Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of online encyclopedias in every major language. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia went "live" on January 15th of that year and grew exponentially in its first 4 to 5 years. It is the world's largest encyclopedia project and one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The English-language Wikipedia is the world's largest single wiki and now contains more than 3.4 million individual articles.

History

An accidental spin-off of Nupedia, a now-defunct online encyclopedia written by experts, Wikipedia was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001 as a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia that anyone with access to one of its project websites can edit. Sanger left the project March 1, 2002 when funding ran dry, and later permanently distanced himself from it toward the end of 2002.

Changes made to Wikipedia articles undergo no formal peer review and are immediately viewable on the World Wide Web. Under this deliberately radical open model, Wikipedia's growth has been exponential. Within only a month, Wikipedia had 600 articles, and a year later in January 2002, 20,000. On November 20, 2004, the English Wikipedia alone reached 400,000 articles, and by March 1, 2006, that number had reached 1 million. By 2010 more than 3,000,000 articles had been created on the English Wikipedia alone.

Philosophy

Wikipedia's undergirding philosophy is that most of its contributors are well-meaning, and that unmoderated collaboration among them will gradually improve the encyclopedia such that it is both reliable and reputable.

Main features

Wikipedia refers to two of its pivotal features in its slogan, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Indeed, virtually any person on the Internet may create or edit a Wikipedia article, thanks to the use of wiki software. Contributors may edit Wikipedia anonymously or register user accounts. As of August, 2009, Wikipedia has more than 10 million registered users, though much of the content that users see is produced by a relatively small group of people: perhaps about 4,200 users, or 0.1%. These users have been responsible for about 44% of regularly-read content, with this domination increasing, according to one 2007 research estimate based on words read.

The project wrote its own wiki software called MediaWiki, the software package on which Wikipedia runs, which makes it a dynamic wiki, capable of producing its contents through the interactions of its users. It is written in PHP and released under the GPL, permitting anyone to copy it and to modify it freely.

MediaWiki keeps fastidious track of its participants' editing and much of its internal activities. All edits are tracked and the editing history for every Wikipedia page is available. As a result, when anonymous (or registered) users make inappropriate revisions to an encyclopedia article (i.e., Wikipedia "vandalism"), Wikipedia volunteers can readily restore the prior version. This transparency also enables visitors to examine both the history of substantive articles and the deliberations of Wikipedia's policy and organizational decisions, which are often effectuated through wiki webpages.

A more or less stable group of Wikipedia users judges certain articles to be important enough and well-written enough to be considered featured articles. On 24 April 2008, there were 2,024 "Featured Articles" out of 2,346,120 articles on the English Wikipedia. In addition, various groups of users collaborate within topical "projects" to rate the quality of articles and upgrade weaker articles.

Wikipedia may be said to be free insofar as its articles provide free and open access to all content, thereby creating public domain products. All contributions of text are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

While anyone may contribute anonymously, anonymous contributors may be partially identified by the IP address from which they contributed.

Wikipedia articles include both knowledge typical of printed encyclopedias as well as relatively recondite subjects, such as information on small towns, minor sports figures and celebrities, and popular culture. For example, many of the Pokémon characters have individual articles.

Administration

The editors of Wikipedia are at the bottom of the Wikipedia hierarchy, and Jimmy Wales is at the top, ostensibly in a position of ultimate authority, although he has deferred in most instances to the leadership of Wikipedia, the ~34 present Bureaucrats or Crats, the ~719 active Administrators or Admins, and another group called the Arbitration Committee or ArbCom with 15-18 members, depending upon the rules adopted each year.

Bureaucrats, a new category introduced in 2004, are empowered to appoint or remove Administrators and Bureaucrats. They supervise the selection procedures, and weigh their notions of what has to be balanced. As a result, Bureaucrats have almost complete control over appointment of new Bureaucrats. The number of new "crats" has steadily declined over the years, with only two successful candidacies in 2011. Bureaucrats serve indefinitely.

Admins are editors whose nomination and selection is supervised by existing Bureaucrats, who decide whether a candidate has garnered sufficient support in discussion of their candidacy, in the opinion of Bureaucrats. There are no clear-cut criteria for successful candidacy and, in particular, popular support within the community is not a sole determinant. The powers of Admins are best described in a how-to guide instructing Admins on the use of their authority. There were 45 successful candidacies in 2011. Admins serve indefinitely, but at the pleasure of Bureaucrats.

ArbCom members are elected annually in one-year or overlapping two-year terms. The election rules are debated each year. The role of ArbCom is to impose binding solutions to conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve.

Wikipedia is subject to the Wikimedia Foundation, which is primarily interested in technical functions. At the top of this hierarchy are Stewards of the entire set of Wikimedia wikis, and the System Administrators or SysOps of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The overall control is by the five-member Wikimedia Board of Trustees one of whom is Jimmy Wales. The present membership is found here.

Editing environment

Wikipedia articles can be contributed by anyone, and edited by anyone. A variety of guidelines and stricter policies are intended to "describe its principles and best-known practices", but are not "hard-and-fast rules".

It is encouraged that nontrivial changes in content of articles be discussed on the article Talk page to iron out wrinkles without huge numbers of changes back and forth on the Main page. Some behavioral rules are intended to protect the main page, the most obvious one being the three-revert rule that blocks contributors that make too many changes on the Main page. A number of identity issues regarding the concept of Wikipedia are suggested. Talk pages often use this and other policies as weaponry in battles over changes, exchanges called wikilawyering, that is, insisting upon the letter of a policy or guideline while violating its spirit or underlying principles. As tempers rise and contributors lose sight of the goals of WP to engage instead in duels of self-importance and gang enforcement, attempts to control the temperature on Talk pages are provided: cautions such as no personal attacks, WP is not about winning, and so forth. It may be confessed that although wise, these admonitions frequently do not suffice, nor do the various more structured resolution mechanisms, and appeals to Administrators or to the Arbitration Committee result, requesting that the opposing parties be sanctioned for bad behavior.

Although almost anyone can edit articles on Wikipedia, sanctions result in exceptions: certain individuals are blocked partially or completely, temporarily or permanently, through actions of the Wikipedia administration from Wales on down. These blocking or banning actions tend to be hotly contested, and frequently are sought by contributors that have run into irresolvable conflict over content, or over personalities. It then falls upon community consensus (rarely) or upon individual Admins, or possibly upon ArbCom, to invoke a ban or block. It commonly occurs that such decisions are arrived upon by internal conversation among Admins or ArbCom members, or quite often are made unilaterally by individual Admins upon their personal assessment, and the results are announced with only very broad-brush explanation, and next to no attempt to provide a "legal" basis for the action based upon the Wikipedia policies and guidelines. These governing rules are held to be not hard-and-fast, but are to be handled with "common sense". Frequently that freedom amounts to their replacement entirely by the judgment of a single Admin, or by the consensus of several involved Admins or of ArbCom, however that assessment was arrived upon, and the real basis for rulings can be opaque. To some extent, opacity is employed to insulate rulings from community reactions.

Appeals to Admins or to ArbCom do not result in a narrow consideration of the issues at hand. Rather, the scope of deliberations may be enlarged, or even diverted to considerations that Admins and ArbCom find to be of interest to them, quite apart from any community concerns. So rulings and actions can be taken that have absolutely no bearing upon the original matter brought for adjudication and instead, to the amazement of those making the appeal, result in actions concerning other issues entirely, never envisioned by the litigants, and entertained outside the formal framework that safeguards fact finding and organized discussion. As a very simple example, ArbCom (or an individual Admin) may seize upon a case as an opportunity to restrain supplicants that try their patience, and with regard neither for who brought the case nor for its basis, will rule simply to block or ban the disfavored as a means of pruning future demands upon ArbCom's (or the Admin's) time.

An appeals process exists for those disagreeing with rulings, but overturn is unlikely. One might naïvely expect that with hundreds of administrators available, a disputant might find some Admin that would find their protests worthy of consideration. However, shopping about for support is considered to be campaigning a deliberate disruption of dispute resolution, and is frowned upon. Despite such restrictions upon searching for support, it was found that indeed Admin support for litigants occasionally did occur, especially in cases of egregious abuse of authority. Apparently fearing wars between their numbers, Admins passed a Enforcement Motion expressly to prevent any Admin from overturning a prior action by another Admin under the threat of immediate stripping of powers (deSysOpping). Consequently, any Admin protest over another Admin's actions automatically results in a very protracted and tendentious review process with a serious downside that strongly discourages such actions. That leaves a litigant with only a formal submission of an appeal to ArbCom or to Wales. It may be observed that ArbCom may be ruling upon its own ruling, and Wales has little time to dig into disputes, usually deferring to the opinion of ArbCom.

Policies

Wikipedia has policies that "all editors should normally follow" unless the rules contradict "common sense". These policies have developed by consensus over time. The neutral point of view or NPOV policy recommends that articles represent a wide variety of opinions while remaining neutral. A "simple formulation" of this policy is given as: "Assert facts, including facts about opinions - but do not assert the opinions themselves". The neutrality policy also disallows moralizing, preferring to let the facts "speak for themselves". In the section on balance, the policy asserts that viewpoints should be weighted according to their prominence. On an article on the Holocaust, for instance, it would be required to point out that the opinions of Holocaust deniers (or 'revisionist scholars') make up a tiny proportion of the learned opinion on the subject. The policy also bans "POV forks", that is articles about existing topics that contain just supportive or critical material. If one were to start an article entitled "Benefits of Homeopathy" because the article on Homeopathy was considered too critical or sceptical, this would be considered a breach of the neutrality policies.

Wikipedia recommends that claims in articles be verifiable, which generally means that "reliable" sources must be pointed out so that readers can follow up and verify Wikipedia's claims. Original research and writing is not allowed on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's "Be bold" policy, which has become widely used on other wikis and collaborative projects, encourages participation by letting people just jump in, even at risk of breaking other policies.

To avoid deletion, new or proposed articles must satisfy several criteria that are enforced by the site's administrators: notability, verifiability (not 'truth'), reliability of sources and neutral point of view. In addition, new articles can be 'speedily deleted' by administrators if the author fails to assert the significance of the subject. An example of the latter occurred in September 2007, when a row erupted over the deletion of a 'stub' article started by co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Criticisms and controversies

Due to Wikipedia's practice of allowing anonymous editing by anyone with access to the Internet, it has been criticized for factual inaccuracy and for vulnerability to vandalism. A notorious incident involving Wikipedia's inaccuracies was the John Seigenthaler biography controversy, in which an anonymous Wikipedia editor wrote a biography of a John Seigenthaler alleging that Seigenthaler was involved in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. In February 2007, The New Yorker ran a rare editorial retraction that Essjay, a high ranking Wikipedia administrator, was discovered to have lied about his career, background, and academic credentials in a telephone interview to 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff of The New Yorker.

In June, 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation hit the headlines again over a false claim regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, placed on the Wikinews site. Georgia police told reporters that the information had been a significant hindrance to their investigations. The individual responsible was traced via their IP address.

Also in June, as reported in Wikipedia's own on-line newspaper, in rejecting an attempt to register a trademark, the UK Intellectual Property Office based their decision in part on the Wikipedia article on Formula One motor racing. Despite noting that Wikipedia could host "potentially libellous statements", the final ruling extensively quotes Wikipedia sources and includes a claim by author David Landau that "inherently, I cannot see that what is in Wikipedia is any less likely to be true than what is published in a book or on the websites of news organisations". As unreported on Wikipedia, Landau also noted that the material referred to contains "the history and background of F1 racing, nothing particularly controversial."

In October 2011, users of the Italian version of Wikipedia opted to suspend the site due to the possibility of a new law being passed in Italy that would possibly allow legal action over material believed offensive.

Forks and spin-offs

The concept of Wiki's collaborative projects, along with criticisms of Wikipedia, has led to the emergence of several forks and spin-offs of Wikipedia. Examples include Wikinfo, a fork created by Fred Bauder; Conservapedia, a Wiki-style encyclopedia for political conservatives; Veropedia, founded by Danny Wool, which, funded by advertising, copied and fixed selected Wikipedia articles, and New World Encyclopedia, an encyclopedia written by "editors with academic and literary qualifications" but all from the perspective of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, launched in 2008. The Citizendium, an encyclopedic project established by Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, was originally a Wikipedia fork. Sanger has criticised numerous aspects of Wikipedia, including lack of respect for expertise and the dominance of 'difficult people' or trolls. The Citizendium differs primarily from Wikipedia in that its chief goal is to have "reliable" and high-quality content. It hopes to achieve that goal by only allowing users with real-name registration to edit, while giving experts in a particular field more authority regarding its content.

Development of editing restrictions

In June 2010, the English Wikipedia introduced editing restrictions known as 'Pending Changes'. Pages under Pending Changes protection may be edited by anybody, but changes by unregistered users must be approved by a reviewer. This has been rolled out on German Wikipedia but currently sits in limbo on English Wikipedia.

Such an approach has been compared to the Citizendium, though founder Larry Sanger has stated that this approach will not solve the problems endemic to the site, such as extensive duplication from copyrighted texts and persistent disputes over edits, largely because existing contributors "act like each other's editors, forming their requests as orders and in other ways competing to outdo each other".