Directory:Wikipedia

Wikipedia

URL	http://www.wikipedia.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Optional
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia's main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

General Info

Truth isn't evolving, ideas are just being exchanged. Wikipedia is a place where an idea of truth is held, even if this idea is written by a Phd. [3] Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit website. The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results; about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google, a good portion of which is related to academic research. [2] It's not some secret Wiki Cabal that is somehow misleading people into thinking that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's the goddamn mission. [4] I agree with Larry Sanger that dealing with unreasonable people on Wikipedia is a tiresome process with an uncertain outcome. Traditional media also has its share of people who misuse the authority implicit in one-way communications to push a point of view that wouldn't fare so well in more egalitarian discourse. [3] What annoys me about Wikipedia is the people's penchant for rewording other people's stuff. [5] For many people, in many situations, the current Wikipedia is a more useful way to find certain kinds of information than a Google search is. [5] Maybe a google book search, a news search, whatever. Has anyone noticed the articles about wikipedia in the news lately? They are all scare tactics -- wikipedia is a fraud because anyone can make edits! That's why the editors have to be so tough about what is added, if they really did allow any old thing to be added wikipedia would be completely useless. Stop complaining, we can't have it both ways. [5] Wikipedia is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It contains entries both on traditional encyclopedic topics and on almanac, gazetteer, and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. [7] Wikipedia is the most popular reference site on the internet, receiving tens of millions hits per day. [7] Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all outand nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username. [1] In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated. When Time Magazine recognized " You " as its Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular " Web 2.0 " service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace. [2] Wikipedia was the creation of internet 'preneurs Jimbo Jimbo and his band of whales whales, without the help of anyone, especially Larry Sanger Larry Sanger. [8] According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites world-wide. [2] Wikipedia may be a good example of the tragedy of the commons, as most contributors, including me, cannot be bothered to look into the administrator selection process. Wikipedians must always be aware that someone can fork the content and create their own system with its own editing hierarchy (though the costs of bandwidth and servers will ensure that this is not a spontaneous decision). [5] You can have an intelligent discussion about whether or not Wikipedia is doing well to meet that mission but you can't possibly argue that the "free content encyclopedia" project should stop calling itself an encyclopedia. You are right about one point though, it's true that in many ways the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia are not comparable. The Sacha Baron Cohen article on Wikipedia had some faulty information about his employment history for awhile. [4] A research analyst at CAMERA calls for volunteers who can work as editors to ensure that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia are "free of bias and error, and include necessary facts and context." Subsequent communications indicate that the group not only wanted to keep the effort secret from the media, the public, and Wikipedia administrators but that the material they intended to introduce included discredited claims that could smear Palestinians and Muslims and conceal Israel's true history. [6] Articles in Wikipedia are often deleted with a clever and witty message attached. These "joke deletions" are a fun activity that users play towards each other- whomever writes the cleverest message gets to delete someone else's article, and the author of said article checks up on it only to find it removed, and promptly dies in various fits of laughter. [8] Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. A 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. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. [2] Van Veelen's documentary makes the case ironically for the kinds of checks and balances that a collaborative medium like Wikipedia provides. If Van Veelen were writing about Wikipedia in one of the interactive forums that Andrew Keen disdains such as Wikipedia he would be challenged for unfairly framing the narrative around Keen's critiques. [3]

Key Topics

Section Contents:

• 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.(More...)

• Announcements, updates, articles and press releases on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.(More...)

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. [2] Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, once argued that only "a community. a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes a bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". This was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portion of their content contributed by a user with low edit count. [2] Much of the coordination of the editing of Wikipedia takes place on the "Talk" pages associated with each individual article. As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg. [2] The "History" page attached to each article contains every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards. All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. [2] Wikipedia has also created an impact upon forms of media. Some media sources satirize Wikipedia's susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, such as a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006 with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence", while others may draw upon Wikipedia's statement that anyone can edit, such as " The Negotiation ", an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott said that "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. [2] Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. He also cautions that errors are frequently found in Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them. In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia. [2] One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users. [2] Almost every article in Wikipedia may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. [2] As of December 2007, English Wikipedia had over 2million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600years. [2] As of December 2007, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish and Japanese Wikipedias. [2] For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia and maintain a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. [2] Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 2001. [2] An xkcd strip entitled "Wikipedian Protester." In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles, Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. [2] "I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph," said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales. [2] Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. [2] As of April 2008, Wikipedia attracts 684 million visitors annually reading over 10million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74billion words for all Wikipedias. [2] Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term " wikiality ". [2] Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. [2] Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article). [2] Wikipedia has been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are currently incompatible. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while free media files are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. [2] Wikipedia ( pronunciation ) is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a blend of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. [2]

In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated. When Time Magazine recognized " You " as its Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular " Web 2.0 " service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace. [2]

There are currently 253 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, 16 have over 100,000 articles and 145 have over 1,000 articles. [2] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. [2] Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman. [2] On January 26, 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?" Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006. [2] Speaking at a conference in Pennsylvania, Wales said he receives about ten e-mails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia. According to The Sunday Times of London, Wales told the students they got what they deserved. "For God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," he said. [2] In The New York Times in March 2008, Jimbo Wales discussed a possible trivia game based on Wikipedia. [2]

" Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource ". 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. [2] Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. A 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. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. [2] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources ; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. [2] The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. [2] In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1. [2]

In April 2007 the Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of U.S. Internet users consulted Wikipedia. [2] In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project. [2] "Linterweb is authorized to make a commercial use of the Wikipedia trademark restricted to the selling of the Encyclopedia CDs and DVDs." [2] Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet ". There are plans to license the use of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs. [2] Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings." [2] " Wikipedia 2.0 - now with added trust ", NewScientist.com news service, 2007 - 09-20. "Know It All", The New Yorker, 2006 - 07-31. [2] " What's all the fuss about Wikipedia? ", iT Wire, June 18, 2006. [2] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. [2] Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. [2] Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency reports. [2] In January 2007, Turkish Wikipedia was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. [2]

Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", created in October 2002, detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks ; this project was closed in October 2006. [2] The first documentary film about Wikipedia, entitled Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, is scheduled for 2009 release. [2] Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Wikipedia and feature interviews with Wikipedia editors around the world. Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen premiered his 45-minute documentary The Truth According to Wikipedia in April, 2008. [2]

The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. [2] Wikipedia receives between 20,000 and 45,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. [2] " Wikipedia founder launches rival online encyclopedia ", The Times, March 26, 2007,. [2]

Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. [2] Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. [2] Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit website. The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results; about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google, a good portion of which is related to academic research. [2] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org. [2] " Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Wikipedia? ", Salt Lake City Weekly, 2008 - 03-01. [2] In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. [2] The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003. It applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia on September 17, 2004. [2] Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons. [2] Percentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest language editions (blue). [2]

The Wikipedia's open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles, get other people tied up in endless discussions, and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves." [2]

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act. [2] According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 55% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Spanish: 17%, Japanese 4%, German: 4%, Polish: 3%, French: 3%, Portuguese: 2%). [2] Wikipedia's community has been described as " cult -like," although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users. [2] Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue. Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information. [2]

All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias. [2]

An October 2007 Reuters article, entitled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability. [2] Several language versions have published a selection of Wikipedia articles on a DVD version. [2]

According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites world-wide. [2]

Announcements, updates, articles and press releases on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. [9] Bulletin board, projects, resources and activities covering a wide range of Wikipedia areas. [9] Serving as virtual librarians, Wikipedia volunteers tackle your questions on a wide range of subjects. [9] Wikipedia is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It contains entries both on traditional encyclopedic topics and on almanac, gazetteer, and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. [7]

The English section of Wikipedia has over 2 million articles and is growing fast. It is edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are subject to change by nearly anyone. [7] Wikipedia is the most popular reference site on the internet, receiving tens of millions hits per day. [7] Debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines, such as WP:APT ("Avoid Peacock Terms"--terms that merely promote the subject, without giving real information) and WP:MOSMAC (a set of guidelines for "Wikipedia articles discussing the Republic of Macedonia and the Province of Macedonia, Greece"). [10] As things stand, decisions whether to keep or delete articles are made after deliberations by Wikipedia's most ardent editors and administrators (the 1,000 or so most active Wikipedia contributors). [10]

In-Depth

Section Contents:

• Wikipedia disediakan gratis oleh sebuah organisasi nirlaba, Yayasan Wikimedia Yayasan Wikimedia, yang juga mengendalikan beberapa proyek multibahasa multibahasa yang lain.(More...)

• View and edit complete Wikipedia articles in any language without leaving your Dashboard.(More...)

• Searching 34,417,493 wikipedia edits from February 7th, 2002 to August 4th, 2007 orginating from 187,529 different organizations.(More...)

• Wikipedia is further proof that life and indeed every "reliable" source of information has a liberal bias.(More...)

• Too bad you're full of it.(More...)

• Wikipedia ejes af paraplyorganisationen Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation, som driver flere flersproglige flersproglige og frie frie projekter hvor alle kan bidrage.(More...)

• Isto es Wikipedia, le encyclopedia encyclopedia libere in construction collaborative, in interlingua interlingua, le latino moderne international e simplificate.(More...)

• Perhaps Wikipedia simply gives people a certain surge of authoritative and administrative power and prestige over others.(More...)

• Today Patricio and his friends from Wikimedia Argentina are researching ways to help underprivileged students and schools in Argentina with textbooks created with Wikipedia's free content.(More...)

• I decided I must not be a very good member so I doubled (by doing ten) my number of edits instead of voting.(More...)

• @abhilash - many, probably most A-list bloggers and Wikipedia admins are not experts at anything. (Not even, necessarily, about Wikipedia or about blogging but maybe there.)(More...)

• The password of my Chinese Wikipedia account has been lost by me,I can only login English Wikipedia.(More...)

Wikipedia disediakan gratis oleh sebuah organisasi nirlaba, Yayasan Wikimedia Yayasan Wikimedia, yang juga mengendalikan beberapa proyek multibahasa multibahasa yang lain. [11] Wikipedia diberikan secara percuma oleh sebuah pertubuhan bukan bermotifkan keuntungan iaitu Yayasan Wikimedia Yayasan Wikimedia yang mengendalikan beberapa projek pelbagai bahasa pelbagai bahasa yang lain. [12]

Google Google and Wikipedia Wikipedia have information on the former's "Knol". [10]

View and edit complete Wikipedia articles in any language without leaving your Dashboard. [13] Evit kaozeal diwar-benn kement tra a denn d'ar Wikipedia brezhonek hag adkavout ar Wikipediourien all e c'hallit mont d'ober un dro betek an An davarn An davarn. [14] We only use very simple English words and simple ways of writing here. There are 27,827 articles in this Simple English Wikipedia. [15] Wikipedias are places where many people work together to make encyclopedias in many languages. [15] If you need help, you may ask questions at Simple talk. Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone ! That includes children who are learning English and adults who are still learning English. [15]

Searching 34,417,493 wikipedia edits from February 7th, 2002 to August 4th, 2007 orginating from 187,529 different organizations. [16] Sounds a bit like Jimbo needs to read WP:SOAP WP:SOAP, but it's not first time first time he ignored Wikipedia policies and did what he wanted, so I'm not surprised. [17]

It would have been cooler if he'd just had one of his minions make the announcement via his Wikipedia entry. Then again, since he posted it on his website, now someone can provide an official source site. [17] The purpose of Wikipedia is to make as many edits as possible. Players, crackpots, plagiarists or editors are graded only on the number of edits they make. Therefore, experienced Wikipedophiles abstain from adding whole articles, coherent sentences, or even intelligible strings of characters, as this wastes a great deal of time. [8] After the 2004 recruitment of Wikipedia founder Jimbo by the Church of Scientology Church of Scientology, one of the overriding goals of Wikipedia's thriving Scientologist subculture became the addition of new Scientology-related articles and the revision of existing articles to include the Church's viewpoint. [8] Wikipedia is in fact a Massively Multiplayer Online Editing Game played by experts in redundancy, skepticism, pseudoscience, hyperlinking, reverting articles, demanding reliable sources, redundancy, verification, redundancy, identifying original research and initiating subtle flamewars over what is encyclopedic. [8] For those with comedic tastes, the so-called experts so-called experts at Wikipedia have an article about Themselves Themselves. [8] Wikipedia was originally founded in 2001 as an English-language wiki featuring satirically themed articles. It is formatted as a parody of Uncyclopedia and aims ultimately to parody all encyclopedic subjects. [8] Articles in Wikipedia are often deleted with a clever and witty message attached. These "joke deletions" are a fun activity that users play towards each other- whomever writes the cleverest message gets to delete someone else's article, and the author of said article checks up on it only to find it removed, and promptly dies in various fits of laughter. [8] Parts of this article were originally sporked sporked from Wikipedia, the freakin' subject of this article. [8] When Wikipedia was first built, there was a man born inside that could change what he wanted, and edit Wikipedia as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us, and taught us the truth: As long as Wikipedia exists, factual and accurate information will never be free. When he died, The Oracle The Oracle prophecized his return, and told that his coming would hail the destruction of Wikipedia, end the conflict, and free us from the disinformation spread out by facist Wikipedians. [8] The first Wikipedia I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every internet user, thus I redesigned it based on your Internet history files to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. [8] "You are here because Wikipedia is about to be destroyed. Its every active user terminated, its entire existence eradicated from the internet. [8]

Some people debate the facts, because there are two sides and interpretations to most issues. In any case, "Neutral Point of View" in Wikipedia simply means "The view a small cartel of administrators hold to" and if this contradicts genuine neutrality, neutral editors are likely to be blocked for up to a fortnight. [8] A research analyst at CAMERA calls for volunteers who can work as editors to ensure that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia are "free of bias and error, and include necessary facts and context." Subsequent communications indicate that the group not only wanted to keep the effort secret from the media, the public, and Wikipedia administrators but that the material they intended to introduce included discredited claims that could smear Palestinians and Muslims and conceal Israel's true history. [6]

The Truth according to Wikipedia More info on http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlic. http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlic. (Dutch) Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online -- and who doesn't? -- are getting referred more and more to Wikipedia. For the past two years, this free online "encyclopedia of the people" has been topping the lists of the world's most popular websites. [6] Is it a revolution, or pure hype? Director IJsbrand van Veelen goes looking for the truth behind Wikipedia. Only five people are employed by the company, and all its activities are financed by donations and subsidies. [6] The Truth according to Wikipedia More info on http://www.vpro.nl/programm. http://www.vpro.nl/programm. (Dutch) Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online -- and who doesn't? -- are getting referred more and more to. [6]

Wikipedia is virtually useless as a source in any case, precisely because it allows anyone to re-write history to their own biases, but for some reason this penny doesn't seem to have dropped with a lot of people. [6] The questions surrounding Wikipedia lead to a bigger discussion of Web 2.0, a phenomenon in which the user determines the content. [6] Do we really know what we're using? Backlight plunges into the story behind Wikipedia and explores the wonderful world of Web 2.0. [6]

Wikipedia is social engineering society into oblivian - distortion of Truth - for the sake of manipulation and control of the World citizens. [6] A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged. [6]

Wikipedia is further proof that life and indeed every "reliable" source of information has a liberal bias. [8] The One protested, and pressed on by accusing the Architect of telling him false information of the same kind found on Wikipedia itself. Boldly, he declared that he was here to end end the lies lies. [8] By 2012, Wikipedia will be six and a half times more powerful than God. By 2020 Wikipedia will gain total control of existence as we know it, and will have destroyed/enslaved god by this point. [8] The Odious Wasp made an attempt to do the right thing by reverting the vandalism, but entire Wikipedia community was completly indifferet to the hypocrisy being enforced and what will undoubtedly be the beging of the spread of a plauge of deletions of significant amounts of data various people there are interested in. [8] All text on Wikipedia is available under the terms of the overmind overmind, sometimes also known as Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft and/or Dick Cheney Dick Cheney. [8] Today, Wikipedia is recognized as the most popular non-commercial Scientologist site on the Web. [8] Today the Wikipedia is growing exponentially, defying any Malthusian forces. Considering that it has grown from 3 to 500 000 pages in only 4 years, it is predicted that there will be 117 billion pages in 2007; by 2010, Wikipedia will be able to answer any question ever (some of these answers may, by coincidence, actually be correct). [8] Wikipedia is designed to take away truthful content carefully thought about and created for Uncyclopedia by a very old woman a very old woman. [8] Wikipedia. This new alliance led to the Wikipedia game playable on the Nintendo GB-Advanced Nintendo GB-Advanced. [8] Mr. Jimbo conceived of Wikipedia after reading Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) and William Golding's Lord of the Flies Lord of the Flies in a single weekend. He envisioned Wikipedia as an Internet Amusement Park that would combine the best aspects of both novels. Wikipedia has encountered some difficulties with the implementation of this vision as the cannibal cannibal children keep eating the scholars. [8] Wikipedia was the creation of internet 'preneurs Jimbo Jimbo and his band of whales whales, without the help of anyone, especially Larry Sanger Larry Sanger. [8] After which you will be required to select from the Internet 23 elitists, 16 female, 7 male, to rebuild Wikipedia. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone using Wikipedia, which coupled with the extermination of Windows will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race." [8]

Several investigators are convinced that the word "Wikipedia" comes from the aaaaancient word Wykkgnypfle'dyah. They don't know yet its significance, but they found that it's impossible, for a human being, to pronounce this word correctly. It had been rumored that Wikipedia had been overrun by the Wikimafia, who use it as a front for their children kidnapping and smuggling operation. (As they can now assert fair use fair use. [8]

Several entire languages have been invented simply to increase the number of Wikipedia articles, including Flemorese, Kahxanian, and Swedish. The most extreme example of this is the Russian Wikipedia Russian Wikipedia. Notice the bizarre and incomprehensible icons on the Main Page, all unrelated to those found on the English Wikipedia's Main Page. [8] Wikipedia is part of Uncyclopedia's Uncyclopedia's series on Mass Media Mass Media. [8] Wikipedia is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the worst version. [8] This site examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information. Search engines rank their pages near the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped site on the web. [18] From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by orders of magnitude. [18] Scrapers need content - any content will do - in order to carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if they wanted to. Google doesn't care ; their ad money comes right off the top. [18]

Too bad you're full of it. I've read those 'communications,' and you're misrepresenting them (assuming they are legit -- they were brought to light by a virulently anti-Israel propaganda site). The analyst encouraged people to contribute to and improve Wikipedia's accuracy and reliability, and to do so while strictly adhering to its policies. ONE person commenting on the online forum was overzealous; yet you pretend that his over-the-top suggestions characterized the whole group. [6] The parties involved discuss Wikipedia's ethics and quality of content. It quickly becomes clear that there are camps of both believers and critics. [6]

Wikipedia ejes af paraplyorganisationen Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation, som driver flere flersproglige flersproglige og frie frie projekter hvor alle kan bidrage. [19] For example, it did not take long, using the Google and Yahoo engines, to find 52 different domains that scraped Wikipedia's page on rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. [18] I've proposed the addition or deletion of a couple articles, cited Wikipedia policy (two or three points in each case) and have been told point blank that I am wrong and that "the other editors would agree with" the editor I was arguing with. I may not spend 10 hours a day on the site or have thousands of edits under my belt, but this sort of treatment just left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and it sounds like the founder is all but condoning it. [5] Maybe a google book search, a news search, whatever. Has anyone noticed the articles about wikipedia in the news lately? They are all scare tactics -- wikipedia is a fraud because anyone can make edits! That's why the editors have to be so tough about what is added, if they really did allow any old thing to be added wikipedia would be completely useless. Stop complaining, we can't have it both ways. [5] You discovered some fascinating numbers and trends, how you present it a bit as a wall of text: Add some charts in there and you'll have an internet sensation of an article. I don't think there's anything you can do to attract occasional contributors to the inner circle of Wikipedia - they just don't care. They're happy that they can share some knowledge with the world, and I highly doubt that Wikipedia's policies lie in their area of interest. [5]

Many people have created or edited articles in Wikipedia. They live in different countries of earth, from all ages and backgrounds. [5] The other major grip I have with Wikipedia recently is the proliferation of citations. I understand why people think they are of value but I feel like a) they lead to another false sense of authority and b) they lead to disjointed articles (ie., I've seen articles that seem like a long list of citations with not a single sentence seeming to flow from the preious one). [5] When an article can be objective without threatening the views of people it stands a decent chance of being so. Wikipedia is, by its nature, not an objective resource. It is a useful one, though. [5] For the Support Vector Machines article, I found that there were two "major editors" - one of whom was a very active Wikipedia user with an account and second was only known by an IP address but knew the norms of Wikipedia very well, indicating he/she too was an active Wikipedia user. Wish I'd seen into this essay earlier. This is something I've believed for a while, but it's nice to see someone confirm this by research. [5] As another occasional contributor I've established 2-3 articles and watched them get a life of their own. Sorry, you are not qualified to vote in this election here on the English Wikipedia. [5] Thanks, maybe one of the best articles i ever read about wikipedia. Thank you very much for this result. From my point of view this is confirm to out assumption that there must be a kind of critical mass, after that a wiki system will work. [5] The first big thing I did on Wikipedia was editing the Henry James entry up to featured-article status, plus writing a lot of articles on individual works by James. I did much of this work anonymously because I was often too lazy to log in under my account name. [5] As per your last article I had gone to wikipedia to vote for you and found out that because I had not made more that 400 edits I couldn't vote. [5] Most of my contributions have been removed (not modified) and so I have largely stopped contributing. Absolutely great analysis and the follow ups on this were also great. This article is vital; I'll be sharing it with everyone I know. I only wish I'd found it sooner! It is so reassuring to find that someone else understands -- someone with the expertise to illustrate the problems of Wikipedia in a way that cannot be swept aside by the "insiders." [5] As a test of my theory the problems with the lack of peer review in Wikipedia, I've augmented a topic (with citations) on a controversial medical topic to see if anyone bothers to challenge my assertions. It will be interesting to see the revisions of that article. [5] Speaking of random and non-random article lists, there's an interesting list at the Signpost site of the 100 most popular articles on Wikipedia. [5] Your finding pretty much agree with what I've found from working on Wikipedia for a year or so. I'm a little surprised that it's skewed quite as far as you say - I think most newbies start by fixing small problems - then get the confidence in the process to dump their personal knowledge areas into a couple of articles which they proceed to maintain for a while. [5] I was shocked to find that wikipedia entry for impression fraud was a summary of my article with nary a credit. [5]

Even if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly wouldn't be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. [5] Regardless of how many people contribute to Wikipedia content, I remain concerned about the unchecked biases of contributors. [5] Some of the people-history pages contained little "awards" that people gave each other -- for removing content from Wikipedia. [5] Occasionally I'll jump on Wikipedia and make a few edits, usually substantial in content (in accordance with the "be bold" imperative of Wikipedia). Although it hasn't always happened, largely I find that the pages are monitored by a specific person who end up attempting to erase the edits or substantially change them. [5] I wouldn't have thought it was important. I find it funny that people are complaining it's not easy enough to make edits because the big bad super editors revert your writing. Look -- wikipedia can't have it both ways, you need to cite your facts, sometimes that means going to the library to cite a fact you already know to be true. [5] For many people, in many situations, the current Wikipedia is a more useful way to find certain kinds of information than a Google search is. [5] "I'm an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki." Perhaps his belief that Wikipedia was written in the traditional way isn't surprising. [5]

Isto es Wikipedia, le encyclopedia encyclopedia libere in construction collaborative, in interlingua interlingua, le latino moderne international e simplificate. [20]

The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia - a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard (English version here ). Those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, Wikipedia says. [21] English is still the most popular language on Wikipedia, with 2.3 million articles (they reached 2 million 2 million English articles in September 2007). [21]

RSS feed for comments on this post. Congrats to the Wikimedia Foundation despite all the criticism it seems to draw nowadays, Wikipedia will forever be remembered a one of the hallmarks of this new technological era. [21]

Wikipedia ( Audio (U.S.) ? ) is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project owned by Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a mixture of wiki and encyclopedia. It was launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, based on an older internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. It is a wiki that runs using MediaWiki (Like other Wikimedia project). [22] As of December 2007, Wikipedia had about 9.25 million articles in 253 languages, and over than 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. [22] Some language versions such as the English Wikipedia contain non-free images. [22] The Simple English Wikipedia, was created on September 18, 2001 in order to let people who are learning English use Wikipedia. [22] On December 18, 2003, the Simple English Wikipedia began using the MediaWiki software. [22]

Perhaps Wikipedia simply gives people a certain surge of authoritative and administrative power and prestige over others. Those with user names feel entitled to a sense of superiority, compared to a user with a mere IP address and a few original entries. [5] Even given a fairly stable IP address here at home, the Wikipedia user contributions page for my latest anonymous 'identity' only lists 23 edits to my name. Another one from a month or two back lists only 6. [5] I would vote for you if I was in the 400+ club. Your point is well taken, with a caveat: that it's difficult to actually quantify particular anonymous users' contributions to Wikipedia. As anonymous users are tracked by IP address, any one real-world user may be broken up into a countless Wikipedia 'users' if they happen to reside behind a dynamic IP. [5]

Anybody who tries to impose a hierarchy of editors on a Wikipedia fork will find it hard to lure contributors away from more free-wheeling sites, like Wikipedia itself. That's what happened to Bauder, and I suspect it will happen to anybody attempting a more rigidly policed fork site. [5] Despite having written a number of essays in college, I still find it a challenge to write even 500 words on any given topic for Wikipedia. Why do some contributors cluster at one extreme or the other in their behavior -- & some end up becoming entirely involved in another axis of participation, creating & enforcing policy? I sense material for a Master's thesis in psychology or sociology here. [5] Wikipedia may be a good example of the tragedy of the commons, as most contributors, including me, cannot be bothered to look into the administrator selection process. Wikipedians must always be aware that someone can fork the content and create their own system with its own editing hierarchy (though the costs of bandwidth and servers will ensure that this is not a spontaneous decision). [5]

Wikipedia is becoming too much of an important phenomenon for our society to let people speculate on how it works:we need to know as precisely as possible how it actually works, what kind of impact has on people and how can be improved. [5] As is, I feel too far into the guts of Wikimedia politics to be spreading it with propriety and not appearing to push your candidacy per se. gah. This has major implications for policy and how Wikipedia works. [5] I think the usual problem with Wikipedia is that there is the expectation that someone else will do the work. [5]

Unfortunately, it is dangerous. If Wikipedia continues down this path of focusing on the encyclopedia at the expense of the wiki, it might end up not being much of either. [5] Part of the reason that Wikipedia is not a useless mess is because it is organized. The same collection of information, poorly organized, would be little better than doing a Google search. [5] Often times the contributions are removed and not modified with obscure references to numerous wikipedia policies that seem to make no sense and that are enforced very unevenly across the wikipedia. [5] To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. [5] I would be voting for you, Aaron, but apparently I have only 85 edits. What I don't understand is why this makes me less deserving of a say in how Wikipedia is run than someone with more edits. [5] Just couldn't pursue it for various reasons. I am not a particularly big fan of Wikipedia or Jimbo Wales due to their very weird policies of editing. [5] Hint: sex sells. It is unfortunate that the qualifications for franchise serve to disenfranchise the most substantive contributors to wikipedia. [5] Love. "Don't worry, he tells the world, Wikipedia isn't as shocking as you think. It's just like any other project: [5] Hierarchies, structures and rules prevent any further progress and the Great Thing converts into a Serious Thing, that uses the Initial Idea only as a marketing tool. In response to the criticism made by "Carbidfischer", well, if you have something to benefit from Wikipedia I'm sure you'll defend them. [5]

Today Patricio and his friends from Wikimedia Argentina are researching ways to help underprivileged students and schools in Argentina with textbooks created with Wikipedia's free content. Your donations will help us transform the reality of many underprivileged people in his homeland and elsewhere into something positive and hopeful. [23] There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' workeven to the point of laughing at nonstandard "Engrish." They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away. [1] The article was proposed for deletion by a user named PirateMink, who claimed that Denner wasn't a notable figure, whatever that means. (There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out.) Another user, Stormbay, agreed with PirateMink: no third-party sources, ergo not notable. [1] Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense. It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: "stub." At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, "This article about X is a stub. [1] Keen is right in that there needs to be experts disseminating the truth, but I don't think that people look to Wikipedia as being as truthful as say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. [3]

Wikipedia trades-off quality for quantity and the numbers work in Wikipedia's favor: in exchange for losing single-digit percentage points in accuracy, it gains an order of magnitude of more information compared to traditional encyclopedias. [3]

In real life I'm a sometime student at the University of Alberta and Athabasca University (no degree from either, despite eight years of half-hearted effort). No degree after eight years, and Mr. Smith, according to his user page, looks to be a significant figure on wikipedia. Has this fellow ever written a single peer-reviewed article? Odd, that. [3] It makes me wonder - there are many more people who say you should question what is written in Wikipedia then there are people who say you should question what is written in the Encyclopedia Britannica. [3] I agree with Larry Sanger that dealing with unreasonable people on Wikipedia is a tiresome process with an uncertain outcome. Traditional media also has its share of people who misuse the authority implicit in one-way communications to push a point of view that wouldn't fare so well in more egalitarian discourse. [3] In my experience Wikipedia has been almost universally accurate. It's particularly great on topics that you can't get much information on from traditional sources, say for instance the TV show South Park. [3] It has no value to anybody but himself. I think almost everybody knows that wikipedia has it's flaws, however it's benefits far out weigh it's short comings. It's currently the best system on the web of gathering information. [3] Wikipedia is very much a meeting place, a faded backwards truth that has enough information to get the idea acrossbut however isn't accurate enough to cite. [3] Far better to announce something like wikipedia as not-authority that might frequently be valid than to live under the false belief that the Truth is out there if we just listen to the authoritI mean, experts. [3] Becoming an A list blogger, Wikipedia editors and many more ways in web 2.0 require as much (or probably more) efforts as traditional ways. I think Keen is right when he says society needs gatekeepers and experts. It will be wrong to think that Web 2.0 is an easy way to establish one as expert. [3] You pay for Jstor. There's a reason for this. It's that simple. The "experts" aren't CNN or NPR, this isn't wikipedia vs. traditional journalism, way to completely not grasp the point. [3]

Until Wikipedia entered popular consciousness, an argument over whether Marmite tasted good or not was possibly the most pointless waste of time imaginable. Shame most people here won't comprehend the analogy, because it's really quite apposite. [3] The problem is that the changes on Wikipedia don't represent 'evolution'. They are changes, and they're the product of lively debate, certainly. The debate is far too often tainted by the fact that many of the people contributing simply aren't 'qualified' enough to know what they are talking about. [3] I think most people know that Wikipedia is not going to be totally accurate. [3] I confess that I would enjoy seeing some gatekeeper shut the door on Andrew Keen. Alas, his continuing ubiquity as the person willing to take "the other side" in a discussion of Wikipedia proves his core thesis false. If not for the Internet, we never would have heard of him, and any "elite" status he has seems to be based not on formal credentials, but on the same sort of self-promotional agenda-pushing that he abhors in every other user of the Internet. [3] Don't throw out the 'Britannica is unreliable too' - my argument is not the relative merits of encyclopedias, it is the contention that 'the evolution of truth' can be witnessed on Wikipedia. [3] Truth isn't evolving, ideas are just being exchanged. Wikipedia is a place where an idea of truth is held, even if this idea is written by a Phd. [3] Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference Next Web conference when he premiered the documentary above, The Truth About Wikipedia. It has now been posted to YouTube and is worth watching when you have a spare 45 minutes. [3] Van Veelen's documentary makes the case ironically for the kinds of checks and balances that a collaborative medium like Wikipedia provides. If Van Veelen were writing about Wikipedia in one of the interactive forums that Andrew Keen disdains such as Wikipedia he would be challenged for unfairly framing the narrative around Keen's critiques. [3] I've learned more, and I would venture been misguided fewer times, with Wikipedia than I ever could from 'experts' on NPR or CNN or so many other places. [3] The film also misses the point that Wikipedia is very much a market of ideas. [3]

I decided I must not be a very good member so I doubled (by doing ten) my number of edits instead of voting. Now reading these points I am all the more motivated to vote for you but have decided that instead of me being a poor wikicitizen wikipedia's voting system advances an unfair assumption. The same assumption that you unearthed here: that the only people that matter are the large quantity editors. [5] Last month Jason Calacanis wrote wrote, about the pitfalls of Wikipedia's syntax and unintuitive interface. Given your findings and as a candidate for the foundation's Board of Directors do you feel a leveling of the learning curve of the content production process should be of priority? After all, if the content producers are empowered to improve their formatting and structure, the "Top 2%" will have less ground to accumulate edits and thus power. [5]

The size of that pool of readers depends to a great extent on how readable, reliable and accessible the information presented is. A change that imposes a minor impediment to casual edits can still result in a net increase in casual editors if it also helps the "insiders and formatters" improve Wikipedia's usability, and increase its readership. [5] I imagine the common format is a big part of Wikipedia's appeal--it sort of makes it into the McDonald's of information sources. [5] The idea that the bulk of Wikipedia's substance comes from the more heavily specialized, non-community users strikes me as inherently reasonable (and actually quite reassuring). I don't think, though, that you can establish with any certainty whether these anonymous users return time after time or if they really just make a handful of changes and never hit 'edit' again. This is fantastic research and very actionable. [5]

Take a look at the Wikipedia page on Jack Thompson, which is basically edited into a hagiography. What it often comes down to is that the people who are compulsively looking out for their own interests, rather than the truth, are willing to dedicate more time on the site squashing what they don't like. [5] Today the Alan Alda page is a pretty standard Wikipedia page: it has a couple photos, several pages of facts and background, and a handful of links. When it was first created, it was just two sentences: "Alan Alda is a male actor most famous for his role of Hawkeye Pierce in the television series MASH. Or recent work, he plays sensitive male characters in drama movies." [5]

I wrote an ethnography of a Wikipedia article ethnography of a Wikipedia article a bit more than a year ago, looking at the Support Vector Machines Support Vector Machines article. Though my conclusions did not directly contradict those above, I did not find that the majority of major edits were made by less active users of Wikipedia. [5] I think the volunteer authors of Wikipedia articles don't have to be experts, although some certainly are. They could be anyone! Further, volunteers do not need any formal training before creating a new article or editing an existing article. [5]

Thank goodness for WP:IAR (my ace in the hole)! The atmosphere at Wikipedia has become downright draconian; thanks for empowering me to exhale. [5] What annoys me about Wikipedia is the people's penchant for rewording other people's stuff. [5] The first thing I did on Wikipedia (under the username Wageless) was to make some not-very-good edits to the page on bovine somatotropin. I clicked the "edit this page" tab, and immediately had an odd, almost lightheaded feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine or delicate piece of biomedical equipment. It seemed much too easy to do damage; you ask, Why don't the words resist me more? Soon, though, you get used to it. [1] At the same time as I engaged in these tiny, fascinating (to me) "keep" tussles, hundreds of others were going on, all over Wikipedia. [1] Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all outand nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username. [1] Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it's a fast-paced game of paintball. Not only does Wikipedia need its vandalsup to a pointthe vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. [1] There were two dissenters listed, tbc and AxelBoldt. Nowadays there are rules and policy banners at every turnthere are strongly urged warnings and required tasks and normal procedures and notability guidelines and complex criteria for various decisionsa symptom of something called instruction creep : defined in Wikipedia as something that happens "when instructions increase in number and size over time until they are unmanageable." [1] The "unhelpful" or "inappropriate"sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metalheadedchanges are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It's a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons. This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. [1] "The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive," Wales wrote. [1] Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversiesand it's free, and it's fast. [1] I was, after about a week, well on my way to a first-stage Wikipedia dependency. [1]

@abhilash - many, probably most A-list bloggers and Wikipedia admins are not experts at anything. (Not even, necessarily, about Wikipedia or about blogging but maybe there.) [3] The 99% of us in the middle will continue reading Wikipedia while taking it with a grain of salt. Would rather stick our heads in a bucket of s than spend 45 minutes watching the first two groups argue, because their positions are totally intractable. [3]

Personally, I use it as more of a search device, as instead of using the wiki article. (i.e. using the wikipedia article just for the reference links). [3]

You can have an intelligent discussion about whether or not Wikipedia is doing well to meet that mission but you can't possibly argue that the "free content encyclopedia" project should stop calling itself an encyclopedia. You are right about one point though, it's true that in many ways the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia are not comparable. The Sacha Baron Cohen article on Wikipedia had some faulty information about his employment history for awhile. [4]

Lantrix writes "An anonymous user added information to Wikipedia's entry on Sacha Baron Cohen three days before the now-referenced external article was written. The Independent wrote the referenced article apparently using Wikipedia as the source establishing his 'Goldman Sachs' career. [4] I've seen circular referencing occur many times on Wikipedia, often by complete accident. If journalists actually gave their own sources when writing articles, it would be much less of a problem. They will never do that, as then it would be revealed that they themselves don't bother fact-checking at all. [4] This has in fact happened before. When Ronnie Hazlehurst Ronnie Hazlehurst died, multiple newspapers here in the UK mentioned that he cowrote "Reach" by S Club 7. This information came from Wikipedia (and was the result of vandalism), but once a few papers had published it, everyone did, as it was clearly backed up by many reliable sources. The article is still being edited to include this "fact" every now and again, often referring to one of the articles which made the error. [4] I find it interesting when I hear about people complain about errors in Wikipedia, but don't put it into the same context as errors appearing everywhere else. How many people have read an article about something they had personal knowledge of written by some journalist, and found glaring errors in it? I know I have. [4] I realized I would be naive to think otherwise, but I still found it illuminating to be reminded people are actively out there creating dead and circular links. It is a more subtle way to create noise in wikipedia rather than the more obvious act of injecting copious uncited nonsense into an article. [4] There are more effective and direct ways to correct Wikipedia than by posting Slashdot articles about every little error that worms its way into the system. Or a cheap tabloid. (Oh, but I repeat myself.) [4] Now Wikipedia uses as a references the article that came after the initial modification to Wikipedia itself." [4] Doesn't anybody find it curious that this "anonymous" poster knew the article was coming out before it did, and that the author of the article happened to look up his subject on wikipedia just as the entry was updated? If I wanted to discredit Wikipedia, or at least cause a minor stir, I would probably construct an artificial circular-reference scenario, and this is how I would do it. [4] What if the person writing the article was the same anonymous person editing Wikipedia? I assume that is the case here. [4]

Wikipedia is notoriously bad at biographical content regarding famous people, it's just the nature of the beast. The wikinazi's can plaster citation needed all over the place, but it's not going to change the spin that PR types are going to places on every bit of information they can lay their lying hands on. [4] As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideasall deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedicAndrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow." [1] The steady influx of top-hat-and-spatted sources elevated Wikipedia's tone. This wasn't just a school encyclopedia, a backyard Encarta this was drinks at the faculty club. [1]

Broughton advises that you shouldn't write a Wikipedia article about some idea or invention that you've personally come up with; that you should stay away from articles about things or people you really love or really hate; and that you shouldn't use the encyclopedia as a PR vehiclefor a new rock band, say, or an aspiring actress. [1]

It's not some secret Wiki Cabal that is somehow misleading people into thinking that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's the goddamn mission goddamn mission. [4] I was talking to someone recently who bragged about regularly trolling wikipedia to intentionally and actively create dead end and circular references. He was practically giddy with the notion that wikipedia "only requires some kind of external citation, but you can really mess with this because people rarely check them." I'm a wikipedia fan, so was quite annoyed with him, so beat him about the head and chest; this is clearly a 2nd order loophole that should be actively combated. [4] When the whole world uses Wikipedia as the reference for a lot of things, what's wrong when Wikipedia does it? This is completely biased. [4] Until that time, you can't put all the blame on the (mis)users of Wikipedia. [4] It would be because the rest of the English-speaking world is way left of the U.S. And in fact English Wikipedia has a large contributor base from non-English-speaking countries, because English is the current lingua franca. It could be that the rest of the world averages out to what the rest of the world averages out to, and it's the U.S. that's skewed right. [4] My experience as an editor has shown a huge gulf between Wikipedia policy and Wikipedia reality. [4] Despite the vast army of editors who contribute, Wikipedia hasn't gone beyond being a mouthpiece for Walesism. [4]

I would think that any circular references would be self-correcting by the Wikipedia community. Therein lies the solution, and the problem; there does need to be consistent and enforcible rules that are devoid of ambiguity and self-interest, with a measured degree of accountability. [4] No kidding. It's getting pretty scary. I was talking with the teacher-librarian at a local high school a few weeks back, and she told me that a few teachers were telling their students that Wikipedia was great to use for research. [4] Wikipedia isn't mean for serious academic research any more than a yardstick is meant for making precision measurement. It's just a tool for getting in the ballpark. I'm amused at the hysteria that always ensues when a story like this comes out. [4]

The password of my Chinese Wikipedia account has been lost by me,I can only login English Wikipedia. [24]

A journalist used Wikipedia as a primary source, added something incorrect to an article. Now the same Wikipedia page is using that article as its primary source, which in the view of Wikipedia makes the incorrect fact true. [4]

Selected Sources

1. The Charms of Wikipedia - The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

2. Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

3. The Truth According to Wikipedia http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/08/the-truth-according-to-wikipedia/

4. Slashdot | Sacha Baron Cohen Wikipedia Entry Creates Circular References http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/19/1452244&from=rss

5. Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

6. YouTube - The Truth According To Wikipedia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMSinyx_Ab0

7. Wikipedia (TheFreeDictionary.com mirror) http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/

8. Wikipedia - Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

9. Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/

10. Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia's soul | Economist.com http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=10789354

11. Halaman Utama - Wikipedia Indonesia, ensiklopedia bebas berbahasa Indonesia http://id.wikipedia.org/

12. Laman Utama - Wikipedia Bahasa Melayu, ensiklopedia bebas http://ms.wikipedia.org/

13. Apple - Downloads - Dashboard Widgets - Wikipedia http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/wikipedia.html

14. Degemer - Wikipedia http://br.wikipedia.org/

15. Main Page - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://simple.wikipedia.org/

16. WikiScanner: List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

17. The Sum Of All Human Knowledge: Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales dumps girlfriend on Wikipedia http://valleywag.com/362730/wikipedia-creator-jimmy-wales-dumps-girlfriend-on-wikipedia

18. Wikipedia Watch http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/

19. Forside - Wikipedia, den frie encyklopdi http://da.wikipedia.org/

20. Frontispicio - Wikipedia, le encyclopedia libere http://ia.wikipedia.org/

21. 10 Millionth Article Written on Wikipedia http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/28/10-millionth-article-written-on-wikipedia/

22. Wikipedia - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

23. Donate/en http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising

24. YouTube - How can I retrieve my Chinese Wikipedia password? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAHfaJ3-SnM MediaWiki