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Wikipedia's most notable style policy is that editors are required to uphold a "neutral point of view", under which notable perspectives are summarized without an attempt to determine an Objective truth. Wikipedia's co-founder, , 2005 , There are over 200 language editions of Wikipedia, around 130 of which are active. Fifteen editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English (the original), German , French , Polish , Danish , Japanese , Dutch , Italian , Swedish , Portuguese , Spanish , Russian , Chinese , Norwegian and Finnish . Its German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM , and there are also proposals for an English DVD or paper edition. Many of its other editions are Mirrored or have been Forked by other websites. Characteristics .]] Wikipedia's slogan is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," regardless of qualifications. It is developed using a type of Software called a " Wiki ", a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb and derived from the Hawaiian ''wiki wiki'', which means "quick". Jimmy Wales intends for Wikipedia to ultimately achieve a "'' Britannica '' or better" level of quality and be published in print. Although several other Encyclopedia Projects exist or have existed on the Internet , none have achieved Wikipedia's size or popularity. Traditional multilingual editorial policies and article ownership are sometimes used, such as the expert-written '' Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy '', the now-defunct Nupedia , and the more casual H2g2 and Everything2 . Projects such as Wikipedia, Susning.nu , '' Enciclopedia Libre '' and WikiZnanie are other wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal process of review. Wikipedia has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word count. Unlike many encyclopedias, it has licensed its content under the GNU Free Documentation License . Wikipedia has a set of policies identifying types of information appropriate for inclusion. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, revised, transferred to a sister project, or removed. Free content The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license through which Wikipedia's articles are made available, is one of many " Copyleft " Copyright licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of Derivative Work s, and commercial use of content, provided that its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When an author contributes original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained by them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Wikipedia may thus be distributed multilingually to, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license. Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Wikipedia's images and sounds are not free. Items such as , 2005 ) Some Wikipedia users, or ''Wikipedians'', maintain (noncomprehensive) lists of such uses. Wikipedia as a source Language editions Wikipedia encompasses 132 "active" language editions (ones with 100+ articles) as of April 2006." Complete list of language Wikipedias available ", Meta-Wiki (, 2006 Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions or direct translations of each other, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multi-lingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to translate articles by hand. The various language editions ''are'' held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Wikipedia editions, the former through ", 2005 ) The following is a list of the large editions, sorted by number of articles as of March 1 , 2006 . (The article count, however, is a limited metric for comparing the editions. For instance, in some Wikipedia versions nearly half of the articles are short articles created automatically by Robots .) . ] #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) #) Editing Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's content, and registered users can create new articles and have their changes instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the expectation that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that , 2005 but this description is not accepted by most Wikipedians. Although many users take advantage of Wikipedia's , 2005 ) channel, #en.wikipedia .]] Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time due to the aforementioned vandalism or revert wars; Wikipedia does not declare any of its articles to be "complete" or "finished". The authors of articles need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who wishes to do so. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group; decisions on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia are instead made largely through , 2005 Regular users often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles, including new updates, discussions, and vandalism. Most past edits to Wikipedia articles also remain viewable after the fact, and are stored on "edit history" pages sorted chronologically, making it possible to see former versions of any page at any time. The only exceptions are the entire histories of articles which have been deleted, and many individual edits which contain Libel ous statements, copyright violations, and other content which could incur legal liability or be otherwise detrimental to Wikipedia; these edits may only be viewed by Wikipedia administrators. History See Also: History of Wikipedia Wikipedia began as a complementary project for . On January 10 , 2001 , Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote: , 2001 , two and a half months after its founding.]] Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to , 2005 , Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the '' Enciclopedia Libre '' in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display Advertisements , and its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo , which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view". The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on ; Wiktionary , a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote , a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks , a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below. Wikipedia has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or fewer new articles per day; by 2004, this had accelerated to a total of 1,000 to 3,000 per day (counting all editions). The English Wikipedia reached its 100,000-article milestone on , 2006 ; meanwhile, the millionth user registration had been made just 2 days before. The Wikimedia Foundation applied to the in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet ". Software and hardware Wikipedia is run by --> Free Software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida and four other locations around the world. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required CamelCase for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Wikipedia began running on a PHP Wiki Engine with a MySQL Database in January 2002. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske . Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki. It was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed Multitier Architecture . In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL , multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid Cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world. Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of . Funding Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation . Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.6 Bomis , an online advertising company that hosts mostly adult-oriented web-rings, played a significant part in the early development of Wikipedia and the network itself. Evaluations Wikipedia has become increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence and popularity, with many critics alleging that Wikipedia's open nature makes it unauthoritative and unreliable, that it exhibits severe Systemic Bias and inconsistency, and that the Group Dynamics of its community are hindering its goals. Wikipedia has also been criticized for its use of dubious sources, its disregard for credentials, and its vulnerability to vandalism and special interest groups. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of articles. Reliability Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time, while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality. Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a Reference Work among many Librarian s, Academic s, and the Editor s of more formally written encyclopedias. Many university lecturers discourage their students from using any encyclopedia as a reference in academic work, preferring primary sources instead. Wide World of WIKIPEDIA A website called Wikipedia Watch has been created to denounce Wikipedia as having "…a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information." Brandt, Daniel/PIR. Wikipedia Watch Some argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. Wikipedia contains no formal , January 4 , 2005 . Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in ''Science''. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves. Some critics have suggested that Wikipedia cannot justifiably be called an "encyclopedia", a term which (it is claimed) implies a high degree of reliability and authority that Wikipedia, due to its open editorial policies, may not be able to maintain. However, Wikipedia does meet all the criteria for the basic definition of the word ''encyclopedia''. In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former ''Britannica'' editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,
In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles; see for example . The idea is to provide ''source provenance'' on each interval of text in an article and ''temporal provenance'' as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security". However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial. Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them ", March 1 , 2005 . Former , December 31 , 2004 . The English-language website also suffers from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional Downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative impact on Wikipedia's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information. At the end of 2005 , Controversy Erupted after journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax about Seigenthaler. This led to the decision to restrict the ability to start articles to registered users. Coverage Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing , 2004 . Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances was five times the length of that on Chinese Art , and the entry on '' Coronation Street '' was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair ." (As of December 2005, this is no longer the case.) Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven." Wikipedia has been praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the , 2005 . , 2005 . The German computing magazine ''c't'' performed a comparison of '' Nature reported in 2005 that Science articles in Wikipedia were comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia had an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contained three. Of eight "serious errors" found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source.7. On March 24, 2006, Britannica provided a rebuttal labeling the study "fatally flawed". 8. Community The Wikipedia community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices."Emigh, ibid. Editors on , July 23 , 2004 . In a page on researching with Wikipedia, its authors argue that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen." Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia ", Wikipedia ( March 28 , 2005 ). Wikipedia editions also often contain Reference Desk s in which the community answers questions. Awards Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004" Trophy Box ", Meta-Wiki (; this came with a 10,000 Euro grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category. Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project. Wikipedia has received plaudits from sources including BBC News , '' Washington Post '', '' The Economist '', '' Newsweek '', '' Los Angeles Times '', '' Science '', '' The Guardian '', '' Chicago Sun-Times '', '' The Times '' (London), '' Toronto Star '', '' Globe And Mail '', '' The Financial Times '', '' Time Magazine '', '' Irish Times '', '' Reader's Digest '' and '' The Daily Telegraph ''. Authors During December 2005, Wikipedia had about 27,000 users who made at least five edits that month; 17,000 of these active users worked on the English edition.Paragraph's statistics taken from " Active wikipedians " (Wikipedia Statistics, , 2005 . Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee. Former Nupedia editor-in-chief , 2005 , In popular culture
The vandalizing the He-Man article. See also References Further reading
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