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Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a copyleft encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to standard encyclopedic knowledge, Wikipedia includes information more often
associated with almanacs and gazetteers, as well as coverage of current events.
Wikipedia is free content under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning that it
may be freely used, freely edited, and is free to copy and redistribute.
The content of Wikipedia is entirely created by its users. No single person owns the content; no article is ever finished. As such, Wikipedia is subject to some unique hardships [1] that do not exist in
traditional encyclopedias. It has self-healing systems in place to deal with these challenges, and even a page designed to
explain these systems [2] .
Wikipedia began as an English language project on January 15, 2001, and soon gained its first other
language, French, on March
23, 2001. There has since been a great deal of effort to make it multilingual, and it contains over 280,000 articles in English and over 400,000 in all other languages combined as of June 2004 [3] .
History
Apart from downtimes caused by technical problems and upgrades, Wikipedia has
been in operation since January 10, 2001.
See History of Wikipedia for more.
Antecedents
The idea of collecting all of the world's knowledge within arm's reach under a single roof goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon. The modern idea of the general purpose widely distributed printed encyclopedia goes back to just a
little before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. See Encyclopedia for more.
The idea to use automated machinery beyond the printing press to
build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells's short story
of a World Brain (1937) and
Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex, in As We May Think
(1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960).
With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop online
encyclopedia projects. See Internet
encyclopedia project. Free software exponent Richard Stallman articulated the usefulness of a "Free Universal
Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. He described Wikipedia's formation as
"exciting news," and his Free Software Foundation
encourages people "to visit and contribute to the site."
Essential characteristics
There are three essential characteristics of the Wikipedia project, which together define its niche on the World Wide Web:
- It is, or aims to become, primarily an encyclopedia.
- It is a wiki, in that it can be edited by anyone (except for banned
users, and except for protected pages).
- It is open content, and uses the copyleft GNU Free
Documentation License.
- If you wish to become a Wikipedia contributor, please take a look at the page titled Welcome, newcomers .
Vandalism
One pertinent issue on Wikipedia is "vandalism": silly or offensive edits to
its encyclopedia articles. For example, Sarah Lane, presenter of "Sarah's Blog
Report," part of The Screen Savers TV program on
TechTV, "vandalised" the Wikipedia page on monkeypox live on air [4] - leading
to a surge of vandalism on that page by viewers of the TV show. Lane later wrote that "Although this excites me in its ease and
simplicity, it's a little frightening. I mean, what if I had instead written 'My boss is a big fat **** and his phone number is
****'? Sure, somebody would delete it, but this calls for some seriously dedicated moderators." [5]
"Because Wikipedia is a radically free, open project, it attracts an anarchistic element," Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, admitted to Wired
News. "Fortunately, most of us are willing to take a definite stand against vandalism ... and to get rid of it
instantly."
According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that instances of vandalism at Wikipedia
are often quickly resolved: Recent research by a team from IBM found that most vandalism suffered by Wikipedia had been repaired within five minutes.
That's fast: "We were surprised at how often we found vandalism, and then surprised again at how fast it was fixed," says Martin
Wattenberg, a researcher in the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, in Cambridge, Mass. ([6] )
Policies
Wikipedia's participants (Wikipedians) commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies.
First, because there are a huge variety of participants of all ideologies, and
from around the world, Wikipedia is committed to making its articles as unbiased as possible. However there has been criticism
that the systemic bias of the participants can color the neutrality of an
article. The aim is not to write articles from a single objective point of view — this is a common
misunderstanding of the policy — but rather, to fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a
neutral way. Of course, which views need to be attributed is a significant issue.
Second, there are a number of article naming conventions; for example, when several names exist, the most common one in the
respective Wikipedia language is to be used.
Third, Wikipedians use "talk" pages or other "out of band" methods to discuss changes to articles, rather than discussing the
changes within the articles themselves. This marked a break from other wikis of the time, such as Ward Cunningham's WikiWiki.
Fourth, there are a number of kinds of entries which are generally discouraged, because they do not, strictly speaking,
constitute encyclopedia articles. For example, Wikipedia entries are not dictionary definitions, and the wholesale addition of
source material such as the text of laws and speeches is generally frowned upon. (However, some of Wikipedia's sister projects,
such as Wiktionary and Wikisource, are designed as repositories for many of the worthwhile-knowledge items, such as the aforementioned
in the previous sentence, that do not fit well into Wikipedia.)
Fifth, there are a variety of sometimes contradictory rules, guidelines, policies, and common practices that have been
proposed and which have varying amounts of support within the Wikipedia community. When these proposed rules are violated, it is
decided on a case by case basis among the Wikipedia community whether they should be more strictly enforced or not.
Personnel
Wikipedia has been edited by thousands of people. Wikipedia calls people who edit it Wikipedians.
There is no editor-in-chief, as such. The two people who founded Wikipedia are Jimmy Wales (former CEO of the small Internet company Bomis, Inc.) and
Larry Sanger. The Wikipedia.com domain is registered under Wales' name. For the first thirteen months, Sanger was paid by Bomis
to work on Wikipedia. Sanger was said to have taken a role of mediator at times, making decisions on issues of heated debates.
This was based not on formal authority, but on demands from users at large. Funding ran out for his position, leading to his
resignation in February of 2002. Other current and past Bomis employees who have done some work on the encyclopedia include Tim
Shell, one of the co-founders and current CEO of Bomis, as well as programmers Jason Richey and Toan Vo.
Software and hardware
The servers used by Wikipedia and its sister projects
The particular version of wiki software that originally ran Wikipedia was UseModWiki, written by Clifford Adams ("Phase I"). At
first it required CamelCase for links; soon it was also possible to use the
current linking method with double brackets. In January 2002, Wikipedia began running on PHP wiki software, which used an
underlying MySQL database, added many
features (and abolished the behaviour of CamelCase words automatically becoming links), and was specifically written for the
Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske ("Phase II"). After a while, the site started to slow down to an extent where editing became
almost impossible; several rounds of modifications to the software provided only temporary relief. Then Lee Daniel Crocker
rewrote the software from scratch; the new version, a major improvement, has been running since July 2002; this "Phase III"
software is now also called MediaWiki. Brion Vibber has since taken the lead in
fixing bugs and tuning the database for performance.
In late 2003, server outages had become a serious problem to Wikipedia contributors. Many of them reported they had difficulty
editing articles by getting time-outs and severe slowness. This was due to congestion on the single server that was running all
the Wikipedias at the time.
As of June 2004, the project runs on nine dedicated servers, located in Florida.
This new configuration includes a single database server and four web servers, all running Redhat Linux. The web servers serve up pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias.
To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until rendered invalid, allowing page
rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Cached requests are served by two Squid servers; the new servers are linked via two file system NFS
servers (one primary and one backup - the primary NFS server is currently also the email server).
Sister projects
Wikipedia has the following sister projects:
- Wiktionary, a free dictionary project
- Wikibooks, a free textbook project
- Wikiquote, a free encyclopedia of quotations
- Wikisource, a repository of source texts in any language which are either
in the public domain or are released under the GFDL.
Downloading the database
If people want to use Wikipedia's open content for something that cannot
best be done on Wikipedia, they may at any time download a nearly-current version
of the entire article database to use for any purpose, within the terms of the GFDL. [7]
A number of sites, such as "4reference.net" and "nationmaster" have used this to mirror or fork Wikipedia's content.
[OpenFacts]
Awards and nominations
2004
- Prix Ars Electronica, winner - in the
category of Digital Communities;
The World Starts With Me also won.
- The Webby Awards, winner of the "Community"
section; was also nominated in the "Best Practices" section. See the winner's list
External links
Related sites
Related papers and academic articles
Reviews, endorsements, and discussion of Wikipedia
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