Test Book 007

Chapter I

Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (listen), /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ (listen) WIK-kee-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual online encyclopedia, based on open collaborationthrough a wiki-based content editing system. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,[3][4][5] and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of June 2019.[6] It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads, and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[7][8][9][10]

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[11] Sanger coined its name,[12][13] as a portmanteau of wiki (the Hawai'ian word for "quick"[14]) and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 5,886,945 articles,[notes 3] the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages[15] and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month.[16]

In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica,[17] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues.[18][19] The following year, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.[20]

Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods",[21] and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial topics.[22] However, f*******: announced that by 2017 it would help readers detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.[23]

NupediaMain article: NupediaWikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called NupediaOther collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful.[24] 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.[25] It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.[26][27] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[28] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[29][30] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[31] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[32]

External audio The Great Book of Knowledge, Part 1, Ideas with Paul Kennedy, CBC, January 15, 2014Launch and early growthThe domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001[33] and January 13, 2001[34] respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001,[25] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[35] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[29]Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[36] was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[29] Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit.[37]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of 2004.[38] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the 1408 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for almost 600 years.[39]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[40] These moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and to change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[41]

Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[42] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[43] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[44] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively.[45][46][47]

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[48][49] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[50] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study.[51] Two years later, in 2011, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In the same interview, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable".[52] A 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia" in MIT's Technology Review questioned this claim. The article revealed that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae.[53] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[54] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis".[55]

Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012A promotional video of the Wikimedia Foundation that encourages viewers to edit Wikipedia, mostly reviewing 2014 via Wikipedia contentMilestonesIn January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites in the US, according to comScore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked number 9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was number 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors.[56] As of May 2019, Wikipedia has rank 5[6][57]among websites in terms of popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received 8 billion pageviews every month.[58] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia has 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore."[16]

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[59] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[60][61]

The Wikipedia Page on December 17, 2001Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[62][63]

On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, but that it "had lost nearly 10 per cent of its page views last year. There was a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by 12 per cent, those of German version slid by 17 per cent and the Japanese version lost 9 per cent."[64] Varma added that, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."[64] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Security indicated that he suspected much of the page view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."[64]

By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked fifth in the most popular websites globally.[65]

OpennessNumber of English Wikipedia articles[66]English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[66]Differences between versions of an article are highlighted as shownUnlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination principle[notes 4][67] regarding the security of its content.[67] It started almost entirely open—anyone could create articles, and any Wikipedia article could be edited by any reader, even those who did not have a Wikipedia account. Modifications to all articles would be published immediately. As a result, any article could contain inaccuracies such as errors, ideological biases, and nonsensical or irrelevant text.

RestrictionsDue to the increasing popularity of Wikipedia, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions in some cases. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article.[68] On the English Wikipedia, among others, some particularly controversial, sensitive and/or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to some degree.[69][70] A frequently vandalized article can be semi-protected or extended confirmed protected, meaning that only autoconfirmed or extended confirmed editors are able to modify it.[71] A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[72]

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles,[73] which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012.[74] Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.[75]

The editing interface of WikipediaReview of changesAlthough changes are not systematically reviewed, the software that powers Wikipedia provides certain tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. The "History" page of each article links to each revision.[notes 5][76] On most articles, anyone can undo others' changes by clicking a link on the article's history page. Anyone can view the latest changes to articles, and anyone may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of any changes. "New pages patrol" is a process whereby newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.[77]

In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favor "creative construction" over "creative destruction".[78]

VandalismMain article: Vandalism on WikipediaAny change or edit that manipulates content in a way that purposefully compromises the integrity of Wikipedia is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor. Vandalism can also include advertising and other types of spam.[79] Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information to an article can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the underlying code of an article, or use images disruptively.[80]

American journalist John Seigenthaler (1927–2014), subject of the Seigenthaler incidentObvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix vandalism is a few minutes.[81][82] However, some vandalism takes much longer to repair.[83]

In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005. Seigenthaler was falsely presented as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[83] The article remained uncorrected for four months.[83] 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. Wales replied that he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.[84][85] After the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".[83] This incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people.[86]

Policies and lawsExternal video Wikimania, 60 Minutes, CBS, 20 minutes, April 5, 2015, co-founder Jimmy Wales at FosdemContent in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, copyright laws) of the United States and of the US state of Virginia, where the majority of Wikipedia's servers are located. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in the "five pillars" and in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately shape content. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website's policies and guidelines.[87] Editors can enforce these rules by deleting or modifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. They have since diverged to some extent.[73]

Content policies and guidelinesAccording to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[88] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",[89] which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject. Further, Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized.[90] It must not present original research. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[91] This can at times lead to the removal of information that, though valid, is not properly sourced.[92] Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides.[93] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article. This is known as neutral point of view (NPOV).

GovernanceFurther information: Wikipedia:AdministrationWikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time.[94][95] An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.[96]

AdministratorsEditors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship: this begins with "administrator",[97][98] privileged users who can delete pages, prevent articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes (setting protective measures on articles), and try to prevent certain persons from editing. Despite the name, administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent certain persons from making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).[99][100]

Fewer editors become administrators than in years past, in part because the process of vetting potential Wikipedia administrators has become more rigorous.[101]

Bureaucrats name new administrators solely upon the recommendations from the community.

Dispute resolutionWikipedians often have disputes regarding content, which may result in repeatedly making opposite changes to an article, known as "edit warring".[102][103] Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semi-formal dispute resolution process to assist in such circumstances. In order to determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums,[notes 6] or seek outside input through third opinion requests or by initiating a more general community discussion known as a "request for comment".

Arbitration CommitteeMain article: Arbitration CommitteeThe Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted,[104] 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. Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather anti-consensus or in violation of editing policies, remedies tend to be limited to warnings.[105]

CommunityMain article: Wikipedia communityVideo of Wikimania 2005 – an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, was held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from August 4 to 8.Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated "Talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate.[106]

Wikipedians and British Museumcurators collaborate on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010Wikipedia's community has been described as cult-like,[107] although not always with entirely negative connotations.[108] The project's preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".[109]

Wikipedians sometimes award one another virtual barnstars for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work.[110]

Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification.[111] As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked on the project.[112] 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".[113] In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits."[114] 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.[115]

The English Wikipedia has 5,886,945 articles, 36,700,952 registered editors, and 121,679 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.

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. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references".[116] Editors who do not log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia,[116] as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation",[117] but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.

StudiesA 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia [...] are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site".[118] Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "(I)t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users... 524 people... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."[113] However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most content in Wikipedia (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders".[113]

A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others,[119][120] although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small.[121] According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content".[122]

DiversitySeveral studies have shown that most of the Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female.[123] Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage females to become Wikipedia contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yaleand Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology.[124] Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, wrote in The New York Times that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior."[125] Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.[126]