Wikipedia

**Wikipedia** is the free encyclopedia used by more then 1.5 Billion People.

## About Wikipedia

**Wikipedia** is an online free content encyclopedia project helping create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. It is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of freely editable content. The name "Wikipedia" is a blending of the words *wiki* (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word '**wiki'**, meaning "quick") and ***encyclopedia***. Wikipedia's articles provide links designed to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent further disruption or vandalism.

Since its creation on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has grown into the world's largest reference website, attracting 1.8 billion unique-device visitors monthly as of August 2021. It currently has more than fifty-seven million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,386,033 articles in English with 125,956 active contributors in the past month.

The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.

## History

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia, begun by the online media company Bomis. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but articles' writing was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales (founder of Nupedia and co-founder of Bomis), and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the encyclopedia project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a wiki might allow public members to contribute material, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the Wiki format, so Sanger gave the new project the name "Wikipedia" and it was launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now called "Wikipedia Day" by some users). The bandwidth and server (in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have worked on the project include Tim Shell, one of the cofounders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey.

In May 2001, a large number of non-English Wikipedias were launched—in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September, Polish was added, and further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian versions were announced.

The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the Wikimedia Foundation was launched, in 2003, as its new parent organization with the ".org" top-level domain denoting its not-for-profit nature. Today, there are Wikipedias in more than 300 languages.

## Contributors

Anyone with Web access can edit Wikipedia, and this openness encourages the inclusion of a tremendous amount of content. About 130,000 editors—from expert scholars to casual readers—regularly edit Wikipedia. These experienced editors often help to create a consistent style throughout the encyclopedia, following our Manual of Style. Experienced or not, contributors are also called "editors" or "Wikipedians".

Several mechanisms are in place to help Wikipedia members carry out the important work of crafting a high-quality resource while maintaining civility. Editors can watch pages, and technically skilled persons can write editing programs to track or rectify bad edits. Where there are disagreements on how to display facts, editors often work together to compile an article that fairly represents current expert opinion on the subject. Aspiring authors may wish to read the information on Contributing to Wikipedia before contributing to the project.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation owns the site, it is largely uninvolved in writing and daily operations.

## Wikipedia Vs Fandom

Wikipedia has advantages over traditional paper encyclopedias. First, it is not limited in space: it can keep growing as fast as people add.

Second, there are no qualifications required to be able to author its articles. It draws from a vast pool of contributors: the whole world. This, and the first advantage mentioned above, have enabled Wikipedia to become the most comprehensive encyclopedia on Earth.

Third, a paper encyclopedia remains static (stays the same) and falls out of date until its next edition. Wikipedia is more dynamic: You don't have to wait for the next edition to come out (there are no editions), as Wikipedia is published online as it is written online. Articles are made available as is, regardless of what stage of development they are in. *You* can update Wikipedia at any moment. People do so continually around the clock, thereby helping each other keep abreast of the most recent events everywhere and the latest facts in every subject.

Fourth, Wikipedia has a meager "publishing" cost for adding or expanding entries, as it is online, with no need to buy paper or ink for distribution. This has allowed it to be made available for free, making it more accessible to everyone. This has also enabled Wikipedia to be independently developed and published in many different languages simultaneously by people literate in each. Of the 290+ different language Wikipedias, 137 of them have 10,000 or more articles.

Fifth, Wikipedia has a low environmental impact in some respects, since it never needs to be printed. However, computers have their own environmental cost.

Sixth, Wikipedia is extra-linear (more than linear). Instead of in-line explanations, Wikipedia incorporates hypertext in the form of wikilinks. Throughout its content is a robust network of links, providing another dimension of knowledge accessibility. The encyclopedia also has correlated to tables of contents and indexes, with each entry in them hyperlinked to an article on the topic specified.

Seventh, each Wikipedia article provides an introduction summarizing the more extensive detail of its contents.

Eighth, being open to anyone to edit, articles on Wikipedia are subject to additions that might be erroneous or written poorly, which in turn are subject to being corrected or rewritten. It is a community effort, with most people involved helping to improve the work, fixing problems they encounter along the way. See more about Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses below ...

## Wikipedia Strengths

Wikipedia's greatest strengths, weaknesses, and differences arise because it is open to anyone. According to editorial guidelines and policies, it has a large contributor base, and its articles are written by consensus.

* Wikipedia is **open to a large contributor base**, drawing many editors from diverse backgrounds. This allows Wikipedia to reduce regional and cultural bias found in many publications significantly and makes it very difficult for any person or group to censor and impose bias. A large, diverse editor base also provides access and breadth on subject matter otherwise inaccessible or poorly documented. Many editors contributing at any moment can produce encyclopedic articles and resources covering newsworthy events within hours or days of their occurrence. Like any publication, Wikipedia may reflect the cultural, age, socio-economic, and other biases of its contributors. There is no systematic process to make sure "obviously important" topics are written about, so Wikipedia may suffer unexpected oversights and omissions. While *anyone may alter most* articles, in practice, editing will be performed by a certain demographic (younger rather than older, male rather than female, literate, rich enough to afford a computer, et cetera) and may, therefore, show some bias. Some topics may not be covered well, others in great depth.
* Allowing **anyone to edit** Wikipedia makes it easily vandalized *and* susceptible to unverified information, which requires removal. See Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is more subject to subtle viewpoint promotion than a typical reference work. However, a bias that would be unchallenged in a traditional reference work is likely to be eventually challenged or considered on Wikipedia. While Wikipedia articles generally attain a good standard after editing, it is important to note that fledgling articles and those monitored less well may be susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information. Wikipedia's radical openness also means any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state, such as in the middle of a large edit or a controversial rewrite. Many contributors do not yet comply fully with key policies or may add information without citable sources. Wikipedia's open approach tremendously increases the chances that any particular factual error or misleading statement will be relatively promptly corrected. Numerous editors at any given time are monitoring recent changes and edit articles on their watchlists.
* Wikipedia is **written by open and transparent consensus**—an approach with its pros and cons. Censorship or imposing "official" points of view is complicated and usually fails after a time. Eventually, all notable views become fairly described for most articles, and a neutral point of view reached. In reality, the process of reaching consensus may be long and drawn-out, with articles fluid or changeable for a long time while they find the "neutral approach" all sides can agree on. Reaching neutrality is occasionally made harder by extreme-viewpoint contributors. Wikipedia operates a full editorial dispute resolution process that allows time for discussion and resolution in-depth. Still, it also permits disagreements to last for months before poor-quality or biased edits are removed. A common conclusion is that Wikipedia is a valuable resource and provides a good reference point on its subjects.
* That said, articles and subject areas sometimes suffer from significant omissions, and while misinformation and vandalism are usually corrected quickly, this does not always happen. (See for example this incident in which a person inserted a fake biography linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations and Soviet Russia as a joke on a co-worker which went undetected for four months, saying afterward he "didn't know Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.")
* Wikipedia is **written largely by amateurs**. Those with expert credentials are given no additional weight. Wikipedia is also not subject to any peer review for scientific, medical, or engineering articles. One advantage of having amateurs write in Wikipedia is that they have more free time on their hands to make rapid changes in response to current events. The wider the general public interest in a topic, the more likely it is to attract contributions from non-specialists.

The MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia retains a history of all edits and changes. Thus information added to Wikipedia never "vanishes" irreversibly. Discussion pages are an important resource on contentious topics. Therefore, serious researchers can often find a wide range of vigorously or thoughtfully advocated viewpoints not present in the consensus article. As with any source, the information should be checked. A 2005 editorial by a BBC technology writer comments that these debates are probably symptomatic of cultural changes that are happening across all sources of information (including search engines and the media) and may lead to "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources."

## Disclamers

Wikipedia disclaimers apply to all pages on Wikipedia. However, the consensus in Wikipedia is to put all disclaimers only as links and at the end of each article. Proposals to have a warning box at the beginning have been rejected. Some do not like the way it looks or that it calls attention to possible errors in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, in common with many websites, has a disclaimer that, at times, has led to commentators citing these to support the view that Wikipedia is unreliable. A selection of similar disclaimers from places which are often regarded as reliable (including sources such as *Encyclopædia Britannica*, Associated Press, and the *Oxford English Dictionary*) can be read and compared at Wikipedia:Non-Wikipedia disclaimers.

## Review

As well as systems to catch and control substandard and vandalistic edits, Wikipedia also has a full style and content manual and various positive systems for continual article review and improvement. Examples of the processes include peer review, good article assessment, and the featured article process, a rigorous review of articles that are intended to meet the highest standards and showcase Wikipedia's capability to produce high-quality work.

Besides, specific types of articles or fields often have their own specialized and comprehensive projects, assessment processes (such as biographical article assessment), and expert reviewers within specific subjects. Nominated articles are also frequently the subject of specific focus on the neutral point of view noticeboard or in WikiProject Cleanup.

## Technical Engine

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki software, the open-source program used not only on Wikimedia projects but also on many other third-party websites. The hardware supporting the Wikimedia projects is based on several hundred servers in various hosting centers worldwide. Full descriptions of these servers and their roles are available on this Meta-Wiki page. For technical information about Wikipedia, check Technical FAQ. Wikipedia publishes various types of metadata; and, across its pages, are many thousands of microformats.

## Feedback and questions

Main article: On Wikipedia; "FAQ"
Wikipedia is run as a communal effort. It is a community project whose result is an encyclopedia. Feedback about the content should, in the first instance, be raised on the discussion pages of those articles. Be bold and edit the pages to add information or correct mistakes.

## Portals

### Community discussion

For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the dashboard. For specific discussion not related to article content or editor conduct, see the Village pump, which covers such subjects as milestone announcements, policy and technical discussion, and information on other specialized portals such as the help, reference and peer review desks. The Community portal is a centralized place to find things to do, collaborations, and general editing to help information and find out what is happening. *The Signpost*, a community-edited newspaper, has recent news and opinion regarding Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

### Static help

The Help:Contents may be accessed by clicking *help* displayed under the *► Interaction* tab at the top left of all pages.

* Help:Menu—is a menu-style page that will direct you to the right place to find information.
* Help:Directory—is a descriptive listing of all Wikipedia's informative, instructional, and consultation pages.

### Giving feedback

There is an established escalation-and-dispute process within Wikipedia and pages designed for questions, feedback, suggestions, and comments. For a full listing of the services and assistance that can be requested on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Request directory.

* Talk pages—the associated discussion page for discussion of an article or policy's contents (usually the first place to go)
* Wikipedia:Vandalism—a facility for reporting vandalism (but fix vandalism as well as report it)
* Dispute resolution—the procedure for handling disputes that remain unresolved within an article's talk space
* Village pump—the Wikipedia discussion area, part of the Community portal
* Wikipedia:Contact us

See also:

* Bug tracker—a facility for reporting problems with the Wikipedia website or the MediaWiki software that runs it
* Village pump: proposals page—a place for making non-policy suggestions
* Wikipedia:Help desk—Wikipedia's general help desk, if other pages have not answered the query

## External Links

* Wikipedia on Facebook
* Wikipedia on Twitter
* Wikipedia on Instagram
* Mission statement—The Wikimedia Foundation
* Wikimedia values—The six values of the Wikimedia Foundation
* Frequently asked questions|In a nutshell, what is Wikipedia? And what is the Wikimedia Foundation?—The Wikimedia Foundation
* Wikimedia founding principles—Principles generally supported by all the Wikimedia communities
* Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia