It was launched as an English-language edition at , and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative. 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 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. 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.
Coverage of topics and systemic bias
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. Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. A “WikiProject” is a group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. 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. 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.
URLs of pages within the projects
- In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles.
- 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.
- 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.
- Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors.
- In other cases the URL may redirect to a valid one (for example, page titles are converted to their canonical form as they are when they appear in wikilinks).
- The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009.
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”.
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”.
The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool. The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. 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.
Help:URL
In 2017, Quartz reported that the Chinese government had begun creating an unofficial version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia Zero was an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to expand the reach of the encyclopedia to the developing countries by partnering with mobile operators to allow free access. The Android app for Wikipedia was released on July 23, 2014, to over 500,000 installs and generally positive reviews, scoring over four of a possible five in a poll of approximately 200,000 users downloading from Google. Bloomberg Businessweek reported in July 2014 that Google’s Android mobile apps have dominated the largest share of global smartphone shipments for 2013, with 78.6% of market share over their next closest competitor in iOS with 15.2% of the market. Wikipedia publishes “dumps” of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023,update there is no dump available of Wikipedia’s images. Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.
In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. Since 2009, tens of thousands of print-on-demand books that reproduced English, German, Russian, and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM. There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia’s articles into printed book form. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law).
Wikipedia languages
Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning “together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”. Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users. This is while Wikipedia faces “a more concerning problem” than funding, namely “a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website”. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”.
Other areas of Wikipedia
These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups. Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 61 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 62 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. “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.
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. Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly 50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia content across its projects.
- Lih fears for Wikipedia’s long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain and rival encyclopedias will not replace it.
- To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a “request for comment”.
- The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.
- 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.
- 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.
- The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009.W 115 The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia.
Use in templates
Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. As of January 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia Wikipedias. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings.
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. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page’s title or categorization, manipulate the article’s underlying code, or use images disruptively.W 24 In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored “creative construction” over “creative destruction”.
The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 86 Wikimedia’s online newspaper The Signpost was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who would join the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees in 2008. In 2019, the level of contributions were reported by the Wikimedia Foundation as being at $120 million annually,W 85 updating the Jaffe estimates for the higher level of support to between $3.08 million and $19.2 million annually. She stated that one of her focuses would be increasing diversity in the Wikimedia community. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.W 57 The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.W 58 The foundation’s 2020 Internal Revenue vegas casino Service Form 990 shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million, with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost $11 million.W 59
Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as “neutral point of view”, they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.W 40 The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians, is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that “one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits.” This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. 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.
Coverage of topics and bias
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. Jimmy Wales once argued that only “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore “much like any traditional organization”. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia’s earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous.