Related Research Articles
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 hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
MediaWiki is 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 development has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. 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 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
Jimmy Donal Wales, also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the non-profit free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.
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.
Microsoft TechNet was a Microsoft web portal and web service for IT professionals. It included a library containing documentation and technical resources for Microsoft products, a learning center providing online training, discussion forums, an evaluation center for downloading trialware, blogs for Microsoft employees and a wiki.
WikiScanner was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated. It did this by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses, though it did not investigate edits made under a username. It was created by Virgil Griffith and released on August 13, 2007.
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.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
Diplopedia, billed as the Encyclopedia of the United States Department of State, is a wiki running on a State internal Intranet, called "OpenNet". It houses a unique collection of information pertaining to diplomacy, international relations, and Department of State tradecraft.
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 and the predecessor of Wikipedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.
A series of incidents in 2009 led to Church of Scientology–owned networks being blocked from making edits to Wikipedia articles relating to Scientology. The Church of Scientology has long had a controversial history on the Internet and had initiated campaigns to manipulate material and remove information critical of itself from the web. From early in Wikipedia's history, conflict arose regarding the website's coverage of Scientology. Disputes began in earnest in 2005, with users disagreeing about whether or not to describe Scientology as an abusive cult or religion, and continued through the decade.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, is able to use under the CC0 public domain license. Wikidata is a wiki powered by the software MediaWiki, including its extension for semi-structured data, the Wikibase. As of mid-2024, Wikidata had 1.57 billion item statements.
Wikiwand, formerly stylized as WikiWand, is a commercial proprietary interface developed for viewing Wikipedia articles. Its interface includes a sidebar menu displaying the table of contents, a navigation bar, personalized links to other languages, new typography, access to previews of linked articles, display advertisements, and sponsored articles. The interface is available on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge as well as via Wikiwand's website.
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration.
The wiki rabbit hole is the learning pathway which a reader travels by navigating from topic to topic while browsing Wikipedia and other wikis. The metaphor of a rabbit hole comes from Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice begins an adventure by following the White Rabbit into his burrow. The black hole metaphor comes from the idea that the reader is powerfully sucked into a hole from which they cannot escape.
References
- ↑ Whelan, Aubrey (21 July 2010). "'Wikiracing' picking up speed among college students". The Philadelphia Inquirer .
- ↑ Jones, Ben (20 June 2010). "Latest game for bored students? Wikiracing". Star Tribune .
- ↑ Doctoroff, Ariel (22 July 2010). "Want To Waste An Hour (Or Three)? Go On A Wikirace". Huffington Post .
- ↑ Colin Hepke (2008). "On Your Mark, Get Set, Wikipedia"! Archived 2012-04-03 at the Wayback Machine Cornerstone 2(3), 8.
- ↑ Jones, Ben (8 July 2010). "Students glued to computers turn Wikipedia into a game". College Times . Archived from the original on 18 July 2012.
- ↑ Stefan Thaler, Katharina Siorpaes, Elena Simperl and Christian Hofe (2011). "A Survey on Games for Knowledge Acquisition". Archived 25 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine Semantic Technology Institute International . pgs 14-17.
- ↑ Walker, John (10 June 2010). "Searching For Fun: Wikipedia Game". Rock, Paper, Shotgun .
- ↑ Stevens, Heidi (14 August 2011). "Zero in on your child's lack of focus"". The Seattle Times .
- ↑ Plumez, Jacqueline Hornor (25 September 2008). "The Career Doctor". Larchmont Gazette. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 16 November 2011.
- ↑ Denise Smith Amos. "500 teens converge for TechOlympics". Cincinnati Enquirer , 3/5/2010
- ↑ Read, Brock (28 May 2008). "6 Degrees of Wikipedia". The Chronicle of Higher Education .
- ↑ "I Made a Graph of Wikipedia... This Is What I Found" on YouTube
