Wikipedia

(PD) Image: John R. Brews
Number of articles on English Wikipedia vs. year. (Data from Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is written in every major language by an anonymous userbase on a voluntary basis. Its editorial decisions are self-described as governed by consensus, and as exemplifying the "democratization of knowledge". Although anyone can edit articles, and anyone with an account can contribute articles, the project is controlled by a many-layered oligarchy that serves to maintain order and the operation of the site.

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 contributors or 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. Bureaucrats are not super-admins, and have no authority beyond certain technical competencies. Among these, they are empowered to appoint or remove Administrators and Bureaucrats. They supervise the selection procedures, and weigh what constitutes "consensus". Selection follows a discussion process. At the end of the discussion period, a Bureaucrat reviews the discussion to see whether there is a consensus for appointment. Consensus is not determined by surpassing a numerical threshold. Rather, the judgment of passing is subject to Bureaucrat discretion. 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.

Administrators exercise authority best described in a how-to guide instructing Admins on the use of their powers, which include authority to ban and to block users' IP addresses. Their nomination and selection is supervised by existing Bureaucrats, who decide whether, in their opinion, a candidate has garnered sufficient support in discussion of their candidacy, a process like that for appointing Bureaucrats. There are no clear-cut criteria for successful candidacy and, in particular, popular support within the community is not a sole determinant. There were 45 successful candidacies in 2011.

Admins serve indefinitely, but can be disbarred by Bureaucrats if ArbCom formally requests it. "Throughout the history of the project, there has been a convention that adminship may be removed only in cases of clear abuse." A possible exception to the "clear abuse" criterion is the Restriction on arbitration enforcement activity, which appropriates to ArbCom the power to limit an Admin's authority whenever ArbCom deems that Admin "consistently make[s] questionable enforcement administrative actions." and to decommission the Admin if they override another Admin's actions without ArbCom's written authorization or a nearly unanimous support from users.

As of 2009 there had been 47 removals during the entire history of WP, and following 2009 no public record has been maintained of these actions. Of the approximately 1,526 Admins presently empowered, 207 (or 13.5%) have declared themselves open to recall by a majority vote of the community.

Arbitration committee or ArbCom members impose binding solutions to conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. They also have the authority to request Bureaucrats to exercise de-Adminship. They are elected annually in one-year or overlapping two-year terms. The election rules are debated each year.

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 ten-member Wikimedia Board of Trustees one of whom is Jimmy Wales. The present membership is found here.

Editing environment

Wikipedia articles can be edited anonymously by anyone, and contributed by anyone with an account (and anyone can create an anonymous account). A variety of guidelines and stricter policies are intended to "describe its principles and best-known practices", but are not "hard-and-fast rules". In fact, one of the policies of Wikipedia is Ignore all rules, which says: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." That may sound liberating, but it can be a recipe for disaster.

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. Discussion of content is guided in part by the policies "What Wikipedia is not" and the five "pillars" of Wikipedia. Talk pages often use these 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, Polling is not a substitute for discussion, and so forth. It may be confessed that although wise, these admonitions frequently do not suffice, nor do the various more structured resolution mechanisms. When these mechanisms fail, appeals for arbitration by Administrators or for arbitration by the Arbitration Committee result, requesting that the opposing parties be sanctioned.

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 does occur that such decisions are arrived upon by internal conversation among Admins or ArbCom members, or are made unilaterally by individual Admins upon their personal assessment, and the results 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".

Some issues with arbitration

According to Wikipedia

Although Wikipedia does not employ hard-and-fast rules, Wikipedia policy and guideline pages describe its principles and best-known practices. Policies explain and describe standards that all users should normally follow, while guidelines are meant to outline best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.

The liberty for Admins to exercise "common sense" sometimes results in the replacement of guidelines and policies with the judgment of a single Admin, or by the consensus of several involved Admins, or of ArbCom. That assessment can appear arbitrary, and the real basis for rulings may be opaque and not related to guidelines at all. To some extent, such opacity insulates rulings from community reaction (Monday morning quarterbacking), which may be an incentive to be a bit vague.

Appeals to Admins or to ArbCom do not necessarily 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. According to Wikipeida:

Arbitration is not a court case - Arbitration is not a legal process with fixed approaches to problems: all actions and general conduct, not merely the direct issue, may be taken into account. A person's general manner, past actions or incidents, and the impressions of them by reasonable people, may all be used to guide the Arbitrators.

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, consider the clause in the WP quote above referring to ArbCom's resort to "impressions" of a person's "general manner". To deal with those giving ArbCom an impression of intransigence, ArbCom may rule simply to block or ban 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 except in cases of blatant misrule. 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: "it is exceedingly unusual for him to intervene".

As a matter of interest to an expert considering contributing to Wikipedia, it may be noted that scholarly argument can look like pedantry to non-experts. Attempts to educate the unversed on an on-line article Talk page possibly will not be well received, and land the expert in arbitration. Once there, the deciding Admins or ArbCom may view the Talk page exchange not so much as a patient attempt at education, but more as evidence of an unduly stubborn and persistent editor. If education on a Talk page is difficult, imagine educating an uninterested panel of judges in a venue where one's behavior is under attack! The result may be an eye-opener, but it isn't likely to end well.

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".