Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia whose entries are created, edited, and maintained by anonymous users. Volunteers around the world contribute to the website's 19.8 million articles (in 282 different languages).
Contents
History
Wikipedia began as a subset of another free encyclopedia project, Nupedia, in early 2000. Nupedia was intended to be a free online English based encyclopedia whose articles were compiled and constructed by leading experts and formally reviewed before being included in the project. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales formally founded Wikipedia in January 2001.
Founders
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched in January 2001. As the project grew in size, Wales became the projects spokesperson and promoter. Larry Sanger began his wiki career as editor-in-chief of Nupedia, then became chief organizer of Wikipedia from 2001-2002. As one of Wikipedia's community leaders, he helped to establish some of the original policies of Wikipedia.
Controversy over Founding
Technology
Wikipedia's software wiki was developed by Ward Cunningham. The website provides a format that allows for creation, editting and linking of pages by many different users. Wikipedia relies on opensource software for it to function. There are a variety of bots that operate within Wikipedia that are responsible for "patrolling" the online environment in order to carry out tasks such as correcting minor edits and spelling errors and identifying copyrighted material.
Ethical Dilemmas
The credibility of Wikipedia articles has been called into question since the website's existence. There has been concern that the anonymous identity of Wikipedia's contributors has allowed misinformation to be printed through undesirable edits, poor quality of writing, and malicious intent. Under a pseudonym, editors are deindividualized and less likely to follow the unbiased writing style of Wikipedia. In anticipation of these potential threats, bots have been created to patrol the site and identify random inserts and unreliable information among other problems.
Along with the use of bots, there are certain ways that Wikipedia strives to remain ethical and unbiased in their articles. On controversial articles, new users are not allowed to edit them until they have used the site for an extended use of time and have proved themselves to be unbiased editor.
All articles are equipped with a page for discussion. Consensus of editors is important to the Wikipedia process and is how articles remain unbiased with accurate, up to date information. When there are disputes over information in an article, rather than people editing and reediting every few minutes, issues are discussed on the talk pages.Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag;
refs with no content must have a namehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ConsensusCite error: Invalid <ref> tag;
refs with no content must have a name This allows editors to collaborate and try to persude the other sides of the arguements to agree with their position. If concensus cannot be reached through discussion, there are different options that wikipedia takes. First, they will bring in a third opinion to sort out the arguement. If that doesnt work, there may be administrative intervence. Those editors may be blocked from editting a certain page and administrators decide what edits are allowed under Wikipedia policy.
Number of English Articles in Wikipedia
The number of english articles in Wikipedia are increasing year by year, as shown in the graph to your right.
