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. 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 vegas casino download defended in 2004 in a court in France.
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 “Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men.”
Disputes and edit warring
In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views. According to the foundation, this growth is largely attributed to automated programs, or “scraper” bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use in training large language models and related applications. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.W 17 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”. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.
Today’s featured picture
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. 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. Wikipedia’s original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection.
Content policies and guidelines
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. This allows specifying the language (hereby ‘sl’ for Slovenian) of the interface messages that will be displayed when opening the page ‘Glavna stran’ in the Commons project. 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.
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. Nupedia was a free English-language online encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia website in 344 languages of the world in which 342 languages are currently active and 14 are closed. Wikipedia editors also have the ability to create hyperlinks to chosen URLs, pointing to pages either within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, or elsewhere on the Web. Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors. The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia.
Impacts of generative AI on Wikipedia views
- Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article.
- 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.
- 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.
The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month. The encyclopedia is home to 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003). English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium.
- 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 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.
- 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).
- More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.W 17
Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them. Jimmy 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”. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia’s earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous. According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.W 27 A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in reliable sources that are independent of the article’s subject.
Methods of access
Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).W 119 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled “The Future of Wikipedia”, cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that “the number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years.” The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 Editors who do not log in are in some sense “second-class citizens” on Wikipedia, 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”, but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.
Linking to URLs
The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name ,W 4 and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. By replacing “en” with the code for another language, you can reach the Main Page of the wikipedia in that language, if it exists. According to the TechCrunch website, on 23 January 2020, Wikipedia reached more than 6 million articles on the English Wikipedia. The number of articles and contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around the spring of 2007.
Wikipedians
People can choose to give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. 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. A 2013 study from Oxford University found that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tend to address broader, global issues.
Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events. The October 22, 2013, essay by Tom Simonite in MIT’s Technology Review titled “The Decline of Wikipedia” discussed the effect of systemic bias and policy creep on the downward trend in the number of editors. 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). Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article. In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of “fake news” because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles.
Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.W 31 When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. If the result of a discussion is not obvious, a closer—an uninvolved editor usually in good standing—may render a verdict from the strength of the arguments presented and then the numbers of arguers on each side. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate’s anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.
English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. The user interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008. Several interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms “followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)”.
Some user rights are granted automatically, such as the autoconfirmed and extended confirmed groups, when thresholds for account age and edits are met. This is accomplished through summarizing reliable sources, using impartial language, and ensuring that multiple points of view are presented based on their prominence. For example, the project namespace uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-governance related discussions.
There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format. Featured articles are articles of the highest quality that can be found on Wikipedia. Bilingual communication, clear CTAs, and a highly engaged community. This lighthearted holiday content is perfect for sharing the Christmas spirit!
It is a wiki that uses the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia Foundation projects). Other projects may also use different strings in place of “/w/” and “/wiki/” in URLs. 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.
The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially printed versions like Encyclopædia Britannica, which were unable to compete with a free alternative. The Talk page concerned a fictional article describing the unintended consequences of the release of a plastic-eating fungus to clean up an oil spill. 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. In an April 2007 episode of the American television comedy The Office, office manager (Michael Scott) is shown relying on a hypothetical Wikipedia article for information on negotiation tactics to assist him in negotiating lesser pay for an employee.
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. You can fetch the raw wikitext of a page using a URL like ///w/index.php? This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. The top left panel display’s Today’s featured article.
Retrospective: 25 years of Wikipedia
BOXThe prefix “en” in the url is the for English language. We begin WikipediaAcademy by acquainting you first as a user and later as an editor. However, if you have sensitive teeth, look for gentler options or alternate with a sensitivity toothpaste like Sensodyne. As consumers become more ingredient-conscious, fluoride-free toothpaste options are gaining traction. From well-known names like Colgate, Crest, and Sensodyne to newer trends like fluoride-free and nano hydroxyapatite toothpaste, today’s toothpaste market offers something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for teeth whitening, cavity protection, or relief from sensitivity, the right toothpaste can make a noticeable difference in your oral health and confidence.
Interdisciplinary scholarly assessments of Wikipedia articles have found that while articles are typically accurate and free of misinformation, they are also typically incomplete and fail to present all perspectives with a neutral point of view. There are two broad types of bias, which are implicit (when a topic is omitted) and explicit (when a certain POV is over-represented in an article or by references). This systemic bias in editor demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia. A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage topics. 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. Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project’s utility and status as an encyclopedia.
In other cases the URL may redirect to a valid one (for example, page titles are converted to their canonical form as they are when they appear in wikilinks). 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. 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.
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