What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a free,
open content online encyclopedia shaped through the collaborative effort of a
community of users known as Wikipedians. Anyone registered on the site can
create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit
articles. The site's name comes from wiki, a server program that enables anyone
to edit Web site content through their Web browser.
Detail of Wikipedia
Formerly, Wikipedia
was created to provide content for Nupedia. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of an earlier encyclopedia project,
Nupedia, in January 2001. However, as the wiki site became established it soon
grew beyond the scope of the earlier project. As of January 2015, the website
provided well over five million articles in English and more than that number
in all other languages combined. At that same time, Alexa ranked Wikipedia as
the seventh-most popular site on the Internet. Wikipedia was the only
non-commercial site of the top ten.
Criticisms of
Wikipedia include assertions that its openness makes it unreliable and
unauthorative. Because articles don't include bylines, authors aren't publicly
accountable for what they write. Similarly, because anyone can edit any
article, the site's entries are vulnerable to unscrupulous edits. In August
2007, Virgil Griffiths created a site, WikiScanner, where users could track the
sources of edits to Wikipedia entries. Griffiths reported that self-serving
edits typically involved whitewashing or removal of criticism of a person or
organization or, conversely, insertion of negative comments into the entry
about a competitor. Wikipedia depends upon the vigilance of editors to find and
reverse such changes to content.
In addition to the encyclopedia, the non-profit
Wikipedia foundation oversees several other open-content projects, including:
Wiktionary, a dictionary and thesaurus
Wikibooks, a collection of free texts and other
books
Wikiquote, a collection of quotations
Wikisource, a collection of free source documents
Wikiversity, a collection of free learning
materials
Wikispecies, a directory of species
Meta-Wiki, which coordinates all the other
projects.
Wikipedia was one of the first social media
websites.
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