Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
---|---|
Available in | |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
URL | simple |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional |
Users | 1,429,937 users, 17 administrators as of 4 April 2024 |
Launched | September 18, 2001 [1] |
The Simple English Wikipedia is a modified English-language edition of Wikipedia written primarily in Basic English and Learning English. [2] It is one of seven Wikipedias written in an Anglic language or English-based pidgin or creole. The site has the stated aim of providing an encyclopedia for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties, and people who are trying to learn English." [3]
Simple English Wikipedia's basic presentation style makes it helpful for beginners learning English. [4] Its simpler word structure and syntax, while missing some nuances, can make information easier to understand when compared with the regular English Wikipedia.
Simple English Wikipedia was launched on September 18, 2001. [1]
In 2012, Andrew Lih, a Wikipedian and author, told NBC News' Helen A.S. Popkin that the Simple English Wikipedia does not "have a high standing in the Wikipedia community," and added that it never had a clear purpose: "Is it for people under the age 14, or just a simpler version of complex articles?", wrote Popkin. [5]
Material from the Simple English Wikipedia formed the basis for One Encyclopedia per Child, [6] a project in One Laptop per Child [7] that ended in 2014. [8]
As of April2024, the site contains over 250,000 content pages. It has more than 1,430,000 registered users, of whom 1,705 have made an edit in the past month. [9]
The articles on the Simple English Wikipedia are usually shorter than their English Wikipedia counterparts, typically presenting only basic information. Tim Dowling of The Guardian newspaper explained that "the Simple English version tends to stick to commonly accepted facts". [10] The interface is also more simply labeled; for instance, the "Random article" link on the English Wikipedia is replaced with a "Show any page" link; users are invited to "change" rather than "edit" pages; clicking on a red link shows a "page not created" message rather than the usual "page does not exist". [11] The project encourages, but does not enforce, the use of a vocabulary of around 1,500 commonly used English words [2] that is based on Basic English, an 850-word controlled natural language created by Charles Kay Ogden in the 1920s. [10]
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing award in 2003.
An encyclopedia or encyclopaedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries that are arranged alphabetically by article name or by thematic categories, or else are hyperlinked and searchable. Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries. Generally speaking, encyclopedia articles focus on factual information concerning the subject named in the article's title; this is unlike dictionary entries, which focus on linguistic information about words, such as their etymology, meaning, pronunciation, use, and grammatical forms.
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.
A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
The Dutch Wikipedia is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was founded on 19 June 2001.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative established with the goal of transforming education for children around the world; this goal was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.
The Urdu Wikipedia, started in January 2004, is the Standard Urdu-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. As of 4 April 2024, it has 204,640 articles, 177,697 registered users and 14,181 files, and it is the 54th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 20th in terms of depth among Wikipedias with over 150,000 articles. There were 6 million page views in January 2024.
Simple English may refer to:
The Czech Wikipedia is the Czech language edition of Wikipedia.
The Ceibal is a Uruguayan initiative to implement the "One laptop per child" model to introduce Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in primary education and secondary schools.
The OLPC XO is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves". The XO was developed by Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, and designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject company. The laptop is manufactured by Quanta Computer and developed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.
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.
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia. It is available in many languages.
The Waray Wikipedia is the Waray language edition of Wikipedia. It is hosted on servers run by the Wikimedia Foundation since September 25, 2005. As of April 4, 2024, this edition has 1,266,427 articles and is the 16th largest Wikipedia edition. The Waray Wikipedia has very few active users (60), and instead owes its large size to automatically generated articles created by bots, most of them by Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Fluenz is a digital language learning platform developed by Fluenz Inc., a U.S. entrepreneurial company. The interactive content can be downloadable or accessed online on computers and mobile devices. The product range consists of programs to learn Spanish as spoken in Latin America, Spanish as spoken in Spain, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, and Portuguese.
A version of Wikipedia, called Simple English Wikipedia, contains entries using the 2,000 or so most common words in English, and is well suited for younger readers.