Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of online encyclopedias in every major language. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia 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 contains nearly two million 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 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 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.

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, each headed de facto by Jimmy Wales. Sanger left the project in late 2001 when funding ran dry, and permanently distanced himself from it around 9 months later over philosophical and management issues.

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 computer software known as a wiki. Contributors may edit Wikipedia anonymously or register permanent "user" accounts. Currently, Wikipedia has tens of thousands of users.

The project wrote its own wiki software called MediaWiki, the sort of "guts" of Wikipedia which make it a dynamic wiki capable of producing its contents through the interactions of its users. It was released under the GPL, permitting anyone to copy it and to modify it freely.

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. 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. 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, each of the 493 Pokémon characters has an individual article.

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 rectraction 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 Wikipedia 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 [sic] 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" [sic]. As unreported on Wikipedia, Landau also noted that the material referred to contains "the history and background of F1 racing, nothing particularly controversial."

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; and New World Encyclopedia, an encyclopedia written by "editors with academic and literary qualifications", that will launch in 2008. 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. Citizendium differs primarily from Wikipedia in that it only allows users with real-name registration to edit, while giving experts in a particular field more authority regarding its content.

Related topics

• Larry Sanger