Wikipedia

Viewers of the show tried to add the episode’s mention of the page as a section of the actual Wikipedia article on negotiation, but this effort was prevented by other users on the article’s talk page. A working group led by Peter Stone (formed as a part of the Stanford-based project One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence) in its report called Wikipedia “the best-known example of crowdsourcing … that far exceeds traditionally-compiled information sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, in scale and depth”. Wikipedia’s content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.W 117 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. There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.update Noam Cohen wrote in Wired that Wikipedia’s effort to combat misinformation related to the pandemic was different from other major websites, opining, “Unless Twitter, Facebook and the others can learn to address misinformation more effectively, Wikipedia will remain the last best place on the Internet.” In October 2020, the World Health Organization announced they were freely licensing its infographics and other materials on Wikimedia projects.

Coverage of topics and systemic bias

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.W 40 The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians, is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that “one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits.” 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. 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 considered biased).f Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%). 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.

Review of changes

The encyclopedia’s assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the US federal courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization—though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case. Noam Cohen, writing in The Washington Post states, “YouTube’s reliance on Wikipedia to set the record straight builds on the thinking of another fact-challenged platform, the Facebook social network, which announced last year that Wikipedia would help its users root out ‘fake news’.” In 2017–18, after a barrage of false news reports, both Facebook and YouTube announced they would rely on Wikipedia to help their users evaluate reports and reject false news. Lih fears for Wikipedia’s long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain and rival encyclopedias will not replace it. Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult and this discourages new potential contributors. Many devices and applications optimize or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata like geoinformation.

The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 7,118,741 as of January 2026.b It contains 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias,b although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We can use localurl for a link to a project which uses the same string in the URL between the server name and the question mark ($wgScript, on Wikimedia “/w/index.php”), but not for links to other projects. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative. 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.

Wikipedia’s software makes it easy to reverse errors, and experienced editors watch and patrol bad edits. While the Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines, new editors do not need to be familiar with them before they start contributing. Wikipedia currently has more than sixty-six million articles in more than 300 languages, including 7,118,730 articles in English, with 267,535 active contributors in the past month. Written collaboratively by volunteers known as Wikipedians, Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with Internet access, except in limited cases in which editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia consists of freely editable content, with articles that usually contain numerous links guiding readers to more information.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and millions already have. Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. Research published in 2024 determined that several groups of connected accounts had coordinated to promote Russian propaganda narratives and state-controlled media sources in articles, related to Russian-Ukrainian relations and Russia’s war with Ukraine.

The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 86 Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.W 75 According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government. These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups. Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 61 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 62 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.W 57 The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.W 58 The foundation’s 2020 Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million, with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost $11 million.W 59

• A 2013 study from Oxford University found that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tend to address broader, global issues.
• Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study.
• Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.W 49 The exact degree and manner of coverage on Wikipedia is under constant review by its editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see deletionism and inclusionism).
• Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively.

The quality of content is more important than the expertise of who contributes it. Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines.

Registered users may maintain a “watchlist” of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes.W 22 “New pages patrol” is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.W 23 Editors also can make only one revert per day across the entire field and can be banned from editing related articles. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains “stable versions” of articles which have passed certain reviews.W 21 Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the “pending changes” system in December 2012. Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors. A frequently vandalized article can be “semi-protected” or “extended confirmed protected”, meaning that only “autoconfirmed” or “extended confirmed” editors can modify it.

Impacts of generative AI on Wikipedia views

The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. Each article’s History page links to each revision.e On most articles, anyone can view the latest changes and undo others’ revisions by clicking a link on the article’s History page.

Edit

A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. This pattern is attributed to the status of English as a global lingua franca, leading to contributions from many editors for whom English is a second language. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias.

It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool.W 18 The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.W 9 A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to “increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits”. After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors appears to have peaked around early 2007. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.

URLs of pages within the projects

In 2009, a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices.W 109 Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since. Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service.W 97 In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. Although Wikipedia content has been accessible through the mobile web since July 2013, The New York Times on February 9, 2014, quoted Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stating that the transition of internet traffic from desktops to mobile devices was significant and a cause for concern and worry. Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.W 107 Wikipedia publishes “dumps” of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023,update there is no dump available of Wikipedia’s images.W 108 Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this. The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia.

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes.W 20 A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia’s page-protection policies as “perhaps the most important” means at its disposal to “regulate its market of ideas”. Due to Wikipedia’s increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA. Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page.

Welcome to Wikipedia

Experienced editors are encouraged to not “bite” the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 33 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content on Wikipedia or its related projects but merely a hosting service for contributors to and licensors of Wikipedia, a position which was successfully defended in 2004 in a court in France. Two projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and the “Thank” tab in the edit history, which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).W 74 Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors. Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.W 73 One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles vegas casino with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship.

Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia’s large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014.update Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. A study published by PLOS One in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). As of January 2021,update the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology.

An editorial in The Guardian in 2014 claimed that more effort went into providing references for a list of female porn actors than a list of women writers. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, “the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created”. Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.

Images

• Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government.
• In 2011, Wales claimed that the unevenness of coverage is a reflection of the demography of the editors, citing for example “biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare”.
• One principal concern cited by The New York Times for the “worry” is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment.
• The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 86
• Her exclusion from Wikipedia led to accusations of sexism, but Corinne Purtill writing for Quartz argued that “it’s also a pointed lesson in the hazards of gender bias in media, and of the broader consequences of underrepresentation.” Purtill attributes the issue to the gender bias in media coverage.
• In 2017–18, after a barrage of false news reports, both Facebook and YouTube announced they would rely on Wikipedia to help their users evaluate reports and reject false news.

Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia’s participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide. 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.

Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month.W 16 On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, “according to the ratings firm comScore”. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.W 5W 6 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former’s servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The name, proposed by Sanger to forestall any potential damage to the Nupedia name, originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world’s seventh or ninth most visited website, according to differing sources on internet traffic.

Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. For use in templates, correct URLs can be constructed using certain magic words and parser functions such as fullurl, urlencode and others. However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. Wikipedia’s content must conform with its policies, including being verifiable by published reliable sources.

Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language”.W 41 Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Spanish, Russian, Italian, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Waray, and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Indonesian, Korean, Serbian, Chechen, and Norwegian), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.W 36W 35 The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 7.1 million articles. As of January 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, German, French, Swedish, and Dutch Wikipedias.W 35 The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013update had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias.