History Main / OverdrawnAtTheBloodbank

* The [[http://www.creepypasta.com/day-of-all-the-blood/ DAY OF ALL THE BLOOD]] (troll) creepypasta. "THERE WAS SO MUCH BLOOD THAT IT FILLED UP AN ELEVATOR."

* ''BurnUpExcess'' sees Yuji have a nosebleed severe enough to flood the Coptown Police Tower in one of the omake-scenes.

*** Yup, it's WordOfGod that Zoro lost 3 liters of blood in his first fight with Mihawk, and then 5 liters in his fight only a couple of days later(!) with Hachi and Arlong. The human body, on average, holds 5.6 liters of blood. SoYeah. He should be dead. But it's okay! He survives with the [[RunsOnNonsensoleum power of Heart]]!

[[MangaUK http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mangacertifiedblooddonorcarda.png]][[caption-width:300:Manga Certified Blood Donor Card]]

*** Somewhat justified in that Negi can heal himself with magic, and later can ask for healing from Konoka.
*** Of course, she was doing this ''every day'', so...

* Usually averted in anything involving Joss Whedon ... despite the copious use of bladed weapons, even [[WhatAMeasureIsANonHuman non-human]] blood is thin on the ground (*ahem*) - see for example the final battle in ''Serenity'' where [[spoiler: River ends up surrounded by Reavers that she has hacked to death]] with scarcely a drop of blood on the floor. Probably one to pin on the MoralGuardians.

* Usually averted in anything involving Joss Whedon ... despite the copious use of bladed weapons, even [[WhatAMeasureIsANonhuman non-human]] blood is thin on the ground (*ahem*) - see for example the final battle in ''Serenity'' where [[spoiler: River ends up surrounded by Reavers that she has hacked to death]] with scarcely a drop of blood on the floor. Probably one to pin on the MoralGuardians.

* Usually averted in anything involving Joss Whedon ... despite the copious use of bladed weapons, even [[Whatameasureisanonhuman non-human]] blood is thin on the ground (*ahem*) - see for example the final battle in ''Serenity'' where [[spoiler: River ends up surrounded by Reavers that she has hacked to death]] with scarcely a drop of blood on the floor. Probably one to pin on the MoralGuardians.

*** After all, the bread and wine is transfigured into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus every time someone takes communion. Not only must Jesus have a lot more flesh and blood than he looks to, but he's surprisingly tasty, too!

*Subverted in the SurprisinglyGoodScience manga, ''{{Change 123}}''. The author (committed as ever to technical accuracy, if not overall plausibility) comments on the effects of blood loss, and takes pains to apply it to the series' primary fighters, even throwing in some DeathOfAThousandCuts.

The average male human body contains roughly five litres of blood (blood volume is proportional to body size). When donating whole blood, 450-500ml is normally taken, which produces feelings of fatigue and weakness for a while, and you must wait 56 days before doing it again. Red blood cells do not regenerate all that fast; that's why we have transfusions. While people can survive losing quite a bit of blood provided they get prompt medical attention, after [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exsanguination losing 40% or more]] death is pretty much guaranteed.

[[MangaUK http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/Wikipedia is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.[9]

The word Wikipedia ( /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[11] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[13] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15][16] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[17]

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[18] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[19][20] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[21]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Nature of Wikipedia
o 2.1 Editing model
o 2.2 Rules and laws governing content
o 2.3 Defenses against undesirable edits
o 2.4 Coverage of topics
o 2.5 Quality
o 2.6 Reliability
o 2.7 Community
* 3 Operation
o 3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
o 3.2 Software and hardware
o 3.3 Mobile access
* 4 License and language editions
* 5 Reusing Wikipedia's content
* 6 Cultural significance
* 7 Related projects
* 8 See also
* 9 Notes
* 10 Further reading
* 11 External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N."
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.[22]
Main Page of the English Wikipedia

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[23][24] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[25][26] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[27] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[28] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[29] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[25] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] 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.[25]
Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007.
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 web 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 final days of 2004.[31] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[32]

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.[33] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[34] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol[35] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function tending to 4.4 million articles.

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[36] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009[update], that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[37] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[38][39]

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 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.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[42] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[43]
Nature of Wikipedia
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies of Wikipedia
Editing model
Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
Play video
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[44]

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in the English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors and are agreed on by consensus.[45]

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[46] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[47][48] In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework). In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the British Broadcasting Corporation, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."[49]
Web page showing side-by-side comparison of an article highlighting changed paragraphs.
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[50][51] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[52] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The editing interface of Wikipedia.

Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[53][54] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[55] other editions have also adopted this.[clarification needed]

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternate titles should appear in bold.
Rules and laws governing content

For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[56] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non English editions of the Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[57] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability,"[58] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[59] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[60] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[61] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[62] This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.

Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.

Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.[63]
Defenses against undesirable edits

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[64]

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[65]

White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[66]

Obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[15][16] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[66] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[67][68] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[50][69] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[70] and organizationsWikipedia is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.[9]

The word Wikipedia ( /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[11] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[13] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15][16] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[17]

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[18] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[19][20] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[21]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Nature of Wikipedia
o 2.1 Editing model
o 2.2 Rules and laws governing content
o 2.3 Defenses against undesirable edits
o 2.4 Coverage of topics
o 2.5 Quality
o 2.6 Reliability
o 2.7 Community
* 3 Operation
o 3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
o 3.2 Software and hardware
o 3.3 Mobile access
* 4 License and language editions
* 5 Reusing Wikipedia's content
* 6 Cultural significance
* 7 Related projects
* 8 See also
* 9 Notes
* 10 Further reading
* 11 External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N."
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.[22]
Main Page of the English Wikipedia

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[23][24] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[25][26] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[27] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[28] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[29] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[25] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] 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.[25]
Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007.
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 web 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 final days of 2004.[31] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[32]

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.[33] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[34] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol[35] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function tending to 4.4 million articles.

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[36] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009[update], that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[37] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[38][39]

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 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.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[42] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[43]
Nature of Wikipedia
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies of Wikipedia
Editing model
Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
Play video
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[44]

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in the English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors and are agreed on by consensus.[45]

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[46] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[47][48] In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework). In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the British Broadcasting Corporation, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."[49]
Web page showing side-by-side comparison of an article highlighting changed paragraphs.
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[50][51] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[52] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The editing interface of Wikipedia.

Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[53][54] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[55] other editions have also adopted this.[clarification needed]

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternate titles should appear in bold.
Rules and laws governing content

For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[56] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non English editions of the Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[57] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability,"[58] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[59] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[60] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[61] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[62] This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.

Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.

Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.[63]
Defenses against undesirable edits

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[64]

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[65]

White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[66]

Obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[15][16] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[66] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[67][68] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[50][69] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[70] and organizationsWikipedia is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.[9]

The word Wikipedia ( /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[11] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[13] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15][16] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[17]

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[18] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[19][20] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[21]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Nature of Wikipedia
o 2.1 Editing model
o 2.2 Rules and laws governing content
o 2.3 Defenses against undesirable edits
o 2.4 Coverage of topics
o 2.5 Quality
o 2.6 Reliability
o 2.7 Community
* 3 Operation
o 3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
o 3.2 Software and hardware
o 3.3 Mobile access
* 4 License and language editions
* 5 Reusing Wikipedia's content
* 6 Cultural significance
* 7 Related projects
* 8 See also
* 9 Notes
* 10 Further reading
* 11 External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N."
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.[22]
Main Page of the English Wikipedia

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[23][24] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[25][26] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[27] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[28] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[29] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[25] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] 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.[25]
Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007.
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 web 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 final days of 2004.[31] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[32]

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.[33] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[34] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol[35] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function tending to 4.4 million articles.

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[36] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009[update], that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[37] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[38][39]

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 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.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[42] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[43]
Nature of Wikipedia
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies of Wikipedia
Editing model
Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
Play video
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[44]

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in the English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors and are agreed on by consensus.[45]

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[46] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[47][48] In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework). In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the British Broadcasting Corporation, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."[49]
Web page showing side-by-side comparison of an article highlighting changed paragraphs.
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[50][51] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[52] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The editing interface of Wikipedia.

Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[53][54] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[55] other editions have also adopted this.[clarification needed]

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternate titles should appear in bold.
Rules and laws governing content

For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[56] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non English editions of the Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[57] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability,"[58] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[59] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[60] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[61] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[62] This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.

Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.

Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.[63]
Defenses against undesirable edits

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[64]

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[65]

White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[66]

Obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[15][16] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[66] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[67][68] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[50][69] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[70] and organizationsWikipedia is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.[9]

The word Wikipedia ( /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[11] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[13] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15][16] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[17]

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[18] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[19][20] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[21]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Nature of Wikipedia
o 2.1 Editing model
o 2.2 Rules and laws governing content
o 2.3 Defenses against undesirable edits
o 2.4 Coverage of topics
o 2.5 Quality
o 2.6 Reliability
o 2.7 Community
* 3 Operation
o 3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
o 3.2 Software and hardware
o 3.3 Mobile access
* 4 License and language editions
* 5 Reusing Wikipedia's content
* 6 Cultural significance
* 7 Related projects
* 8 See also
* 9 Notes
* 10 Further reading
* 11 External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N."
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.[22]
Main Page of the English Wikipedia

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[23][24] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[25][26] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[27] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[28] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[29] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[25] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] 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.[25]
Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007.
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 web 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 final days of 2004.[31] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[32]

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.[33] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[34] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol[35] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function tending to 4.4 million articles.

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[36] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009[update], that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[37] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[38][39]

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 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.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[42] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[43]
Nature of Wikipedia
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies of Wikipedia
Editing model
Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
Play video
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[44]

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in the English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors and are agreed on by consensus.[45]

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[46] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[47][48] In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework). In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the British Broadcasting Corporation, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."[49]
Web page showing side-by-side comparison of an article highlighting changed paragraphs.
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[50][51] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[52] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The editing interface of Wikipedia.

Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[53][54] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[55] other editions have also adopted this.[clarification needed]

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternate titles should appear in bold.
Rules and laws governing content

For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[56] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non English editions of the Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[57] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability,"[58] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[59] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[60] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[61] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[62] This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.

Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.

Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.[63]
Defenses against undesirable edits

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[64]

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[65]

White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[66]

Obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[15][16] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[66] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[67][68] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[50][69] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[70] and organizationsWikipedia is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.[9]

The word Wikipedia ( /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) was coined by Larry Sanger[10] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.

Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[11] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[13] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[15][16] and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[17]

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[18] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[19][20] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[21]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Nature of Wikipedia
o 2.1 Editing model
o 2.2 Rules and laws governing content
o 2.3 Defenses against undesirable edits
o 2.4 Coverage of topics
o 2.5 Quality
o 2.6 Reliability
o 2.7 Community
* 3 Operation
o 3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
o 3.2 Software and hardware
o 3.3 Mobile access
* 4 License and language editions
* 5 Reusing Wikipedia's content
* 6 Cultural significance
* 7 Related projects
* 8 See also
* 9 Notes
* 10 Further reading
* 11 External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N."
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.[22]
Main Page of the English Wikipedia

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[23][24] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[25][26] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[27] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[28] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[29] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[25] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] 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.[25]
Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007.
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 web 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 final days of 2004.[31] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[32]

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.[33] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[34] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol[35] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function tending to 4.4 million articles.

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[36] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009[update], that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[37] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[38][39]

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 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.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[42] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[43]
Nature of Wikipedia
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies of Wikipedia
Editing model
Wiki feel stupid v2.ogv
Play video
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[44]

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in the English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors and are agreed on by consensus.[45]

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[46] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[47][48] In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework). In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the British Broadcasting Corporation, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."[49]
Web page showing side-by-side comparison of an article highlighting changed paragraphs.
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[50][51] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[52] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The editing interface of Wikipedia.

Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[53][54] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[55] other editions have also adopted this.[clarification needed]

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternate titles should appear in bold.
Rules and laws governing content

For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[56] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non English editions of the Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[57] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability,"[58] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[59] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[60] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[61] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[62] This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.

Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.

Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.[63]
Defenses against undesirable edits

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[64]

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[65]

White-haired elderly gentleman in suit and tie speaks at a podium.
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[66]

Obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[15][16] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[66] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[67][68] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[50][69] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[70] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[71] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[72]

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[73]

In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[74] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[75] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[76] Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue. such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[71] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[72]

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[73]

In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[74] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[75] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[76] Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue. such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[71] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[72]

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[73]

In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[74] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[75] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[76] Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue. such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[71] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[72]

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[73]

In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[74] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[75] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[76] Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue. such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[71] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[72]

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[73]

In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[74] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[75] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[76] Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue.images/mangacertifiedblooddonorcarda.png]]
[[caption-width:300:Manga Certified Blood Donor Card]]

[[MangaUK http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mangacertifiedblooddonorcarda.png]]