“Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men.” In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.W 56 Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, becoming the third woman to ever receive the award. Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women’s topics. After some editors who volunteered to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part of his co-founder status. In 2011, Wales claimed that the unevenness of coverage is a reflection of the demography of the editors, citing for example “biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare”. Interdisciplinary scholarly assessments of Wikipedia articles have found that while articles are typically accurate and free of misinformation, they are also typically incomplete and fail to present all perspectives with a neutral point of view.
A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications. 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 article contained Talk page topics found on Wikipedia, like discussions of changes in the articles priority level. “My Number One Doctor”, a 2007 episode of the television show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.
Kinds of dead links
- In 2009, a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices.W 109 Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since.
- Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public.
- In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Spanish, Russian, Italian, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Waray, and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Indonesian, Korean, Serbian, Chechen, and Norwegian), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.W 36W 35 The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 7.1 million articles.
- However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL.
English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. 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).W 119 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g. Creative Commons’ CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.W 95 Wikipedia’s accommodation of varying international copyright laws regarding images has led some to observe that its photographic coverage of topics lags behind the quality of the encyclopedic text. The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.
In November 2013, New York magazine stated, “Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis.” The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.W 7 Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia’s domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.W 8 Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name ,W 4 and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. For use in templates, correct URLs can be constructed using certain magic words and parser functions such as fullurl, urlencode and others. However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. Wikipedia’s content must conform with its policies, including being verifiable by published reliable sources.
Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia’s inception. In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The English Wikipedia’s three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad.
Statistical analyses suggest that the English Wikipedia committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.W 28 Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website’s policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus.
An editorial in The Guardian in 2014 claimed that more effort went into providing references for a list of female porn actors than a list of women writers. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, “the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created”. Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.
Language editions
- Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success.
- It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the Simple English Wikipedia.
- However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community.
- Featured articles are articles of the highest quality that can be found on Wikipedia.
- We begin WikipediaAcademy by acquainting you first as a user and later as an editor.
The edition’s one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. English Wikipedia, vegas casino often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format.
Experienced editors are encouraged to not “bite” the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 33 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them.
In 2009, a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices.W 109 Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since. Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service.W 97 In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. Although Wikipedia content has been accessible through the mobile web since July 2013, The New York Times on February 9, 2014, quoted Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stating that the transition of internet traffic from desktops to mobile devices was significant and a cause for concern and worry. Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.W 107 Wikipedia publishes “dumps” of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023,update there is no dump available of Wikipedia’s images.W 108 Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this. The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia.
Latest updates
Registered users may maintain a “watchlist” of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes.W 22 “New pages patrol” is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.W 23 Editors also can make only one revert per day across the entire field and can be banned from editing related articles. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains “stable versions” of articles which have passed certain reviews.W 21 Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the “pending changes” system in December 2012. Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors. A frequently vandalized article can be “semi-protected” or “extended confirmed protected”, meaning that only “autoconfirmed” or “extended confirmed” editors can modify it.
Parser function urlencode
Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month.W 16 On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, “according to the ratings firm comScore”. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.W 5W 6 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former’s servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The name, proposed by Sanger to forestall any potential damage to the Nupedia name, originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world’s seventh or ninth most visited website, according to differing sources on internet traffic.
On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled “The Future of Wikipedia”, cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that “the number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years.” The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 The English Wikipedia has 7,118,730 articles, 50,949,695 registered editors, and 267,535 active editors. Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages. Under this system, new and unregistered users’ edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published. Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly 50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia content across its projects.
External Links
Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language”.W 41 Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Spanish, Russian, Italian, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Waray, and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Indonesian, Korean, Serbian, Chechen, and Norwegian), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.W 36W 35 The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 7.1 million articles. As of January 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, German, French, Swedish, and Dutch Wikipedias.W 35 The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013update had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias.
Methods of access
Nicholas Carr’s 2005 essay “The amorality of Web 2.0” criticizes 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”. The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially printed versions like Encyclopædia Britannica, which were unable to compete with a free alternative. The Talk page concerned a fictional article describing the unintended consequences of the release of a plastic-eating fungus to clean up an oil spill. In an April 2007 episode of the American television comedy The Office, office manager (Michael Scott) is shown relying on a hypothetical Wikipedia article for information on negotiation tactics to assist him in negotiating lesser pay for an employee. Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”.
Prior to winning the award, Strickland’s only mention on Wikipedia was in the article about her collaborator and co-winner of the award Gérard Mourou. This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project.W 55 He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing-list that this action was “in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted”.
Community
The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content on Wikipedia or its related projects but merely a hosting service for contributors to and licensors of Wikipedia, a position which was successfully defended in 2004 in a court in France. Two projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and the “Thank” tab in the edit history, which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).W 74 Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors. Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.W 73 One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship.
Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes, the influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources. Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Latest reviews
Wikipedia’s software makes it easy to reverse errors, and experienced editors watch and patrol bad edits. While the Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines, new editors do not need to be familiar with them before they start contributing. Wikipedia currently has more than sixty-six million articles in more than 300 languages, including 7,118,730 articles in English, with 267,535 active contributors in the past month. Written collaboratively by volunteers known as Wikipedians, Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with Internet access, except in limited cases in which editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia consists of freely editable content, with articles that usually contain numerous links guiding readers to more information.