention to Wikipedia’s editorial process, they have done little to dampen
public use of the resource, which is one of the most visited sites on the Internet.
By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than 1,000,000
articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had surpassed 3,500,000.
However, while the encyclopedia continued to expand at a rate of millions of words
per month, the number of new articles created each year gradually decreased, from a
peak of 665,000 in 2007 to 374,000 in 2010. In response to this slowdown, the
Wikimedia Foundation began to focus its expansion efforts on non-English versions
of Wikipedia, which by 2011 numbered more than 250. Some versions had already
amassed hundreds of thousands of articles; indeed, the French and German versions
both boasted more than a million. Consequently, the foundation paid particular
attention to languages of the developing world, such as Swahili and Tamil, in an
attempt to reach populations otherwise underserved by the Internet. One impediment
to Wikipedia’s ability to reach a truly global audience, however, was the Chinese
government’s periodic restrictions of access to some or all of the site’s content within
China.
In some respects, Wikipedia’s open source production model is the epitome of the so-
called Web 2.0, an egalitarian environment where the web of social software
enmeshes users in both their real and virtual-reality workplaces. The Wikipedia
community is based on a limited number of standard principles. One important
principle is neutrality. Another is the faith that contributors are participating in a
sincere and deliberate fashion. Readers can correct what they perceive to be errors,
and disputes over facts and over possible bias are conducted through contributor
discussions. Three other guiding principles are to keep within the defined parameters
of an encyclopedia, to respect copyright laws, and to consider any other rules to be
flexible. The last principle reinforces the project’s belief that the open-source process
will make Wikipedia the best product available, given its community of users. At the
very least, one by-product of the process is that the encyclopedia contains a number
of publicly accessible pages that are not necessarily classifiable as articles. These
include stubs (very short articles intended to be expanded) and talk pages (which
contain discussions between contributors).
The central policy of inviting readers to serve as authors or editors creates the
potential for problems as well as at least their partial solution. Not all users are
scrupulous about providing accurate information, and Wikipedia must also deal with
individuals who deliberately deface particular articles, post misleading or false
statements, or add obscene material. Wikipedia’s method is to rely on its users to
monitor and clean up its articles. Moreover, trusted contributors can receive
administrator privileges that provide access to an array of software tools to speedily
fix web graffiti and other serious problems.
Reliance on community self-policing has generated some problems. In 2005 the
American journalist John L. Seigenthaler, Jr., discovered that his Wikipedia
biography falsely identified him as a potential conspirator in the assassinations of
both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and that these malicious claims had
survived Wikipedia’s community policing for 132 days. The author of this
information could not be easily identified, since all that is known about unregistered
contributors is their computers’ IP (Internet protocol) addresses, many of which are
dynamically generated each time a user goes online. (The contributor later confessed
and apologized, saying that he wrote the false information as a joke.) The
Seigenthaler case prompted Wikipedia to prohibit unregistered users from editing
certain articles. Similar instances of vandalism later led site administrators to
formulate a procedure, despite protests from some contributors, by which some edits
would be reviewed by experienced editors before the changes could appear online.
