Wikipedia

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It has been suggested that Predictions of the end of Wikipedia be merged into this
article. (Discuss) Proposed since October 2020.
This article is about the encyclopedia. For the English edition, see English Wikipedia. For other
uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).
For the general introduction to the English Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:About.
Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from

various writing systems
Screenshot
Type of site Online encyclopedia
Available in 285 languages
Country of
United States
origin
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
 Jimmy Wales
Created by  Larry Sanger[1]

URL wikipedia.org
Alexa rank 13 (Global, October 2020)[2]
Commercial No
Registration Optional[note 1]
>307,638 active users[note 2] and
Users >92,103,431 registered users
1,145 administrators (English)
Launched January 15, 2001; 19 years ago
Current status Active
CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0
Content license Most text is also dual-licensed
under GFDL; media licensing varies
Written in LAMP platform[3]
OCLC number 52075003

Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ ( listen) wik-ee; abbreviated as

WP) is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration
project[4] by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.[5] It is the
largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web.[6][7][8] It is also one of
the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of August 2020.[9] It features exclusively
free content and has no advertising. It is hosted[10] by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American
non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[11][12][13][14]

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, and was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry
Sanger.[15] Sanger coined its name[16][17] as a portmanteau of the terms "wiki" and "encyclopedia".
It was initially an English-language encyclopedia, but versions in other languages were quickly
developed. With 6.2 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 300
Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 54 million articles[18]
attracting 1.5 billion unique visitors per month.[19][20]

In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia
Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of
Britannica,[21] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of
a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues.[22]
[23][needs update]
The following year, Time stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit
had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a
testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.[24][needs update]

Wikipedia has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and exhibiting systemic bias. Wikipedia
has also been criticized for gender bias, particularly on its English-language version, [citation needed]
where the dominant majority of editors are male. However, edit-a-thons have been held to
encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.[25][26] The project's
reputation improved significantly in the 2010s as it made efforts to improve its quality and
reliability.[27] Facebook announced that by 2017 it would help readers detect fake news by
suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.[28]

Contents
 1 History
o 1.1 Nupedia
o 1.2 Launch and early growth
o 1.3 Milestones
 2 Openness
o 2.1 Restrictions
o 2.2 Review of changes
o 2.3 Vandalism
 o 2.4 Edit warring
 3 Policies and laws
o 3.1 Content policies and guidelines
 4 Governance
o 4.1 Administrators
o 4.2 Dispute resolution
 5 Community
o 5.1 Studies
o 5.2 Diversity
 6 Language editions
o 6.1 English Wikipedia editor decline
 7 Reception
o 7.1 Accuracy of content
o 7.2 Discouragement in education
o 7.3 Quality of writing
o 7.4 Coverage of topics and systemic bias
o 7.5 Explicit content
o 7.6 Privacy
o 7.7 Sexism
 8 Operation
o 8.1 Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates
o 8.2 Software operations and support
o 8.3 Automated editing
o 8.4 Hardware operations and support
o 8.5 Internal research and operational development
o 8.6 Internal news publications
 9 Access to content
o 9.1 Content licensing
o 9.2 Methods of access
 10 Cultural impact
o 10.1 Trusted source to combat fake news
o 10.2 Readership
o 10.3 Cultural significance
o 10.4 Sister projects—Wikimedia
o 10.5 Publishing
o 10.6 Research use
 11 Related projects
 12 See also
 13 Notes
 14 References
 15 Further reading
o 15.1 Academic studies
o 15.2 Books
 o 15.3 Book review-related articles
o 15.4 Learning resources
o 15.5 Other media coverage
 16 External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger

Nupedia

Main article: Nupedia

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia

Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as
successful.[29] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-
language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a
formal process.[30] It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal
company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for
Nupedia and later Wikipedia.[31][32] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open
Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free
Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[33] Wales is credited with defining the
goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[34][35] while Sanger is credited with the strategy
of using a wiki to reach that goal.[36] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia
mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[37]
Launch and early growth

The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001[38] and
January 13, 2001[39] respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001,[30] as a single
English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[40] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia
mailing list.[34] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[41] was codified in its first few
months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated
independently of Nupedia.[34] Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for
profit.[42]

The Wikipedia Page on December 17, 2001

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine
indexing. Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of 2004.[43] Nupedia
and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its
text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million
articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the
Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming Dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for
almost 600 years.[44]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[45] These
moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and to
change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[46] Brion Vibber applied the
change on August 15, 2002.[47]

Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the
edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked
around early 2007.[48] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by
2013 that average was roughly 800.[49] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this
slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[50] Others
suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging
fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively.[51]
[52][53]

Play media
A promotional video of the Wikimedia Foundation that encourages viewers to edit Wikipedia,
mostly reviewing 2014 via Wikipedia content

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the
English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison,
the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[54][55] The Wall Street Journal
cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons
for this trend.[56] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the
methodology of the study.[57] Two years later, in 2011, Wales acknowledged the presence of a
slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800
in June 2011. In the same interview, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and
sustainable".[58] A 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia" in MIT's Technology Review
questioned this claim. The article revealed that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its
volunteer editors, and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae.[59] In July 2012,
The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[60] In the November 25,
2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used
website, is facing an internal crisis".[61]

Milestones

Map is showing how many articles of each European language there were as of January 2019.
One square represents 1000 articles. Languages with less than 1000 articles are represented with
one square. Languages are grouped by language family and each language family is presented by
a separate color.

In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites
in the US, according to comScore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was
ranked number 9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a
significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was number 33, with Wikipedia receiving
around 18.3 million unique visitors.[62] As of March 2020, Wikipedia has rank 13[9] among
websites in terms of popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight billion
page views every month.[63] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia
has 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the
ratings firm comScore".[19] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long
tradition of historical encyclopedias that accumulated improvements piecemeal through
"stigmergic accumulation".[64][65]

Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests
against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[66] More than
162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia
content.[67][68]

On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only
had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There
was a decline of about two billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most
popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by twelve
percent, those of German version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost nine
percent."[69] Varma added that, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to
errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year
may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."[69] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate
professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet &
Society indicated that he suspected much of the page view decline was due to Knowledge
Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to
click [any further]."[69] By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked fifth in the most
popular websites globally.[70]

In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia; in October 2014,
Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument; and, in July 2015, a portion of Wikipedia
became available as Print Wikipedia, 106 books for $500,000]]. In 2019, a species of flowering
plant was named Viola wikipedia.[71] In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash
landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia
engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash.[72][73] In June 2019,
scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia have been encoded
into synthetic DNA.[74]
Openness

Number of English Wikipedia articles[75]

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[76]

Differences between versions of an article are highlighted

Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination principle[note 3] regarding

the security of its content.[77] It started almost entirely open—anyone could create articles, and
any Wikipedia article could be edited by any reader, even those who did not have a Wikipedia
account. Modifications to all articles would be published immediately. As a result, any article
could contain inaccuracies such as errors, ideological biases, and nonsensical or irrelevant text.

Restrictions

Due to the increasing popularity of Wikipedia, some editions, including the English version,
have introduced editing restrictions in some cases. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and
some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article.[78] On the English
Wikipedia, among others, some particularly controversial, sensitive or vandalism-prone pages
have been protected to some degree.[79][80] A frequently vandalized article can be semi-protected
or extended confirmed protected, meaning that only autoconfirmed or extended confirmed
editors are able to modify it.[81] A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only
administrators are able to make changes.[82]

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some
editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable
versions" of articles,[83] which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and
community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in
December 2012.[84] Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial
or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.[85]