28417219	, and Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. Another sister project of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, is a catalogue of species. In 2012 Wikivoyage, an editable travel guide, and Wikidata, an editable knowledge base, launched. Publishing. The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially the printed versions, e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica", which were unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. Nicholas Carr wrote a 2005 essay, "The amorality of Web 2.0", that criticized websites with user-generated content, like Wikipedia, for possibly leading  to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers' going out of business, because "free trumps quality all the time". Carr wrote: "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening." Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of "Wired Magazine", wrote in "Nature" that the "wisdom of crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals, with their rigorous peer review process. There is also an ongoing debate about  the influence of Wikipedia on the biography publishing business. "The worry is that, if you can get all that information from Wikipedia, what's left for biography?" said Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and author of "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton" and "George Eliot: the Last Victorian". Research use. Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called "wikification , and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Methods similar to wikification can in turn be used to find missing" links in Wikipedia. In 2015, French researchers José Lages of the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon and Dima Shepelyansky of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse published a global university ranking based on Wikipedia scholarly citations. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms "followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)". The study was updated in 2019. A 2017 MIT study  suggests that words used on Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications. Studies related to Wikipedia have been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to support various operations. One of the most important areas—automatic detection of vandalism and data quality assessment in Wikipedia. In February 2022, civil servants from the UK's Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities were found to have used Wikipedia for research in the drafting of the Levelling Up White Paper after journalists at "The Independent" noted that parts of the document had been lifted directly from Wikipedia articles on Constantinople and the list  of largest cities throughout history. Related projects. Several interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from more than a million contributors in the UK, and covered the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user interface and part  of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008. Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE). One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative. Subsequent collaborative knowledge websites have drawn inspiration from Wikipedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as "Encyclopedia of Life" and the online  wiki encyclopedias "Scholarpedia" and Citizendium. The latter was started by Sanger in an attempt to create a reliable alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia Wikipedia ( or ) is a multilingual open online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa; Wikipedia was ranked the 10th most popular site. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization