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This article is about the free encyclopedia. For the different similar terms related to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia (terminology).
| Wikipedia | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot of Wikipedia\'s multilingual portal | |
| URL | http://www.wikipedia.org |
| Slogan | The Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | 236 active editions (253 in total) |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales, Larry SangerJonathan Sidener. "Everyone\'s Encyclopedia", San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved on 2006-10-15. |
| Launched | January 15 2001 |
| Current status | perpetual work-in-progress |
Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/, or /ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/) (Audio (U.S.) ) is a free,Some language versions such as English one contains non-free images. multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a blend of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,Miliard, Mike. "Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Wikipedia?", Salt Lake City Weekly, 2008-03-01. Retrieved on 2008-02-21. it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.Tancer, Bill. "Look Who\'s Using Wikipedia", Time, 2007-05-01. Retrieved on 2007-12-01. "The sheer volume of content [...] is partly responsible for the site\'s dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category" (the author\'s blog post on the article)Woodson, Alex. "Wikipedia remains go-to site for online news", Reuters, 2007-07-08. Retrieved on 2007-12-16. "Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings."
As of December 2007, Wikipedia has approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of March 12, 2008 it had over 2,276,000 articles consisting of over 990,000,000 words.List of Wikipedias. Meta-Wiki (2007-07-12). Wikipedia\'s articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception,Five-year traffic statistics for wikipedia.org. Alexa Internet. Retrieved on 2007-01-29. it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.
Critics have questioned Wikipedia\'s reliability and accuracy, citing its open nature.Simon Waldman (2004-10-26). Who knows?. The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-02-11. The criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism, such as the insertion of profanities or random letters into articles, and the addition of spurious or unverified information; uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies; and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.Danah Boyd (2005-01-04). Academia and Wikipedia. Many-to-Many. Retrieved on 2007-02-11. Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.. "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations" (PDF). Retrieved on 2007-01-24.Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl (2007-11-04). "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia". Association for Computing Machinery GROUP \'07 conference proceedings. Retrieved on 2007-10-13.
In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated.Jonathan Dee. "All the News That’s Fit to Print Out", The New York Times Magazine, 2007-07-01. Retrieved on 2007-12-01. Andrew Lih (04-16-2004). "Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource". 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. Retrieved on 2007-10-13. When Time Magazine recognized "You" as their 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."Time\'s Person of the Year: You", Time, 2006-12-13.
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Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.
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. Nupedia was founded on March 9 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia\'s founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.Stallman, Richard M. (2007-06-20). The Free Encyclopedia Project. Free Software Foundation. Retrieved on 2008-01-04.
Jimmy Wales
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia. Meyers, Peter. "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", The New York Times, September 20, 2001. Retrieved on 2007-11-22. "I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph," said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the counter-intuitive strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?. Retrieved on 2007-02-20. On January 10 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.Larry Sanger. "Let\'s make a wiki", Internet Archive, January 10 2001. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,Wikipedia: HomePage. Retrieved on 2001-03-31. and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.Larry Sanger. "Wikipedia is up!", Internet Archive, January 17 2001. Wikipedia\'s policy of "neutral point-of-view""Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia (21 January 2007) was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia\'s earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.Larry Sanger. "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir", Slashdot, April 18 2005.
Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article).
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the closing stages 2004."Multilingual statistics", Wikipedia, March 30 2005 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former\'s servers went down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. As of December 2007, English Wikipedia had over 2 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for nearly 600 years. "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. 18. (2007). Encyclopædia Britannica. 257–286.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. Wikinfo does not require neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Amapedia and Google\'s Knol — have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research and commercial advertising.
The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20 2003.Jimmy Wales: "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", June 20 2003,
The Wikimedia Foundation\'s 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.Budget/2005. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2006-03-11. The Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and holds regular fundraisers;Fundraising, Wikimedia Foundation the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over $1 million."Fundraising report", Wikimedia Foundation (January 21 2007)
Almost every article in Wikipedia may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. The "History" page attached to each article contains every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.The Japanese Wikipedia, for example, is known for deleting every mention of real names of victims of certain high-profile crimes, even though they may still be noted in other language editions. All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. Wikipedia has been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are currently incompatible.Walter Vermeir (2007). Resolution:License update. Wikizine. Retrieved on 2007-12-04. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while free media files are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Wikipedia is submitted to formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. To ensure its quality, the project relies on its community members, called Wikipedians,Wikipedia:Wikipedians. Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-12-08. to remove vandalism or identify problems such as violation of neutrality Claburn, Thomas. "Wikipedia Becomes Intelligence Tool And Target For Jihadists", Information Week, March 22, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. and factual errors in its articles."Wikipedia Falsely Reports Sinbad\'s Death", Associated Press, March 16, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. Since June 2006, vandalism-repair bots have also been in use.
Articles in Wikipedia are subject to the law in Florida, United States and several internal policies and guidelines;Who\'s behind Wikipedia?. PC World (2008-02-06). Retrieved on 2008-02-07. they need to be on "notable" Wikipedia:Notability. Retrieved on 2008-02-13. “A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.” topics, contain "no original research"Wikipedia:No original research. Retrieved on 2008-02-13. “Wikipedia does not publish original thought” and only "verifiable"Wikipedia:Verifiability. Retrieved on 2008-02-13. “Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source.” facts and must be written from a "neutral point of view."Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view. Retrieved on 2008-02-13. “All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias.” Articles that fail to meet those guidelines and policies are modified or deleted. Deletionism and inclusionism are two editor philosophies on the extent of these modifications and deletions."The battle for Wikipedia\'s soul", The Economist, 2008-03-06. Retrieved on 2008-03-07. "Wikipedia: an online encyclopedia torn apart", The Daily Telegraph, 2007-11-10. Retrieved on 2008-03-11.
The community has a power structure. Corner, Stuart. "What\'s all the fuss about Wikipedia?", iT Wire, June 18, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. Wilson, Chris. "The Wisdom of the Chaperones", Slate, 2008-02-22. Retrieved on 2008-03-04. While they are welcomed by the community, Schiff, Stacy. "Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?", Know It All, The New Yorker, July 24, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. authors new to Wikipedia are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Wikipedia.Kleinz, Torsten. "World of Knowledge", The Wikipedia Project, Linux Magazine, February, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator"Mehegan, David. "Many contributors, common cause", The Boston Globe, February 13, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. and goes up with "steward" and "bureaucrat". Wikipedia:User access levels," Wikipedia (January 12 2007) Administrators, the largest group of privileged users (1,503 Wikipedians for the English edition on February 23, 2008), have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and deter users from editing. Much of the coordination of the editing of Wikipedia takes place on the "Talk" pages associated with each individual article.Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jesse Kriss, Frank van Ham (2007-01-03). "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia". Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia" has become one of questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.Kittur, Aniket. Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie (pdf). Retrieved on 2008-02-23. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes up a bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". This was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portion of their content contributed by a user with low edit count.Swartz, Aaron (2006-09-04). Raw Thought: Who Writes Wikipedia?. Retrieved on 2008-02-23.
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 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.
Overview of system architecture, May 2006. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.
Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of GNU/Linux servers, 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam and 23 in Yahoo!\'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul.Wikimedia servers at wikimedia.org. Retrieved on 2008-02-16. 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 servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.
Wikipedia receives between 20,000 and 45,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day."Monthly request statistics", Wikimedia. Retrieved on 2008-02-26. 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.
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This section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page. This article has been tagged since October 2007. |
Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour)spelling. Manual of Style. Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-05-19. or points of view.Countering systemic bias. Retrieved on 2007-05-19. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.Fair use. Meta wiki. Retrieved on 2007-07-14.Images on Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-07-14.Fernanda B. Viégas (2007-01-03). "The Visual Side of Wikipedia". Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
Percentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest language editions (blue). As of November 2007, less than 25% of Wikipedia articles are in English.
Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia 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,Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions,For example, "Translation into English", Wikipedia. (March 9, 2005) in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed.Wikipedia: Translation. English Wikipedia, accessed on 2007-02-03 Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. Images and other non-verbal media are shared among the various language editions through the Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia foundation.
Several language versions have published a selection of Wikipedia articles on a DVD version. An English version"List of Mirrors Hosting the CD Iso." Wikipedia on DVD. Linterweb. Accessed 1 June 2007 developed by Linterweb contains "1964 + articles"."Wikipedia on DVD". Linterweb. Accessed 1 June 2007. "Linterweb is authorized to make a commercial use of the Wikipedia trademark restricted to the selling of the Encyclopedia CDs and DVDs.""Wikipedia 0.5 Available on a CD-ROM". Wikipedia on DVD. Linterweb. Accessed 1 June 2007. "The DVD or CD-ROM version 0.5 was commercially available for purchase." The Polish version contains nearly 240000 articles.Polish Wikipedia on DVD. There are also a few German versions.Wikipedia:DVD.
Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site."Wikipedia "Good Samaritans Are on the Money", Scientific American, 2007-10-19. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources.
Wikipedia tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view.Eric Haas (2007-10-26). Will Unethical Editing Destroy Wikipedia\'s Credibility?. AlterNet.org. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. Retrieved on 2007-10-28. other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1500 articles have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon (2007-07-22). "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" (pdf). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Andrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia", First Monday December 2003.
In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.Child, Maxwell L.,"Professors Split on Wiki Debate", The Harvard Crimson, Monday, February 26, 2007. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,Chloe Stothart, Web threatens learning ethos, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 2007, 1799 (22 June), page 2 stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are “the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything.” He also said that “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet” was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on the academics who cite Wikipedia that: “You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she said. “The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way.”
Speaking at a conference in Pennsylvania, Wales said he receives about ten e-mails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia. According to the Sunday Times of London, Wales told the students they got what they deserved. "For God\'s sake, you’re in college; don\'t cite the encyclopedia," he said."Jimmy Wales," Biography Resource Center Online. (Gale, 2006)
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;Simon Waldman, Who knows? The Guardian, October 26 2004 critics argue that Wikipedia\'s open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.Stacy Schiff. "Know It All", The New Yorker, 2006-07-31. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. The project\'s preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".Larry Sanger, Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, Kuro5hin, December 31 2004. Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project\'s utility and status as an encyclopedia.Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, November 15 2004. Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;Wide World of WIKIPEDIA. The Emory Wheel (April 21 2006). Retrieved on 2007-10-17. some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.Jaschik, Scott. "A Stand Against Wikipedia", Inside Higher Ed, 2007-01-26. Retrieved on 2007-01-27. Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.Helm, Burt. "Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress"", BusinessWeek, 2005-12-14. Retrieved on 2007-01-29. Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."Thompson, Bill. "What is it with Wikipedia?", BBC, 2005-12-16.
In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing – but the community has been unable to form a consensus in favor of such changes, partly because they would require a major software overhaul.meta.wikimedia.orgReviewed_article_version.en.wikipedia.orgWikipedia:Stable_versions. However a similar system is being tested on the German Wikipedia, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version at some future time.en.wikipedia.orgWikipedia:Flagged_revisions. Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz is now being tested that will assign "trust ratings" to individual Wikipedia contributors, with the intention that eventually only edits made by those who have established themselves as "trusted editors" will be made immediately visible.Giles, Jim. "Wikipedia 2.0 - now with added trust", NewScientist.com news service, 2007-09-20.
John Seigenthaler Sr. has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users\' anonymity,Public Information Research - Wikipedia Watch. Retrieved on 2007-01-28. and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.Seigenthaler, John. "A False Wikipedia \'biography\'", USA Today, 2005-11-29. Some critics claim that Wikipedia\'s open structure makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version). Citizendium.org. Retrieved on 2006-10-10.Kleinz, Torsten. "World of Knowledge", The Wikipedia Project, Linux Magazine, February, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-07-13. "The Wikipedia\'s open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles, get other people tied up in endless discussions, and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves." The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groupsAhrens, Frank (2006-07-09). Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles. The Washington Post. Retrieved on 2006-11-01. has been noted,Kane, Margaret (2006-01-30). Politicians notice Wikipedia. CNET. Retrieved on 2007-01-28. and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.Bergstein, Brian (2007-01-23). Microsoft offers cash for Wikipedia edit. MSNBC. Retrieved on 2007-02-01. These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.Stephen Colbert. "Wikiality", Comedycentral.com, 2006-07-30.
Wikipedia\'s community has been described as "cult-like,"Arthur, Charles. "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults", The Guardian, 2005-12-15. although not always with entirely negative connotations,Lu Stout, Kristie. "Wikipedia: The know-it-all Web site", CNN, 2003-08-04. and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users."Wikinfo (2005-03-30). Critical views of Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-29. While praising many aspects of Wikipedia, historian Roy Rosenzweig notes: "Overall, writing is the Achilles’ heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."Rosenzweig, Roy. Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46. Retrieved on 2007-10-29.
In August 2007, a website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia by editors who are not logged in, which reveals that many of these edits come from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and were attempts to remove criticism.Hafner, Katie. "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints From the Editing of Wikipedia", The New York Times, 2007-08-19.
Wales called WikiScanner "a very clever idea," and said that he was considering some changes to Wikipedia to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them. "When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’" he said. "That might make them stop and think."
An xkcd strip entitled "Wikipedian Protester."
In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia\'s growth. Retrieved on 2007-12-22. Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.694 Million People Currently Use the Internet Worldwide According To comScore Networks. comScore. Retrieved on 2007-12-16. “Wikipedia has emerged as a site that continues to increase in popularity, both globally and in the U.S.” According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites world-wide.Top 500. Alexa. Retrieved on 2007-12-04.comScore Data Center (October 2007). Retrieved on 2008-01-19. Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit website. The growth of
