User blog:TheBABAMStudios/My Top 3 Wikis

#1: Wikipedia
For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About. Wikipedia (  /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or    /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/   WIK  -i-  PEE  -dee-ə) is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 22 million articles (over 4 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,[4] and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.[5] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-5">[6] As of August 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AlexaStats_6-0">[7] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Tancer_7-0">[8] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Woodson_8-0">[9] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AlexaTop500_9-0">[10] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AlexaStats_6-1">[7] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-365M_10-0">[11] It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-TCrunch_11-0">[12]

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-MiliardWho_12-0">[13] Sanger coined the name Wikipedia,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13">[14] which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick")<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14">[15] and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Time2006_15-0">[16] Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Dee_16-0">[17] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Lih_17-0">[18]

The policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view. {| class="toc" id="toc"

Contents

 * 1 Nature
 * 1.1 Editing
 * 1.2 Organization of article pages
 * 1.3 Vandalism
 * 1.4 Rules and laws governing content and editor behavior
 * 1.5 Privacy
 * 1.6 Community
 * 1.7 Language editions
 * 2 History
 * 3 Analysis of content
 * 3.1 Accuracy of content
 * 3.2 Quality of writing
 * 3.3 Coverage of topics and systemic bias
 * 3.4 Citing Wikipedia
 * 3.5 Explicit content
 * 4 Operation
 * 4.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
 * 4.2 Software and hardware
 * 5 Access to content
 * 5.1 Content licensing
 * 5.2 Methods of access
 * 6 Impact
 * 6.1 Sister projects – Wikimedia
 * 6.2 Impact on publishing
 * 6.3 Cultural significance
 * 7 Related projects
 * 8 Glossary
 * 9 See also
 * 9.1 Special searches
 * 10 References
 * 11 Further reading
 * 11.1 Academic studies
 * 11.2 Books
 * 11.3 Book reviews and other articles
 * 11.4 Learning resources
 * 11.5 Other media coverage
 * 12 External links
 * }

Editing
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-19">[20] In a departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia is largely open. This means that, except for particularly sensitive and/or vandalism-prone pages, which would be "protected" from some degree of editing,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-20">[21] the reader of an article can edit the text as he sees fit, anonymously or with a user account. Different language editions modify this policy; for example, only registered users may create a new article in the English edition.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-21">[22] No article should be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor vetted by any recognized authority. Instead, editors should agree on the content and structure of articles by consensus.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-22">[23]

By default, an edit to an article becomes available immediately, prior to any review. As such, an article may contain inaccuracies, ideological biases, or even patent nonsense, until or unless another editor corrects the problem. Different language editions, each under separate administrative control, are free to modify this policy. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-23">[24] which have passed certain reviews. Notably, however, the English Wikipedia does not use the German model. In 2010 the former conducted a two-month trial of a "pending changes" system wherein new users' edits to certain "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles would be "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication". In a discussion following the trial, the community failed to reach consensus as to whether or not to keep the "pending changes" system. Thus, all remaining pending changes were removed from article pages in May 2011.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-24">[25] Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.Contributors, whether registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page belonging 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 retroactively.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Torsten_Kleinz_25-0">[26] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-26">[27] Editors can use this page to undo undesirable changes or restore lost content. The "Talk" page associated with each article helps coordinate work among multiple editors.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-27">[28] Importantly, editors may use the "Talk" page to reach "consensus",<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-28">[29] sometimes through the use of polling.

In addition, editors may view the most "recent changes" to the website, which are displayed in reverse chronology. Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, in order to easily track recent changes to those articles. In language editions with many articles, editors tend to prefer the "watchlist" because the number of edits has become too large to follow in "recent changes." New page patrol is a process by which newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-29">[30] A frequently vandalized article can be semi-protected, allowing only well established users to edit it.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-30">[31] A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-31">[32] The editing interface of Wikipedia.Computer programs called bots have been used widely to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-32">[33] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-33">[34] There are also some bots designed to warn users making "undesirable" edits,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-34">[35] block on the creation of links to particular websites, and block on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses ranges. Bots on wikipedia must be approved by administration prior to activation.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-35">[36]

Organization of article pages
Articles in Wikipedia are loosely organized according to their development status and subject matter.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-36">[37] A new article often starts as a "stub", a very short page consisting of definitions and some links. On the other extreme, the most developed articles may be nominated for "Featured article" status. One "featured article" per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-37">[38] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-38">[39] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of few editors.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-39">[40] A 2010 study found the unevenness of the quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is "ineffective" in assessing the quality of articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-40">[41] 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-41">[42]

A group of Wikipedia editors may form a WikiProject to focus their work on a specific topic area, using its associated discussion page to coordinate changes across multiple articles.

Vandalism
Main article: Vandalism on WikipediaThe most common and obvious types of vandalism include insertion of false information, advertising language, highly partisan or opinionated language, or other types of spam.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-42">[43] Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing information or entirely blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism can be more difficult to detect. Those committing vandalism can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the underlying code of an article, or utilize images disruptively.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed]

The opportunity for vandalism provides a number of unique challenges to Wikipedia. One criticism is that, at any moment, 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 the predicament using simile:<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-43">[44] 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-44">[45] John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Seigenthaler_45-0">[46] Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from wiki articles; in practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalism is a few minutes.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-MIT_IBM_study_46-0">[47] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-CreatingDestroyingAndRestoringValue_47-0">[48] However, in one high-profile incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Seigenthaler_45-1">[46] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wales and asked if he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-48">[49] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-49">[50] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people. <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-50">[51]

Rules and laws governing content and editor behavior
Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, the copyright laws) of the United States and of the U.S. state of Florida, where the majority of Wikipedia's servers are located. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines that are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise the website's policies and guidelines.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-51">[52] Editors can enforce rules by deleting or modifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia. They have since diverged to some extent.

English Wikipedia
Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20, 2010.The mobile version of the English Wikipedia Main Page in the Safari web browser on an iPod Touch=====Content policies===== 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-52">[53] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-53">[54] 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 intends only to convey knowledge that is already established and recognized.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-NOR_54-0">[55] It must not present new information or original research. 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-55">[56] This can lead to the removal of information that is valid, thus hindering inclusion of knowledge and growth of the encyclopedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-56">[57] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-autogenerated2_57-0">[58] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-58">[59] This is known as neutral point of view (NPOV).

Dispute resolution
Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "BOLD, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which an editor changes something, another editor reverts the change, and then the two editors discuss the issue on a talk page. When editors disregard this process, when a change is repeatedly done by one editor and then undone by another, an 'edit war' may be asserted to have begun by the editor who chooses to engage in that assertion. The resolution or continuation of which asserted war is then upon the discretion -or absence of- of the editor who would have received the assertion.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-59">[60] The provenance of this phrase "an edit war" is unknown. <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-60">[61]

In order to gain a broader community consensus, editors can raise issues at the Village Pump, or initiate a Request for Comment. An editor can report impolite, uncivil, or otherwise problematic communications with another editor via the "Wikiquette Assistance" noticeboard. Such postings themselves have no binding or disciplinary power. 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-61">[62]

Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee is the ultimate dispute resolution method. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how articles should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on which view should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and focuses on the way disputes are conducted instead,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-62">[63] functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is biased). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63.2% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43.3%), subject matters (23.4%) or Wikipedia (15.7%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather anti-consensus or violating editing policies, warnings tend to be issued.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-63">[64]

Privacy
One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-64">[65] It is a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). Wikipedia Watch argues that "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy" and that "a greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure" would be "the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-65">[66] A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes.

In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-66">[67] On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents were being violated.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-67">[68] The plaintiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused in May 2006.

Community
Main article: Community of WikipediaWikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-68">[69] although not always with entirely negative connotations,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-69">[70] and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-70">[71] The project's preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-71">[72]

Power structure
The Wikipedia community has established "a bureaucracy of sorts", including "a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-NYTimesJune17-2006_72-0">[73] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-iTWireJune18-2006_73-0">[74] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-74">[75] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator,"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-75">[76] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-David_Mehegan_76-0">[77] a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to block users making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-77">[78] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-78">[79]

Contributors
Demographics of Wikipedia editors.Wikipedia does not require that its users provide identification.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-user_identification_79-0">[80] However, as Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-80">[81] Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization." Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits were done by just 0.7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-81">[82] A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-82">[83] Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources.

In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-83">[84] In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain cites Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-84">[85] A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-85">[86] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-86">[87] A 2009 study suggested there was "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-87">[88]

At OOPSLA 2009, Wikimedia CTO and Senior Software Architect Brion Vibber gave a presentation entitled "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-88">[89] in which he discussed the challenges of handling the contributions from a large community and compared the process to that of software development.

Interactions
Wikipedians and British Museum curators collaborate on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010.Members of the community predominantly interact with each other via 'talk' pages, which are wiki-edited pages which are associated with articles, as well as via talk pages that are specific to particular contributors, and talk pages that help run the site. These pages help the contributors reach consensus about what the contents of the articles should be, how the site's rules may change, and to take actions with respect to any problems within the community.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-89">[90]

The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-90">[91] and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-91">[92] It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-92">[93]

Positive re-inforcement
Wikipedians sometimes award one another barnstars for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work. The barnstar phenomenon has been analyzed by researchers seeking to determine what implications it might have for other communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-93">[94]

New users
Up to sixty percent of Wikipedia's registered users never make another edit after their first 24 hours. Possible explanations are that such users only register for a single purpose, or are scared away by their experiences.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-94">[95] Goldman writes that editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk pages, implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders will target their contributions as a threat. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs; the contributor is expected to build a user page, learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to an arcane dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references." Non-logged-in users are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-95">[96] as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation,"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-96">[97] but the contribution histories of IP addresses cannot necessarily with any certainty be credited to, or blamed upon, a particular user.

A 2009 study by Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-97">[98] showed that in a random sample of articles most content in Wikipedia (measured by the amount of contributed text which survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders" (users with low edit counts), while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders" (a select group of established users).

Demographics
One study found that the contributor base to Wikipedia "was barely 13% women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s." Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, hopes to see female editing contributions increase to 25% by 2015.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-98">[99] Linda Basch, President of the National Council for Research on Women, noted the contrast in these Wikipedia editor statistics with the percentage of women currently completing bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and PhD programs in the United States (all at rates of 50% or greater).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-99">[100] Estimation of contributions shares from different regions in the world to different Wikipedia editions.In a research article published in PLoS ONE in 2012, Yasseri et al. based on the circadian patterns of editorial activities of the community, have estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. For instance, it has been reported that edits from North America are limited to almost 50% in the English Wikipedia and this value decreases to 25% in Simple English Wikipedia. The article also covers some other editions in different languages.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-100">[101] The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to increase the number of editors in the Global South to 37% by 2015.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-101">[102]

Language editions
See also: List of WikipediasPercentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest language editions (blue). As of July 2007 less than 23% of Wikipedia articles are in English.There are currently 285 language editions (or language versions) of Wikipedia; of these, 4 have over 1 million articles each (English, German, French and Dutch), 6 more have over 700,000 articles (Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Portuguese), 40 more have over 100,000 articles and 109 have over 10,000 articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-ListOfWikipedias_102-0">[103] The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 4 million articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 54% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Japanese: 10%, German: 8%, Spanish: 5%, Russian: 4%, French: 4%, Italian: 3%).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AlexaStats_6-2">[7] As of January 2012, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Dutch, and Italian Wikipedias.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-103">[104]

Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour)<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-104">[105] or points of view.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-105">[106] Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-106">[107] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-107">[108] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-108">[109]

Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-109">[110] Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-110">[111] For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-111">[112] and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-112">[113] The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English, even when they meet notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because fully automated translation of articles is disallowed.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-113">[114] Articles available in more than one language may offer "Interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.

History
Main article: History of WikipediaWikipedia 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 the Bomis CEO Wales 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-stallman1999_114-0">[115] Sanger and Wales founded Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-autogenerated1_115-0">[116] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Meyers_116-0">[117] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-SangerMemoir_117-0">[118] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Sanger_118-0">[119] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-119">[120] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-120">[121] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-WikipediaHome_121-0">[122] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-SangerMemoir_117-1">[118] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-NPOV_122-0">[123] 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-SangerMemoir_117-2">[118] Number of articles in the English Wikipedia (in blue)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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-123">[124] 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 two million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the 1407 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-EB_encyclopedia_124-0">[125]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-125">[126] These moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Shirky_126-0">[127] Growth of the number of articles in the English Wikipedia (in blue)Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-127">[128] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2010 that average was roughly 1,000.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-128">[129] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-129">[130] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called 'low-hanging fruit' – topics that clearly merit an article – have already been created and built up extensively.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-130">[131] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-131">[132]

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-132">[133] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-133">[134] 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-134">[135] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-135">[136] Two years later, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-wiki-women_136-0">[137] Nevertheless, in the same interview he claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable".

In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top ten list of the most popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks Inc. With 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked No. 9, surpassing the New York Times (#10) and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. Apple Inc.] (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was No. 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-137">[138] As of May 2012, Wikipedia is the sixth-most-popular website worldwide according to Alexa Internet,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-138">[139] receiving more than 2.7 billion U.S. pageviews every month,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-TCrunch_11-1">[12] out of a global monthly total of over 12 billion pageviews.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-139">[140] Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-LA_Times_19_Jan_140-0">[141] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-141">[142] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-142">[143]

Analysis of content
See also: Academic studies about WikipediaAlthough poorly-written articles are flagged for improvement,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-143">[144] critics note that the style and quality of individual articles may vary greatly. Others argue that inherent biases (willful or not) arise in the presentation of facts, especially controversial topics and public or historical figures. Although Wikipedia's stated mission is to provide information and not argue value judgements, articles often contain overly specialized, trivial, or objectionable material.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-144">[145]

In 2006, the Wikipedia Watch criticism website listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English version.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-wwplagiarism_145-0">[146] Wales has said in this respect: "We need to deal with such activities with absolute harshness, no mercy, because this kind of plagiarism is 100% at odds with all of our core principles."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-wwplagiarism_145-1">[146]

Accuracy of content
Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are carefully and deliberately written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. On the other hand, Wikipedia is often cited for factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations. However, a non-scientific report in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for some scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-GilesJ2005Internet_146-0">[147] These claims have been disputed by, among others, Encyclopædia Britannica.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-corporate.britannica.com_147-0">[148] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-148">[149] The Nature report also concluded that the structure of Wikipedia's articles was often poor.

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-149">[150] Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-WikipediaWatch_150-0">[151] the insertion of spurious information,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-151">[152] vandalism, and similar problems.

Economist Tyler Cowen wrote: "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that some traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases and novel results, in his opinion, are over-reported in journal articles and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-152">[153]

Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-153">[154] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AcademiaAndWikipedia_154-0">[155] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-McHenry_2004_155-0">[156]

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Torsten_Kleinz_25-1">[26] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-156">[157] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the US House of Representatives and special interest groups<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-DeathByWikipedia_157-0">[158] has been noted,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-158">[159] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-159">[160] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-wikiality_160-0">[161] 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.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Seeing_Corporate_Fingerprints_161-0">[162]

Quality of writing
Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor, stated that American National Biography Online outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its "clear and engaging prose", which, he said, was an important aspect of good historical writing.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Rosenzweig_162-0">[163] Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization... his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice ... and ... his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull". Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the npov policy—[which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history." By example, he quoted the conclusion of Wikipedia's article on William Clarke Quantrill. While generally praising the article, he pointed out its "waffling" conclusion: "Some historians...remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Rosenzweig_162-1">[163]

Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented: "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-163">[164] A study of cancer articles by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University found that the entries were mostly accurate, but they were written at college reading level, as opposed to the ninth grade level seen in the Physician Data Query. He said that "Wikipedia's lack of readability may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-164">[165] The Economist argued that better-written articles tend to be more reliable: "inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-165">[166]

Coverage of topics and systemic bias
See also: Notability in English WikipediaWikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic of knowledge covered encyclopedically in one article. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional printed encyclopedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-166">[167] It also contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic (cf below).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-167">[168] It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically, religiously, and pornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wikipedia by national authorities in China,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Taylor_168-0">[169] Pakistan<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-169">[170] and the United Kingdom,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-170">[171] among other countries. In addition, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has criticized Wikipedia not for the Pornographic Content, but for the fact that the Content is accessible to children, and contains extreme and detailed photographs and films. <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-171">[172]

A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to January 2008) in each field:<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Kittur2009_172-0">[173] Pie chart of Wikipedia content by subject as of January 2008<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Kittur2009_172-1">[173] *Culture and the arts: 30% (210%) These numbers refer only to the quantity of articles; it is possible for one topic to contain a large number of short articles and another one contain a small number of large ones. Through its "Wikipedia Loves Libraries" program, Wikipedia has partnered with major public libraries such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to expand its coverage of underrepresented subjects and articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-173">[174]
 * Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)
 * Geography and places: 14% (52%)
 * Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)
 * History and events: 11% (143%)
 * Natural and the physical sciences: 9% (213%)
 * Technology and the applied science: 4% (−6%)
 * Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)
 * Health: 2% (42%)
 * Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)
 * Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%)

Furthermore, the exact coverage of Wikipedia is under constant review by the editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see also deletionism and inclusionism).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-174">[175] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-175">[176]

As of September 2009, Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are written about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of large parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-176">[177]

When multiple editors contribute to one topic or set of topics, there may arise a systemic bias, such as non-opposite definitions for apparent antonyms. In 2011 Wales noted that the unevenness of the coverage is the reflection of the demography of the editors, which predominantly consists of young male with high educations in the developed world (cf. above)<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-wiki-women_136-1">[137]

A "selection bias"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-177">[178] may arise when more words per article are devoted to one public figure than a rival public figure. Editors may dispute suspected biases and discuss controversial articles, sometimes at great length. Wales has noted the dangers of bias on controversial political topics or polarizing public figures.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-en.wikipedia.org_178-0">[179]

Citing Wikipedia
Main article: Reliability of WikipediaThe crowdsourced nature of Wikipedia's content creation means that anyone can add falsehoods to, or vandalize, the site. However, it also enables people to easily reverse such actions.Most university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-WideWorldOfWikipedia_179-0">[180] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-180">[181] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-181">[182] Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citeable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AWorkInProgress_182-0">[183]

In February 2007 an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-183">[184] In June 2007 former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-stothart_184-0">[185] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything." He also said that "a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are found only on paper or subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-stothart_184-1">[185]

A Harvard Law textbook, Legal Research in a Nutshell (2011), cites Wikipedia as a "general source" that "can be a real boon" in "coming up to speed in the law governing a situation" and, "while not authoritative, can provide basic facts as well as leads to more in-depth resources."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-185">[186]

Wales once said he receives about ten e-mails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia. According to The Sunday Times of London, Wales told the students they got what they deserved. "For God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia", he said.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-186">[187]

Explicit content
I. Problem? What problem? So, you didn’t know that Wikipedia has a porn problem? Dr. Larry Sanger<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-187">[188] Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing information of graphic content. Articles depicting arguably objectionable content (such as feces, corpses, the human penis or vulva) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with the internet, including children.

The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles.

The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer – a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions – features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. The original release cover caused controversy and was replaced in some countries. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom, after it was reported by a member of the public as child pornography,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-188">[189] to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) which issues a stop list to ISPs. IWF, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, later criticized the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-189">[190]

In April 2010, Sanger wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of U.S. federal obscenity law.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-190">[191] Sanger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one about lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children", under the PROTECT Act of 2003.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-The_Register-April_191-0">[192] That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-The_Register-April_191-1">[192] Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-192">[193] Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger's accusation,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AFP_193-0">[194] saying that Wikipedia did not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AFP_193-1">[194] Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteer to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part of his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list that this action was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-194">[195]

Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
Wikimedia Foundation logoMain article: Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The Wikimedia Foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-financialstatements_195-0">[196] The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of users and supporters of the Wikimedia projects, also participate in the promotion, development, and funding of the project.

Software and hardware
See also: MediaWikiThe operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database system.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-196">[197] The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-197">[198] to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-198">[199] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-199">[200] was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. The site currently uses Lucene Search 2.1,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-200">[201] which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-201">[202] Overview of system architecture, December 2010. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-202">[203] Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-203">[204] Further statistics are available based on a publicly available 3-months Wikipedia access trace.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-204">[205] Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses.

Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers. Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu),<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-205">[206] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-206">[207] with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-servers_207-0">[208]

Content licensing
When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-208">[209] GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs that are licensed under GPL. This made it a poor choice for a general reference work; for example, the GFDL requires the reprints of materials from Wikipedia to come with a full copy of the GFDL license text. In December 2002, the Creative Commons license was released: it was specifically designed for creative works in general; not just for software manuals. The license gained popularity among bloggers and others distributing creative works on the Web. The Wikipedia project sought the switch to the Creative Commons.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-209">[210] Because the two licenses, GFDL and Creative Commons, were incompatible, following the request of the project, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009. (A new version of GFDL automatically covers Wikipedia contents.) In April 2009, Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum which decided the switch in June 2009.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-voteresult_210-0">[211] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-211">[212] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-212">[213] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-213">[214]

The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to, in part due to the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g., in Japanese copyright law). Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content, but merely a hosting service for the contributors (and licensors) of the Wikipedia. This position has been successfully defended in court.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-214">[215] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-215">[216]

Methods of access
Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse, or re-distribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside of the Wikipedia website. Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-227">[228] Wikipedia publishes "dumps" of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2007 there is no dump available of Wikipedia's images.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-228">[229]
 * Web sites – Thousands of "mirror sites" exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones, that also include content from other reference sources, are Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did.
 * Mobile apps – A variety of mobile apps provide access to Wikipedia on hand-held devices, including both Android and Apple iOS devices (see Wikipedia iOS apps). (See also Mobile access).
 * Search engines – Some web search engines make special use of Wikipedia content when displaying search results: examples include Bing (via technology gained from Powerset)<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-216">[217] and Duck Duck Go.
 * Compact Discs, DVDs – Collections of Wikipedia articles have been published on optical discs. An English version, 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-217">[218] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-218">[219] The Polish-language version contains nearly 240,000 articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-219">[220] There are German and Spanish-language versions as well.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-220">[221] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-221">[222] Also: "Wikipedia for Schools", the Wikipedia series of CDs/DVDs, produced by Wikipedians and SOS Children, is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia targeted around the UK National Curriculum and intended to be useful for much of the English-speaking world.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-222">[223] The project is available online; an equivalent print encyclopedia would require roughly 20 volumes.
 * Books – There are efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-223">[224] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-224">[225] Since 2009, tens of thousands of print on demand books which reproduced English, German, Russian and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-FAZ_225-0">[226]
 * Semantic Web – The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, is a project that extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia and makes it available in a queriable semantic format, RDF. The possibility has also been raised to have Wikipedia export its data directly in a semantic format, possibly by using the Semantic MediaWiki extension. Such an export of data could also help Wikipedia reuse its own data, both between articles on the same language Wikipedia and between different language Wikipedias.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-226">[227]

Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. According to a study by Pnina Shachaf in the Journal of Documentation, the quality of the Wikipedia reference desk is comparable to a standard library reference desk, with an accuracy of 55%.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-229">[230]

Mobile access

 * See also: Help:Mobile access

Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed internet connection. In addition, Wikipedia content is now accessible through the mobile web.

Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service. In June 2007 Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009 a newer mobile service was officially released,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-230">[231] located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or the Palm Pre. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged. Many devices and applications optimise or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata (See Wikipedia:Metadata), such as geoinformation.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-231">[232] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-232">[233]

Sister projects – Wikimedia
Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki,"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-233">[234] created in October 2002,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-234">[235] detailed the September 11 attacks. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-235">[236] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, including Wikimedia Commons, a site devoted to free-knowledge multimedia; Wikinews, for citizen journalism; and Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-OurProjects_236-0">[237] Of these, only Commons has had success comparable to that of Wikipedia. Another sister project of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, is a catalogue of species.

Impact on publishing
Some observers have stated that Wikipedia represents an economic threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, who may be unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. Nicholas Carr, wrote a 2005 essay, "The amorality of Web 2.0", that criticized websites with user-generated content, like Wikipedia, for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers going out of business, because "free trumps quality all the time." Carr wrote, "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-237">[238] Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals, with their rigorous peer review process.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-238">[239]

Cultural significance
Main article: Wikipedia in cultureGraph showing the number of days between every 10,000,000th edit.In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-modelling_239-0">[240] Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-comscore_240-0">[241] According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-AlexaTop500_9-1">[10] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-comscoretop10_241-0">[242] The growth of Wikipedia has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-hoover_242-0">[243] about 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-hitwisegoogle_243-0">[244] a good portion of which is related to academic research.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-hitwiseAcademic_244-0">[245] The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-365M_10-1">[11] The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Wikipedia_users_245-0">[246] In October 2006, the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran advertisements.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Wikipedia_valuation_246-0">[247]

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Wikipedia_in_media_247-0">[248] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Bourgeois_248-0">[249] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-249">[250] The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-250">[251] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-WP_court_source_251-0">[252] – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Courts_turn_to_Wikipedia_252-0">[253] Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency reports.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-US_Intelligence_253-0">[254] In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Declan_254-0">[255]

Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-255">[256] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-twsY23_256-0">[257] often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-257">[258] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-258">[259] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-259">[260] In July 2007 Wikipedia was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-260">[261] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st-century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th-century terms as Hoovering or Coca-Cola.

On September 28, 2007 Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Wikipedia, "the seventh most consulted website" to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-261">[262] Jimmy Wales receiving the Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award.On September 16, 2007 The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 U.S. election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-262">[263] An October 2007 Reuters article, titled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol," reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-263">[264]

Active participation also has an impact. Law students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clear and succinct writing for an uninitiated audience.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-264">[265]

Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-265">[266] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-266">[267] Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. On January 26, 2007 Wikipedia was also awarded the fourth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-267">[268]

In September 2008, Wikipedia received Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadić, Eckart Höfling, and Peter Gabriel. The award was presented to Wales by David Weinberger.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-268">[269]

Satire
Wikipedia shown in "Weird Al" Yankovic's music video for his song "White & Nerdy".Many parody Wikipedia's openness and susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles.

Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning "together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-wikiality_160-1">[161] Another example can be found in a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006, with the title "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-269">[270] "My Number One Doctor", a 2007 episode of the TV show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unserious reference tool with a scene in which Dr. Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-270">[271] In 2008, the comedic website CollegeHumor produced a video sketch named "Professor Wikipedia", in which the fictitious Professor Wikipedia instructs a class with a medley of unverifiable and occasionally absurd statements.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-271">[272] In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-272">[273]

In 2010, comedian Daniel Tosh encouraged viewers of his show, Tosh.0, to visit the show's Wikipedia article and edit it at will. On a later episode, he commented on the edits to the article, most of them offensive, which had been made by the audience and had prompted the article to be locked from editing.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-273">[274] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-274">[275]

Related projects
A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covered the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Domesday_Project_275-0">[276] One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative. Everything2 was created in 1998. All of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but were not wikis and neither gave full editorial privileges to public users.

GNE, an encyclopedia which was not a wiki, also created in January 2001, co-existed with Nupedia and Wikipedia early in its history; however, it has been retired.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-stallman1999_114-1">[115]

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, Hudong, and Baidu Baike likewise employ no formal review process, although some like Conservapedia are not as open. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium. The latter was started by Sanger in an attempt to create a reliable alternative to Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Orlowski18_276-0">[277] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-JayLyman_277-0">[278] Scholarpedia also focuses on ensuring high quality.

Glossary

 * AGF – Assume good faith
 * Revert – undoing changes
 * Wikilawyering – a pejorative term, describing various questionable ways of judging the actions of Wikipedians. It may refer to certain quasi-legal practices.
 * Wikipedians – Wikipedia editors

Special searches

 * All pages with titles containing "Wikipedia"
 * All pages beginning with "Wikipedia"

Academic studies
Main article: Academic studies about Wikipedia*Yasseri, Taha; Robert Sumi and János Kertész (2012). Szolnoki, Attila. ed. "Circadian Patterns of Wikipedia Editorial Activity: A Demographic Analysis". PLoS ONE 7 (1): e30091. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030091. PMC 3260192. PMID 22272279.
 * Goldman, Eric (2010). "Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences". Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law 8. (a blog post by the author)
 * Nielsen, Finn (August 2007). "Scientific Citations in Wikipedia". First Monday 12 (8). Retrieved February 22, 2008.
 * Pfeil, Ulrike; Panayiotis Zaphiris and Chee Siang Ang (2006). "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (1): 88. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00316.x. Retrieved December 26, 2008.
 * Priedhorsky, Reid, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia". Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: 1316624.131663.
 * Reagle, Joseph (2007). "Do as I Do: Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia". WikiSym '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis. Montreal, Canada: ACM. Retrieved December 26, 2008.
 * Rosenzweig, Roy. Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. (Originally published in Journal of American History 93.1 (June 2006): 117–46.)
 * Wilkinson, Dennis M.; Bernardo A. Huberman (April 2007). "Assessing the Value of Cooperation in Wikipedia". First Monday 12 (4). Retrieved February 22, 2008.

Books
Main article: List of books about Wikipedia*Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (September 2008). How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.
 * Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-51516-2. (See book rev. by Baker, as listed below.)
 * Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia Reader's Guide. Sebastopol: Pogue Press. ISBN 0-596-52174-X.
 * Dalby, Andrew (2009). The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality. Siduri. ISBN 978-0-9562052-0-9.
 * Keen, Andrew (2007). The Cult of the Amateur. Doubleday/Currency. ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5. (substantial criticisms of Wikipedia and other web 2.0 projects). Listen to: Keen, Andrew (June 16, 2007). "Does the Internet Undermine Culture?". Npr.org. Retrieved March 31, 2010. the NPR interview with A. Keen, Weekend Edition Saturday, June 16, 2007.
 * Lih, Andrew (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6.
 * O'Sullivan, Dan (September 24, 2009). Wikipedia: a new community of practice?. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. ISBN 978-0-7546-7433-7. Retrieved October 11, 2011.
 * Rafaeli, Sheizaf & Yaron Ariel (2008). "Online motivational factors: Incentives for participation and contribution in Wikipedia." In Barak, A.. Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 243–267.
 * Reagle, Joseph Michael Jr. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01447-2.

Book reviews and other articles

 * Baker, Nicholson. "The Charms of Wikipedia". The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008. Accessed December 17, 2008. (Book rev. of The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, as listed above.)
 * Crovitz, L. Gordon. "Wikipedia's Old-Fashioned Revolution: The online encyclopedia is fast becoming the best." (Originally published in Wall Street Journal online – April 6, 2009)

Learning resources

 * Wikiversity list of learning resources. (Includes related courses, Web-based seminars, slides, lecture notes, text books, quizzes, glossaries, etc.)

Other media coverage
See also: List of films about Wikipedia*Balke, Jeff (2008-03). "For Music Fans: Wikipedia; MySpace". Houston Chronicle (Blog). Retrieved December 17, 2008.
 * Dee, Jonathan (July 1, 2007). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine (The New York Times Company). Retrieved February 22, 2008.
 * Giles, Jim (September 20, 2007). "Wikipedia 2.0 – Now with Added Trust". New Scientist. Retrieved January 14, 2008.
 * Miliard, Mike (December 2, 2007). "Wikipedia Rules". The Phoenix. Retrieved February 22, 2008.
 * Poe, Marshall (2006-09). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved March 22, 2008.
 * Rosenwald, Michael S. (October 23, 2009). "Gatekeeper of D.C.'s entry: Road to city's Wikipedia page goes through a DuPont Circle bedroom". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
 * Runciman, David (May 28, 2009). "Like Boiling a Frog". London Review of Books. Retrieved June 3, 2009.
 * Taylor, Chris (May 29, 2005). "It's a Wiki, Wiki World". Time (Time, Inc). Retrieved February 22, 2008.
 * "Technological Quarterly: Brain Scan: The Free-knowledge Fundamentalist". The Economist Web and Print. June 5, 2008. Retrieved June 5, 2008. "Jimmy Wales changed the world with Wikipedia, the hugely popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. What will he do next? [leader]."
 * Is Wikipedia Cracking Up?, The Independent, February 3, 2009

Contents

 * 1 History
 * 2 Topics and wikis
 * 2.1 Questions and answers site
 * 2.2 OpenServing
 * 2.3 ArmchairGM
 * 3 Software and hardware
 * 4 Search engines
 * 4.1 Wikiasari
 * 4.2 Search Wikia
 * 4.3 Current search engine
 * 5 Company
 * 6 Controversy
 * 6.1 Advertising and use of free content
 * 6.2 Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation
 * 7 See also
 * 8 Notes
 * 9 References
 * 10 External links
 * }

History
Wikia spent over a year going by the name "Wikicities" (inviting comparisons to GeoCities),<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-5">[6] but changed its name to "Wikia" on March 27, 2006, saying that "the name Wikicities has often caused confusion, with many people believing it was a site for city guides rather than wikis about any topic."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-6">[7] In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-VentureCapital_7-0">[8] Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-8">[9] with Senior VP of Business Development Jeff Blackburn joining the company board.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mercury_faith_9-0">[10]

In November 2006, Wikia claimed to have spent only $5.74 on marketing, while generating 40 to 50 million page views.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mercury_faith_9-1">[10] The company later spent $2 million to purchase ArmchairGM, a sports forum and wiki, previously an independently hosted site.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mercury_faith_9-2">[10]

Wikia announced the creation of its hundredth wiki on February 3, 2005.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-10">[11] As of July 2007, it had over 3,000 wikis in over 50 languages.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-technewsworld_11-0">[12] Wikia's growth stems not only from wikis founded on Wikia, but also from incorporating formerly independent wikis that joined Wikia over time, such as LyricWiki, The Vault, Uncyclopedia and WoWWiki.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12">[13] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13">[14] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14">[15]

On April 7, 2010, Wikia announced the creation of its 100,000th wiki.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-15">[16] In May 2010, the company offered the removal of external ads (though not internal promotions) for a fee, but only for wikis with fewer than 20,000 page-views per month.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-16">[17]

Topics and wikis
Wikia covers a broad range of topics; almost any project not founded on hate, libel, pornography or copyright infringement is allowed, as long as it does not duplicate Wikimedia Foundation projects.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-17">[18] Many hosted wikis follow the style of Wikipedia, but offer detail beyond what is considered appropriate for a general encyclopedia. For example, a minor character in a Star Wars film may have its own article on Wookieepedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-18">[19] Another example is that content that is generally considered beyond the scope of information of Wikipedia articles on video games and related video game topics, such as detailed instructions, gameplay details, plot details, and so forth, are offered on video game related wikis hosted by Wikia. Gameplay concepts can also have their own articles. Wikia also allows wikis to have a point of view, rather than the neutral POV on Wikipedia. However, many wikis choose to follow a neutral point of view policy regardless.

Wikia requires all user text content to be published under a free license;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-19">[20] most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although Memory Alpha and Uncyclopedia use a noncommercial variant and some use the GNU Free Documentation License.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-test_20-0">[nb 1] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-21">[21]

Questions and answers site
Wikia has struggled several times to open a question-and-answer site akin to Google Answers and similar ventures. In January 2009, the company relaunched this effort, which used the name "Wikianswers", which drew criticism from Answers.com, which had a preexisting site called WikiAnswers.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-22">[22] Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein stated, "Wikia is creating market confusion by associating its Q&A category with our market-leading WikiAnswers domain and site."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-23">[23]

In March 2010, Wikia re-launched "Answers from Wikia",<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-24">[24] where users could create topic-specialized knowledge market wikis based upon Wikia's own Wikianswers subdomain.

OpenServing
OpenServing was a short-lived Web publishing project owned by Wikia, founded on December 12, 2006,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-usatoday_25-0">[25] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-techcrunch_26-0">[26] and abandoned, unannounced, in January 2008.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mars_27-0">[27] Like Wikia, OpenServing was to offer free wiki hosting, but it would differ in that each wiki's founder would retain any revenue gained from advertising on the site.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-usatoday_25-1">[25] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-dailytimes_28-0">[28] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-bwire_29-0">[29] OpenServing used a modified version of the Wikimedia Foundation's MediaWiki software created by ArmchairGM, but was intended to branch out to other open source packages.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-usatoday_25-2">[25] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-30">[30]

According to Wikia co-founder and chairman Jimmy Wales, the OpenServing site received several thousand applications in January 2007.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-journal_31-0">[31] However, after a year, no sites had been launched under the OpenServing banner. Angela Beesley, a co-founder and vice president of Community at Wikia described OpenServing as "never very popular or successful", and said Wikia's efforts had been refocused on wikia.com, to which openserving.com redirects.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-mars_27-1">[27]

ArmchairGM
ArmchairGM was a sports forum and wiki site created by Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis, Robert Lefkowitz and developer David Pean. Launched in early 2006, the site was initially US-based, but sought to improve its links to sports associated with Britain over its first year. Its MediaWiki-based software included a Digg-style article-voting mechanism, blog-like comment forms with "thumbs up/down" user feedback, and the ability to write multiple types of posts (news, opinions, or "locker room" discussion entries).

In late 2006, the site was bought by Wikia for $2 million.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-32">[32] After the purchase was made, the former owners applied ArmchairGM's architecture to other Wikia sites.

For Super Bowl XLI, the site made charity donations for every comment posted. The main hub of this commenting was in a live blog.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-33">[33] An ArmchairGM contributor operating under the pseudonym Manny Stiles auctioned his blogging services on eBay in early 2007. Tampa Bay Devil Rays President Matt Silverman bought the 33-year-old blogger's work for $535, before adding another $1000. The money went to AIDS awareness.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-34">[34]

On March 20, 2008, Sports Illustrated added a section to their website called the SI Vault Wiki, pointing to the ArmchairGM encyclopedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-35">[35]

From September 2010 to February 2011, Wikia absorbed the site's encyclopedia articles and blanked all of its old blog entries, effectively discontinuing ArmchairGM in its original form.

On August 1, 2011, ArmchairGM's codebase was open-sourced.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-36">[36]

Software and hardware
Wikia runs a modified version of MediaWiki<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-37">[37] on Linux (Ubuntu) servers<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed]. The Wikia file store as of June 2011 includes over 8 million files stored on SSD.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-38">[38]

Wikiasari
Wikia Inc. initially proposed creating a copyleft search engine; the software (but not the site) was named "Wikiasari" by a November 2004 naming contest.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-39">[nb 2] The proposal became inactive in 2005.

Search Wikia
Main article: Wikia SearchThe "public alpha" of Wikia Search web search engine was launched on January 7, 2008,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-40">[39] from the USSHC underground data center.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-41">[40] This roll-out version of the search interface was roundly panned by reviewers in technology media.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-42">[41] The project was ended in March 2009.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-43">[42]

Current search engine
Late in 2009, a new search engine was established to index and display results from all sites hosted on Wikia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-44">[43]

Company
Wikia, Inc. is based in San Francisco.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-45">[44] The company was originally incorporated in Florida in December 2004 and re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc. on January 10, 2006.

Angela Beesley has served since the beginning as Wikia's Vice-President of Community Relations.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Venture_46-0">[45] Gil Penchina, a previous angel investor<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Venture_46-1">[45] and former vice president and general manager at eBay, was hired as CEO on June 5, 2006.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-CEO_47-0">[46] Michael E. Davis, a former business partner of Wales who served for years as a founding member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and was that organization's Treasurer, was named Treasurer and Secretary of Wikia in January 2006.

In October 2011, Wikia announced that Craig Palmer, the former CEO of Gracenote, would replace Penchina as CEO, and that Jennifer Betka would commence in the new position of senior vice president of marketing.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-palmer_3-1">[4]

Wikia has technical staff in the USA, but also has an office in Poznań, Poland, in 2006. Explaining his choice of location, Wales commented "It's about reasonable salaries and high quality. You can find cheaper programmers in other parts of the world, but the quality's not there!"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-technewsworld_11-1">[12]

Wikia derives income from advertising. The company initially used Google AdSense,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Marketplace_48-0">[47] but moved on to Federated Media before bringing ad management in-house.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-49">[48]

Advertising and use of free content
Wikia has sometimes expanded by acquiring an existing wiki's domain name, user lists, and databases, from a founder or co-founder in return for money and stock options.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-50">[49] The original wiki is then shut down without consulting its editors or wider community, and the domain redirected to Wikia's version of the project. In at least two cases<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-51">[nb 3] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-52">[50] the content was under a non-commercial license, raising the question of whether the wikis could legitimately be sold to Wikia for commercial use.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-53">[51] In 2009, Wikia added an extension where users could create magazines of content pages, through partner MagCloud;<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-54">[52] however, this was not disabled on wikis with a "Noncommercial" clause on their license, which would break the license.

Once on Wikia, wiki communities have complained of inappropriate advertisements, or advertising in the body text area.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-55">[53] There is no easy way for individual communities to switch to conventional paid hosting, as Wikia usually owns the relevant domain names. If a community leaves Wikia for new hosting, the company typically continues to operate the abandoned wiki using its original name and content, adversely affecting the new wiki's search rankings, for advertising revenue.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-56">[54]

Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikia has been accused of unduly profiting from a perceived association with Wikipedia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-57">[55] Although Wikia has been referred to in the media as "the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia",<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-58">[56] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-59">[57] Wikimedia<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-60">[58] and Wikia staff<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-61">[59] call this description inaccurate.

In 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation shared hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, and received some donated office space from Wikia during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006. At the end of fiscal year 2007, Wikia owed the Foundation US$6,000. As of June 2007, two members of the Foundation's Board of Directors also served as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-62">[60] In January 2009, Wikia subleased two conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-63">[61] According to a 2009 email by Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, bid averaging was used "as a way to arrive at a fair market rate".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-64">[62]

Wookiepedia
Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Wiki is an online encyclopedia for information on the Star Wars fictional universe<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-0">[1] —including information on all six films, as well as The Clone Wars and the Expanded Universe. It is a specialized wiki created to be an extensive encyclopedia of the Star Wars universe with some articles reaching up to 60,000 words,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-variety_1-0">[2] and is written almost entirely from an in-universe perspective. The name Wookieepedia is a portmanteau of Wookiee and encyclopedia, being a pun on the name of Wikipedia. The logo, too, is a visual pun showing the incomplete second Death Star as opposed to Wikipedia's incomplete "jigsaw logo." {| class="toc" id="toc"

Contents

 * 1 History
 * 2 Extent
 * 3 References
 * 4 External links
 * }

History
Wookieepedia was conceived by Steven Greenwood and created at the request of hosting site Wikia by Chad Barbry.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-variety_1-1">[2] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2">[3] Barbry also coined the term "Wookiepedia" (sic), which was later corrected to "Wookieepedia". On March 4, 2005, Wookieepedia was launched at Wikia.

Wookieepedia is the most-visited wiki hosted by Wikia as of April 2005. On November 28, 2005, Wookieepedia was selected as the Sci Fi Channel's "Sci Fi Site of the Week."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3">[4] In January 2006, the site was Wikia's featured Wiki of the month.

As of July 2012, the English language version of the wiki contains over 95,200 articles,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Wookiee_statistics_4-0">[5] making it the fifth-largest Wikia-hosted wiki in terms of article count, ahead of sites such as Memory Alpha and the Marvel Database Project. Wikia hosts Star Wars wikis in many other languages, and Wookieepedia also coordinates its efforts with the German language wiki called Jedipedia.net and the Polish language Biblioteka Ossus.

Extent
As of June 15, 2012, Wookiepedia was documented with 94,000 pages, all covering the Star Wars topic. Its articles stretch from AAA-2 Verbo Brain to Zzzanmxl. Its 50,000 pictures scattered across the wiki illustrate most articles. It is one of the most extensive wikis of Wikia.