(, Web -based, Free Content Encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation , a Non-profit Organization . It is the largest, most extensive and fastest growing encyclopedia currently available on the Internet .
As of September , 2007 , Wikipedia had approximately 8.2 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words for all wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9 2007 with a total of over 609 million words, roughly fifteen times as many as the largest edition of '' Encyclopædia Britannica ''.1 Wikipedia's articles have been written Collaboratively by Volunteer s around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception,2 it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.3
Wikipedia's name is a Portmanteau of the words '' Wiki '' (a type of collaborative website) and '' Encyclopedia ''. Its main Servers are in Tampa, Florida , with additional servers located in Amsterdam and Seoul .
Due to Wikipedia's open nature, critics have questioned its reliability and accuracy.4
The site has been criticized for its susceptibility to Vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information, uneven quality, Systemic Bias and inconsistencies, and for favoring Consensus over Credential s in its editorial process.5 Wikipedia's content policies6 and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.7 Two scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived8 and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as other encyclopedias.9
When "You" was declared '' Time '' Person Of The Year 2006 , praising the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular " Web 2.0 " service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace .10
See Also: History of Wikipedia
Wikipedia's English Edition was launched on January 15 2001 , as a complement to Nupedia , an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia.
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Dan
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Mitchell
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Insider Editing at Wikipedia
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http://wwwnytimescom/2005/12/24/technology/24onlinereadyhtmlex=1293080400&en=431aff478b00239e&ei=5090
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The New York Times
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2005-12-24
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2007-04-14
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Brian
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Bergstein
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Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia
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http://abcnewsgocom/Technology/wireStoryid=2980046
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ABC News
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Associated Press
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2007-03-25
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2007-04-14
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The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy PhD who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp The claim does not seem particularly controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, is not happy about it
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Marshall
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Poe
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The Hive
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http://wwwtheatlanticcom/doc/200609/wikipedia/
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The Atlantic
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September 2006
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2007-04-14
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Mehegan
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David
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The Boston Globe
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Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world
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http://wwwbostoncom/business/technology/articles/2006/02/12/bias_sabotage_haunt_wikipedias_free_world/page=4
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2006-02-12
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2007-04-14
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free registration required
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http://wwwsignonsandiegocom/uniontrib/20041206/news_mz1b6encyclohtml
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Jonathan Sidener
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Everyone's Encyclopedia
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2006-10-15
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San Diego Union Tribune
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Peter Meyers
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Fact-Driven Collegial This Site Wants You
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http://querynytimescom/gst/fullpagehtmlres=9800E5D6123BF933A1575AC0A9679C8B63
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New York Times
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2006-10-15
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2001-09-20
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http://metawikimediaorg/w/indexphptitle=Wikipedia_and_why_it_matters&oldid=149626
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Sanger, Larry
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What Wikipedia is and why it matters
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2006-04-12
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Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteers; these include developers, on the
2007 )
Wikipedia is funded through the (
January 21 2007 )
. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.]]
The operation of Wikipedia depends on
MediaWiki , a custom-made,
Free and
Open Source Wiki Software platform written in
PHP and built upon the
MySQL database. The software incorporates modern programming features, such as a
Macro Language ,
Variables , a
Transclusion system for
Templates , and
URL Redirection . MediaWiki is licensed under the
GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on
UseModWiki written in
Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required
CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a
PHP Wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by
Magnus Manske . The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the
Exponentially Increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.
.]]
Wikipedia runs on dedicated
Clusters of
Linux servers in
Florida and in two other locations.
12 Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, 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 Server s running the
Apache HTTP Server , and seven
Squid Cache servers. By September 2005, its
Server Cluster had grown to around 100 servers in three locations around the world.
Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of
Squid Caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the
Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.
See Also: List of Wikipedias
.
Main Page ,
Hebrew Wikipedia ]]
Wikipedia has been described as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".
Jimmy Wales , "
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia ", March 8 2005,
There are presently 253 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, the top 14 have over 100,000 articles and the top 139 have over 1,000 articles.
Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (this is the case for the English Edition ). These differences may lead to some conflicts about spelling13 or points of view.14 The English Subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 51% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining 49% split among the other languages (Spanish: 15%, Japanese 5%, German: 5%, French: 4%, Polish: 3%, Portuguese: 2%, Arabic: 2%).
