The English Wikipedia has 7,118,730 articles, 50,949,695 registered editors, and 267,535 active editors. The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website’s policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages.

Trusted source to combat fake news

• 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.
• These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate.
• Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine,W 94 while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law).
• Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven, with Africa being the most underrepresented.

In other cases the URL may redirect to a valid one (for example, page titles are converted to their canonical form as they are when they appear in wikilinks). However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted.

Vandalism

Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians, is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. One principal concern cited by The New York Times for the “worry” is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment. Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.W 48In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.W 45

Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as “neutral point of view”, they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.W 40 The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. 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).f Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%). 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.

Internal research and operational development

Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).W 119 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled “The Future of Wikipedia”, cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that “the number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years.” The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 Editors who do not log in are in some sense “second-class citizens” on Wikipedia, 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”, but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.

Edit

Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia. This means anyone can copy or edit it and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing. It is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians.

Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world’s seventh or ninth most visited website, according to differing sources on internet traffic. You can fetch the raw wikitext of a page using a URL like ///w/index.php? This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. The top left panel display’s Today’s featured article.

Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service.W 97 In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. Wikimedia has created the Wikidata project with a similar objective of storing the basic facts from each page of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects and make it available in a queryable semantic format, RDF.W 104 As of February 2023,update it has over 101 million items.W 105 WikiReader is a dedicated reader device that contains an offline copy of Wikipedia, which was launched by OpenMoko and first released in 2009.W 106 There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia’s articles into printed book form.W 103 Since 2009, tens of thousands of print-on-demand books that reproduced English, German, Russian, and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM. Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or re-distribute it at no charge.W 96 The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website. When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by the 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.W 87 The GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs licensed under the GPL.

Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia’s large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014.update Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). As of January 2021,update the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. There are currently 342 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. Wikipedia’s community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations.

Kinds of dead links

Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.W 107 Wikipedia publishes “dumps” of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023,update there is no dump available of Wikipedia’s images.W 108 Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this. The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia. Thousands of “mirror sites” exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones that also include content from other reference sources are Reference.com and Answers.com. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine,W 94 while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law). Wikimedia’s online newspaper The Signpost was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who would join the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees in 2008.

Wikipedia’s sister projects

• Carwil Bjork-James proposes that Wikipedia could follow the diversification pattern of contemporary scholarship and Dangzhi Zhao calls for a “decolonization” of Wikipedia to reduce bias from opinionated White male editors.
• A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications.
• Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly 50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia content across its projects.
• They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms “followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)”.

Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g. Creative Commons’ CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.W 95 Wikipedia’s accommodation of varying international copyright laws regarding images has led some to observe that its photographic coverage of topics lags behind the quality of the encyclopedic text. Two projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and the “Thank” tab in the edit history, which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).W 74 Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors.

English varieties

Many devices and applications optimize or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata like geoinformation. Although Wikipedia content has been accessible through the mobile web since July 2013, The New York Times on February 9, 2014, quoted Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stating that the transition of internet traffic from desktops to mobile devices was significant and a cause for concern and worry. Wikipedia’s original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection.

Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.W 73 One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship. Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva, and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children.W 51 The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles.

In November 2013, New York magazine stated, “Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis.” The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.W 7 Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia’s domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.W 8 The name, proposed by Sanger to forestall any potential damage to the Nupedia name, originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.

In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called “wikification”, and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote in Nature that the “wisdom of crowds” approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes. Nicholas Carr’s 2005 essay “The amorality vegas casino download of Web 2.0″ criticizes websites with user-generated content (like Wikipedia) for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers’ going out of business, because “free trumps quality all the time”.

Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”. Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning “together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia’s participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide.

Once an article is nominated for deletion, the dispute is typically determined by initial votes (to keep or delete) and by reference to topic-specific notability policies. He relied instead on “mutually reverting edit pairs”, where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor. Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes, the influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources.

People can choose to give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. Research published in 2024 determined that several groups of connected accounts had coordinated to promote Russian propaganda narratives and state-controlled media sources in articles, related to Russian-Ukrainian relations and Russia’s war with Ukraine. A 2013 study from Oxford University found that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tend to address broader, global issues.

Wikimedia Foundation and affiliate movements

Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black alleged (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) that articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an “ax to grind” on the topic. No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively improving substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the Simple English Wikipedia. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles. Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language”.W 41 Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all.

Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih states that the number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years, and Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. In 2009, a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices.W 109 Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since.

English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. The user interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008. Several interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms “followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)”.