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The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
Timothy Robert Noah is an American journalist, author, and a staff writer at The New Republic. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic assigned to write the biweekly "TRB From Washington" column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the "Chatterbox" column. In April 2012, Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.
The Encyclopedia of Earth is an electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is described as a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and other approved experts, who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and are intended to be useful to students, educators, scholars, and professionals, as well as to the general public. The authors, editors, and even copy editors are attributed on the articles with links to biographical pages on those individuals.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors, who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
WikiPilipinas is an online, free content website which bills itself as a combination "non-academic encyclopedia", web portal, directory and almanac for Philippine-based knowledge. Like Wikipedia, it contains various articles on Philippine-related topics. Unlike Wikipedia, many of the articles cover topics that would otherwise be deemed unencyclopedic by the stricter Wikipedia. The service for example, promotes the concept of original research and eschews the larger encyclopedia's neutral point-of-view principle.
"Ignore all rules" (IAR) is a policy used on Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. The English Wikipedia policy reads: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." [emphasis in original]. The rule was proposed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to encourage editors to add information without focusing excessively on formatting, though Sanger later criticized the rule's effects on the community.
Everything2 is a collaborative online community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material. E2 is moderated for quality, but has no formal policy on subject matter. Writing on E2 covers a wide range of topics and genres, including encyclopedic articles, diary entries, poetry, humor, and fiction.
Wikipedia has been studied extensively. Between 2001 and 2010, researchers published at least 1,746 peer-reviewed articles about the online encyclopedia. Such studies are greatly facilitated by the fact that Wikipedia's database can be downloaded without help from the site owner.
Deletionism and inclusionism are opposing philosophies that largely developed within the community of volunteer editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The terms reflect differing opinions on the appropriate scope of the encyclopedia and corresponding tendencies either to delete or to include a given encyclopedia article.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
Nupedia was an English-language online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with relevant subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by a committee of experts who predefined the rules. It had only 21 articles in its first year, compared with Wikipedia having 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Gender bias on Wikipedia includes various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.
Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia is a 2014 book about Wikipedia's community of contributors. The author is Dariusz Jemielniak, who is a Wikipedia contributor himself.
The English Wikipedia has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage. This bias partially stems from an under-representation of people of color within its volunteer editor base. In "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," it is noted that article completeness and coverage is dependent on the interests of Wikipedians, not necessarily on the subject matter itself. The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of [Black American history] is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding Black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."
Ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially in its English-language edition, has been the subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideologies its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.
Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia regularly, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is the outright deletion of articles that clearly violate the rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a complete discussion, and a whole debate at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be done by a subset of editors assigned particular specialized privileges by the community, called administrators. An omission that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).
Disputes on Wikipedia arise from Wikipedians disagreeing over article content or internal Wikipedia affairs, which can be discussed on talk pages, as well as from user misconduct. Disputes may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit wars", and may escalate into dispute resolution efforts and enforcement. Wikipedia editors may dispute numerous articles within a contentious topic that reflect debates and conflicts in society, based on ethnic, political, religious, and scientific differences.
References
- ↑ Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth (March 22, 2014). "The Geography of Fame". New York Times . Retrieved March 23, 2014.
- 1 2 Tabb, Kathryn. "Authority and Authorship in a 21st-Century Encyclopaedia and a 'Very Mysterious Foundation'" (PDF). ESharp (12: Technology and Humanity). ISSN 1742-4542.
- 1 2 Forte, Andrea; Bruckman, Amy (2008). "Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance" (PDF). Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2008. Waikoloa, Big Island, HI, US: IEEE. p. 6. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2008.383. hdl: 10535/5638 . Archived from the original (PDF) on June 14, 2011. Retrieved May 11, 2016.
- ↑ Crovitz, L. Gordon (6 April 2009). "Wikipedia's Old-Fashioned Revolution; The online encyclopedia is fast becoming the best". Wall Street Journal .
- 1 2 3 Baker, Nicholson (20 March 2008). "The Charms of Wikipedia". The New York Review of Books. 55 (4). Retrieved 18 December 2016.
There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out.
- 1 2 Noah, Timothy (24 February 2007). "Evicted From Wikipedia". Slate. Retrieved 18 December 2016.
- 1 2 3 Geser, Hans (1 June 2007). "From Printed to "Wikified" Encyclopedias: Sociological Aspects of an Incipient Cultural Revolution" (PDF). Sociology in Switzerland: Towards Cybersociety and "Vireal" Social Relations:Online Publikationen. Zurich: Institute of Sociology of the University of Zurich. p. 59. Retrieved 18 December 2016.
- ↑ Segal, David (3 December 2006). "Look Me Up Under 'Missing Link', Oblivion Looms for the Non-Notable". Washington Post. Retrieved 18 December 2016.
