Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of May 2024, it was ranked fifth by Semrush,https://www.semrush.com/trending-websites/global/all and sixth by Similarweb.https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ This encyclopedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.
==Overview==
Wikipedia has been founded as various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success.["The contribution conundrum: Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed?" https://web.archive.org/web/20230210114540/https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/the-contribution-conundrum-why-did-wikipedia-succeed-while-other-encyclopedias-failed/] - Nieman Lab 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. 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.Everyone's encyclopedia - U-T San Diego
Wikipedia is initially only available in English, editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 other languages have been developed. Its English-language platform has almost 6.9 million articles, making it the largest edition of Wikipedia, which together comprise more than 63 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024."Wikistats – Statistics For Wikimedia Projects" (July 11, 2020)
As of July 18th, 2024, The English platform of Wikipedia has 6,853,178 articles, 47,684,066 registered editors, and 113,883 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians
==Community==
Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated and dedicated "talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. Wikipedia is usually favored by studies, which they use that encyclopedia for educational purposes. 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". 
A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, 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. 
==Reception and Criticism==
Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014. Wikipedia has been criticized for its articles' conflicting information, which editors had fought for their sources in various articles. Wikipedia has also faced its controversies over alleged false information about certain articles, such as Russia's military action in Ukraine.Russian court fines Apple and host of Wikipedia over ‘false information’ - Associated Press (August 3rd, 2023)
Multiple news networks and pundits have accused Wikipedia of being ideologically biased. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much "leftist bias".https://www.foxnews.com/politics/wikipedia-bias-socialism-pages-whitewashed Wikipedia co-founder Sanger said that Wikipedia has become a "propaganda" for the left-leaning "establishment" and warned the site can no longer be trusted."Wikipedia co-founder says site is now 'propaganda' for left-leaning 'establishment'" - New York Post (July 16, 2021) Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a "western cultural bias" (or "pro-western bias") or "Eurocentric bias".https://web.archive.org/web/20231114114652/https://kola.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/2206/file/dissertation%20Anna%20Samoilenko.pdf
==External Links==
*Wikipedia in Wikipedia.
==References==