his article is about Wikipedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page.

For the
English edition, see English Wikipedia. For a list of Wikipedias in other
languages, see List of Wikipedias. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).
Wikipedia
An incomplete sphere made of large, white, jigsaw puzzle pieces. Each puzzle piece
contains one glyph from a different writing system, with each glyph written in
black.
The Wikipedia wordmark which displays the name Wikipedia, written in all caps. The
W and the A are the same height and both are taller than the other letters which
are also all the same height. It also displays Wikipedia's slogan: "The Free
Encyclopedia".
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from various writing systems
Screenshot
Type of site Online encyclopedia
Available in 321 languages
Country of origin United States
Owner Bomis (formerly) Wikimedia Foundation
Created by
Jimmy Wales
Larry Sanger[1]
URL wikipedia.org
Commercial No
Registration Optional[note 1]
Users >330,722 active users[note 2] and >96,270,827 registered users
1,098 administrators (English)
Launched January 15, 2001; 20 years ago
Current status Active
Content license CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0
Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies
Written in LAMP platform[2]
OCLC number 52075003
Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/
(About this soundlisten) wik-ee-) is a free, multilingual online encyclopedia
written and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors through a model of
open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and
most-read reference work in history,[3] and is consistently one of the 15 most
popular websites as ranked by Alexa; as of 2021, it ranked as the 13th most popular
site.[3][4] The project carries no advertisements and is hosted by the Wikimedia
Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through individual
donations.[5]

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; Sanger
coined its name as a portmanteau of "wiki" and "encyclopedia".[6][7] Initially
available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. The
English Wikipedia, with 6.3 million articles as of May 2021, is the largest of the
321 language editions. Combined, Wikipedia's editions comprise more than 56 million
articles, and attract more than 17 million edits and more than 1.7 billion unique
visitors per month.[8][9]

Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of

knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced amount of
commercial bias, but has also been criticized for its perceived unreliability and
for exhibiting systemic bias, namely geographical bias, racial bias, gender bias
against women, and alleged ideological bias. Its coverage of American politics and
of the COVID-19 pandemic have received substantial media attention. At various
points, Wikipedia has been censored by world governments, ranging from the blocking
of specific pages to bans on the entire site. Wikipedia has become an element of
popular culture, with references in books, films and academic studies. In 2006,
Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia
the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world", and is "a testament to
the vision of one man, Jimmy Wales".[10] In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced
that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking links to
related Wikipedia articles.[11]

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

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger

Nupedia
Main article: Nupedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with the large initial "N"
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none
were as successful.[12] 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.[13] 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.[1]
[14] 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.[15] Wales is credited with defining the
goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[16][17] while Sanger is credited
with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[18] On January 10, 2001,
Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project
for Nupedia.[19]

Launch and early growth

The domains wikipedia.com (redirecting to wikipedia.org) and wikipedia.org were
registered on January 12, 2001,[20] and January 13, 2001,[21] respectively, and
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001,[13] as a single English-language
edition at www.wikipedia.com,[22] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing
list.[16] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[23] was codified in its
first few months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and
Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[16] Originally, Bomis intended to make
Wikipedia a business for profit.[24]

The Wikipedia home page on December 17, 2001

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[25]
Number of English Wikipedia articles[26]
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.[27] 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.[28]

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.[29] Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display
advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
[30][31]

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.[32] Around 1,800 articles were added
daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[33] A team
at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's
increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[34] 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.[35][36][37]

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.[38][39] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing
and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[40] Wales
disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology
of the study.[41] 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".[42] A 2013 article titled "The Decline of
Wikipedia" in MIT 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.[43] In July 2012, The Atlantic
reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[44] In the November
25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-
most-used website, is facing an internal crisis".[45]

Milestones

Cartogram showing number of articles in each European language as of January 2019.

One square represents 10,000 articles. Languages with fewer than 10,000 articles
are represented by 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 at number 9, surpassing The New York Times
(No. 10) and Apple (No. 11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006,
when the rank was 33rd, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique
visitors.[46] As of March 2020, Wikipedia ranked 13th[4] among websites in terms of
popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight billion page
views every month.[47] 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".[8] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in
process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that
accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[48][49]

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.[50] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that
temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[51][52]

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."[53] 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."[53] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky,
associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein
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]."[53] By the
end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked fifth in the most popular websites
globally.[54]

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,
106 of the 7,473 700-page volumes of Wikipedia became available as Print Wikipedia.
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.[55][56] In June
2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia
have been encoded into synthetic DNA.[57]

Openness

Differences between versions of an article are highlighted

Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination
principle[note 3] regarding the security of its content.[58] 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 for certain cases. For instance, on
the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only registered users may
create a new article.[59] On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly
controversial, sensitive or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying
degrees.[60][61] 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.[62] A particularly contentious article
may be locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[63] A 2021
article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia's page protection
policies as "[p]erhaps the most important" means at Wikipedia's disposal to
"regulate its market of ideas".[64]

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,[65] which have passed certain
reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English
Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012.[66] Under this
system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-
prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.[67]

The editing interface of Wikipedia

Review of changes
Although changes are not systematically reviewed, the software that powers
Wikipedia provides tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. The
"History" page of each article links to each revision.[note 4][68] On most
articles, anyone can undo others' changes by clicking a link on the article's
history page. Anyone can view the latest changes to articles, and anyone registered
may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified
of any changes. "New pages patrol" is a process whereby newly created articles are
checked for obvious problems.[69]
In 2003, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction
costs of participating in a wiki create a catalyst for collaborative development,
and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favor
"creative construction" over "creative destruction".[70]

Vandalism
Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia
Any change or edit that manipulates content in a way that purposefully compromises
the integrity of Wikipedia is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious
types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor. Vandalism can
also include advertising and other types of spam.[71] Sometimes editors commit
vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page. Less common types
of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information to
an article can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant
formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization,
manipulate the underlying code of an article, or use images disruptively.[72]

White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.

American journalist John Seigenthaler (1927–2014), subject of the Seigenthaler
incident.
Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median
time to detect and fix vandalism is a few minutes.[73][74] However, some vandalism
takes much longer to repair.[75]

In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false

information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in
May 2005. Seigenthaler was falsely presented as a suspect in the assassination of
John F. Kennedy.[75] The article remained uncorrected for four months.[75]
Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the
Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-
founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the
misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, although the perpetrator was
eventually traced.[76][77] After the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as
"a flawed and irresponsible research tool".[75] This incident led to policy changes
at Wikipedia, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of
biographical articles of living people.[78]

In 2010, Daniel Tosh encouraged viewers of his show, Tosh.0, to visit the show's
Wikipedia article and edit it at will. On a later episode, he commented on the
edits to the article, most of them offensive, which had been made by the audience
and had prompted the