Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
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 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; it 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.
The Japanese Wikipedia is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of February 2024, it has over 1,403,000 articles with 13,967 active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.
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.
Deletionpedia was an online archive wiki containing articles deleted from the English Wikipedia. Its version of each article included a header with more information about the deletion such as whether a speedy deletion occurred, where the deletion discussion about the article can be found and which editor deleted the article. The original Deletionpedia operated from February to September 2008. The site was restarted under new management in December 2013.
Deletionism and inclusionism are opposing philosophies that largely developed within the community of 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 was the editor-in-chief of the online encyclopedia Nupedia and co-founded its successor Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote many of Wikipedia's early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Sanger later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Gender bias on Wikipedia is a term used to describe various sex-related facts about Wikipedia: its volunteer contributors are mostly male, although almost 400,000 encyclopedic biographies about women exist on Wikipedia men have many more, and topics primarily of interest to women are less well-covered.
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."
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).
