Relationism and Inclusions | Recovery Coaching

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. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.[W 58] 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).[169][170] Wikipedia contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.[W 59] The "Wikipedia is not censored" policy has sometimes proved controversial: in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of images of Muhammad in the English edition of its Muhammad article, citing this policy.[171] The presence of politically, religiously, and pornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wikipedia by national authorities in China[172] and Pakistan,[173] amongst other countries.[174][175][176]

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.[177] A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage topics. There was a greater concentration of females in the "people and arts" category, while males focus more on "geography and science".[178]

Coverage of topics and bias

Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven, Africa being the most underrepresented.[179] Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.[180]

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.[181] Data has also shown that Africa-related material often faces omission; a knowledge gap that a July 2018 Wikimedia conference in Cape Town sought to address.[112]

Systemic biases

Academic studies of Wikipedia have consistently shown that Wikipedia systematically over-represents a point of view (POV) belonging to a particular demographic described as the "average Wikipedian", who is an educated, technically inclined, English speaking white male, aged 15–49 from a developed Christian country in the northern hemisphere.[182] This POV is over-represented in relation to all existing POVs.[183][184] This systemic bias in editor demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia.[185][186] 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).[183]

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.[185] 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".[37] 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.[38]

Explicit content

For the government censorship of Wikipedia, see Censorship of Wikipedia.

For Wikipedia's policy concerning censorship, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not censored

Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing information about graphic content.[187] Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva, and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children.[W 60]

The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles. It also has non-sexual photographs of nude children.[W 61]

The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from the German rock 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 the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) decided the album cover was a potentially illegal indecent image and added the article's URL to a "blacklist" it supplies to British internet service providers.[188]

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 US federal obscenity law.[189][190] 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.[191] That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law.[191] Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.[192] Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger's accusation,[193] saying that Wikipedia did not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it."[193] Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteered 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".[194] Critics, including Wikipediocracy, noticed that many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010 have reappeared.[195]

Privacy

One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law.[196][g] It is a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life. The Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy states, "we believe that you shouldn't have to provide personal information to participate in the free knowledge movement", and states that "personal information" may be shared "For legal reasons", "To Protect You, Ourselves & Others", or "To Understand & Experiment".[W 62]

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. 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 was being violated.[197]

Wikipedia has a "Volunteer Response Team" that uses Znuny, a free and open-source software fork of OTRS [W 63] to handle queries without having to reveal the identities of the involved parties. This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project.[W 64]

In late April 2023, Wikimedia Foundation announced that Wikipedia will not submit to any age verifications that may be required by the Online Safety Bill. Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation said that such checks would run counter to the website's commitment to minimal data collection on its contributors and readers.[198]

Sexism

Main article: Gender bias on Wikipedia

Wikipedia was described in 2015 as harboring a battleground culture of sexism and harassment.[199][200] The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship.[201] Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.[202]

In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.[W 65][203] Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics", becoming the third woman to ever receive the award.[203][204] Prior to winning the award, Strickland's only mention on Wikipedia was in the article about her collaborator and co-winner of the award Gérard Mourou.[203] 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."[205] Purtill attributes the issue to the gender bias in media coverage.[205]

A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University's College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University found significant gender differences in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. "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."[206]

Operation

Wikimedia Foundation and affiliate movements

Main article: Wikimedia Foundation

Katherine Maher, the third executive director of Wikimedia, served from 2016 to 2021.

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 66] The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.[207][W 67] 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 68]

In May 2014, Wikimedia Foundation named Lila Tretikov as its second executive director, taking over for Sue Gardner.[W 69] The Wall Street Journal reported on May 1, 2014, that Tretikov's information technology background from her years at University of California offers Wikipedia an opportunity to develop in more concentrated directions guided by her often repeated position statement that, "Information, like air, wants to be free."[208][209] The same Wall Street Journal article reported these directions of development according to an interview with spokesman Jay Walsh of Wikimedia, who "said Tretikov would address that issue (paid advocacy) as a priority. 'We are really pushing toward more transparency ... We are reinforcing that paid advocacy is not welcome.' Initiatives to involve greater diversity of contributors, better mobile support of Wikipedia, new geo-location tools to find local content more easily, and more tools for users in the second and third world are also priorities", Walsh said.[208]

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 70] Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.[W 71] 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. She said to Bloomberg Businessweek regarding the harassment issue that: "It establishes a sense within the community that this is a priority ... [and that correction requires that] it has to be more than words."[111]

Maher served as executive director until April 2021.[210] Maryana Iskander was named the incoming CEO in September 2021, and took over that role in January 2022. She stated that one of her focuses would be increasing diversity in the Wikimedia community.[211]

Wikipedia is also supported by many organizations and groups that are affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation but independently-run, called Wikimedia movement affiliates. 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. These affiliates participate in the promotion, development, and funding of Wikipedia.[W 72]

Software operations and support

Automated editing

Main article: Wikipedia bots

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 82][216][217] One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days.[218] Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).[W 83] Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors. An anti-vandal bot is programmed to detect and revert vandalism quickly.[216] 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.[219] Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.[W 84]

According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots.[220]

Hardware operations and support

As of 2021, page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Varnish caching servers and back-end layer caching is done by Apache Traffic Server.[W 85] Requests that cannot be served from the Varnish cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass them to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database.[W 85] 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.[221]

Overview of system architecture as of August 2022

Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers running the Debian operating system.[W 86] As of February 2023, caching clusters are located in Amsterdam, San Francisco, Singapore, and Marseille.[W 27][W 87] By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia.[W 88][222] In 2017, Wikipedia installed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia.[W 89] In 2022, a caching data center was opened in Marseille, France.[W 90]

Internal research and operational development

Following growing amounts of incoming donations in 2013 exceeding seven digits,[38] the Foundation has reached a threshold of assets which qualify its consideration under the principles of industrial organization economics to indicate the need for the re-investment of donations into the internal research and development of the Foundation.[223] 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.[38][215] The estimates for reinvestment by industrial organizations into internal research and development was studied by Adam Jaffe, who recorded that the range of 4% to 25% annually was to be recommended, with high-end technology requiring the higher level of support for internal reinvestment.[224] At the 2013 level of contributions for Wikimedia presently documented as 45 million dollars,[W 91] the computed budget level recommended by Jaffe for reinvestment into internal research and development is between 1.8 million and 11.3 million dollars annually.[224] In 2019, the level of contributions were reported by the Wikimedia Foundation as being at $120 million annually,[W 92] updating the Jaffe estimates for the higher level of support to between $3.08 million and $19.2 million annually.[224]

Internal news publications

Main article: The Signpost

Multiple Wikimedia projects have internal news publications. Wikimedia's online newspaper The Signpost was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who would join the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees in 2008.[225][226] The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia's sister projects.[W 93]

The Wikipedia Library

For information for Wikipedia editors, see Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library.

Wikipedia Library

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.[227][228] Over 60 publishers have partnered with The Wikipedia Library to provide access to their resources: when ICE Publishing joined in 2020, a spokesman said "By enabling free access to our content for Wikipedia editors, we hope to further the research community's resources – creating and updating Wikipedia entries on civil engineering which are read by thousands of monthly readers."[229]

Access to content

"Accessing Wikipedia" redirects here. For our accessibility guidelines, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility.

Content licensing

When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by the 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.[W 26] The GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs licensed under the 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 text.[230] In December 2002, the Creative Commons license was released; it was specifically designed for creative works in general, not just for software manuals. The Wikipedia project sought the switch to the Creative Commons.[W 94] Because the GFDL and Creative Commons were incompatible, in November 2008, following the request of the project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of the GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009.[W 95] In April 2009, Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum which decided the switch in June 2009.[W 96][W 97][W 98][W 99]

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,[W 100] while the others have opted not to, in part because of 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.[W 101] Wikipedia's accommodation of varying international copyright laws regarding images has led some to observe that its photographic coverage of topics lags behind the quality of the encyclopedic text.[231]

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.[232][233]

Methods of access

Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or re-distribute it at no charge.[W 102] The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website.

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.[234][235] Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did.[W 103] Some web search engines make special use of Wikipedia content when displaying search results: examples include Microsoft Bing (via technology gained from Powerset)[236] and DuckDuckGo.

Collections of Wikipedia articles have been published on optical discs. An English version released in 2006 contained about 2,000 articles.[W 104] The Polish-language version from 2006 contains nearly 240,000 articles,[W 105] the German-language version from 2007/2008 contains over 620,000 articles,[W 106] and the Spanish-language version from 2011 contains 886,000 articles.[W 107] Additionally, "Wikipedia for Schools", the Wikipedia series of CDs / DVDs produced by Wikipedia and SOS Children, is a free selection from Wikipedia designed for education towards children eight to seventeen.[W 108]

There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.[237][W 109] Since 2009, tens of thousands of print-on-demand books that 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.[238]

The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia.[239] Wikimedia has created the Wikidata project with a similar objective of storing the basic facts from each page of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects and make it available in a queryable semantic format, RDF.[W 110] As of February 2023, it has over 101 million items.[W 111] WikiReader is a dedicated reader device that contains an offline copy of Wikipedia, which was launched by OpenMoko and first released in 2009.[W 112]

Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.[W 113] Wikipedia publishes "dumps" of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023, there is no dump available of Wikipedia's images.[W 114] Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this.[240]

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 55percent.[241]

Mobile access

A mobile version showing the English Wikipedia's Main Page, on August 3, 2019

Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection. 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. The article in The New York Times reported the comparison statistics for mobile edits stating that, "Only 20 percent of the readership of the English-language Wikipedia comes via mobile devices, a figure substantially lower than the percentage of mobile traffic for other media sites, many of which approach 50 percent. And the shift to mobile editing has lagged even more." In 2014 The New York Times reported that Möller has assigned "a team of 10 software developers focused on mobile", out of a total of approximately 200 employees working at the Wikimedia Foundation. 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.[45] By 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation's staff had grown to over 700 employees.[7]

Bloomberg Businessweek reported in July 2014 that Google's Android mobile apps have dominated the largest share of global smartphone shipments for 2013, with 78.6% of market share over their next closest competitor in iOS with 15.2% of the market.[242] At the time of the appointment of new Wikimedia Foundation executive Lila Tretikov, Wikimedia representatives made a technical announcement concerning the number of mobile access systems in the market seeking access to Wikipedia. Soon after, the representatives stated that Wikimedia would be applying an all-inclusive approach to accommodate as many mobile access systems as possible in its efforts for expanding general mobile access, including BlackBerry and the Windows Phone system, making market share a secondary issue.[209] The Android app for Wikipedia was released on July 23, 2014, to over 500,000 installs and generally positive reviews, scoring over four of a possible five in a poll of approximately 200,000 users downloading from Google.[W 115][W 116] The version for iOS was released on April 3, 2013, to similar reviews.[W 117]

Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service.[W 103] In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. 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 118] Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since. 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.[243][244]

Wikipedia Zero was an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to expand the reach of the encyclopedia to the developing countries by partnering with mobile operators to allow free access.[W 119][245] It was discontinued in February 2018 due to lack of participation from mobile operators.[W 119]

Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult and this discourages new potential contributors.[246][247] Lih states that the number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years,[246] and Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.[38] Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this. Lih fears for Wikipedia's long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain and rival encyclopedias will not replace it.[246][247]

Chinese access

Access to Wikipedia has been blocked in mainland China since May 2015.[16][248][249] This was done after Wikipedia started to use HTTPS encryption, which made selective censorship more difficult.[250]

Cultural influence

Trusted source to combat 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.[13][14] 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'."[14][251]

Readership

In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia was ranked fifth globally among all websites, stating "With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, ... Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors."[45] However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping.[252] The website has since recovered its ranking as of April 2022.[253]

In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,[W 120] Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.[254] The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009.[W 121] The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia.[255] In 2011, Business Insider gave Wikipedia a valuation of $4 billion if it ran advertisements.[256]

According to "Wikipedia Readership Survey 2011", the average age of Wikipedia readers is 36, with a rough parity between genders. Almost half of Wikipedia readers visit the site more than five times a month, and a similar number of readers specifically look for Wikipedia in search engine results. About 47 percent of Wikipedia readers do not realize that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization.[W 122]

As of February 2023, Wikipedia attracts around 2 billion unique devices monthly, with the English Wikipedia receiving 10 billion pageviews each month.[W 1]

COVID-19 pandemic

Main article: Wikipedia coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia's coverage of the pandemic and fight against misinformation received international media attention, and brought an increase in Wikipedia readership overall.[257][258][259][260] 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."[258] In October 2020, the World Health Organization announced they were freely licensing its infographics and other materials on Wikimedia projects.[261] There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.[262][263]

Cultural significance

Main article: Wikipedia in culture

Wikipedia Monument in Słubice, Poland, by Mihran Hakobyan (2014)

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[W 123][264][265] 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.[266] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the US federal courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization [267]—though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[268] Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some US intelligence agency reports.[269] 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.[270]

Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[271][272] often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[273][274][275][276]

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.[277] On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 US 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."[278] 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.[279]

One of the first times Wikipedia was involved in a governmental affair was on September 28, 2007, when 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.[280]

Wikipedia, an introduction – Erasmus Prize 2015

Jimmy Wales accepts the 2008 Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award on behalf of Wikipedia.

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".[281][282]

In a 2017 opinion piece for Wired, Hossein Derakhshan describes Wikipedia as "one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web" and contrasted its existence as a text-based source of knowledge with social media and social networking services, the latter having "since colonized the web for television's values". 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 mean[s] a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment". Rather than "sapere aude" (lit. 'dare to know'), social networks have led to a culture of "dare not to care to know". This is while Wikipedia faces "a more concerning problem" than funding, namely "a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website". Consequently, the challenge for Wikipedia and those who use it is to "save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know."[283]

Awards

Wikipedia team visiting the Parliament of Asturias

Wikipedians meeting after the 2015 Asturias awards ceremony

Wikipedia has won many awards, receiving its first two major awards in May 2004.[W 124] 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.[284]

In 2007, readers of brandchannel.com voted Wikipedia as the fourth-highest brand ranking, receiving 15 percent of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[285]

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.[286]

In 2015, Wikipedia was awarded both the annual Erasmus Prize, which recognizes exceptional contributions to culture, society or social sciences,[287] and the Spanish Princess of Asturias Award on International Cooperation.[288] Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users.[289]

Satire

Many parodies target 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".[156] Another example can be found in "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence", a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion,[290] as well as the 2010 The Onion article "'L.A. Law' Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today".[291]

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.[292] 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.[293]

"My Number One Doctor", a 2007 episode of the television show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which 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.[294]

In 2008, the comedy 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.[295]

The Dilbert comic strip from May 8, 2009, features a character supporting an improbable claim by saying "Give me ten minutes and then check Wikipedia."[296]

In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia.[297] Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.[298]

On August 23, 2013, the New Yorker website published a cartoon with this caption: "Dammit, Manning, have you considered the pronoun war that this is going to start on your Wikipedia page?"[299] The cartoon referred to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning), an American activist, politician, and former United States Army soldier who had recently come out as a trans woman.[300]

In December 2015, John Julius Norwich stated, in a letter published in The Times newspaper, that as a historian he resorted to Wikipedia "at least a dozen times a day", and had never yet caught it out. He described it as "a work of reference as useful as any in existence", with so wide a range that it is almost impossible to find a person, place, or thing that it has left uncovered and that he could never have written his last two books without it.[301]

In June 2024, the Futures section of nature.com published a fictional Wikipedia Talk page under the title "Plastic-eating fungus caused doomsday[2][3] A collaborative effort" by Emma Burnett.[302] The Talk page concerned a (fictional) article describing unintended consequences the release of a plastic-eating fungus to clean up an oil spill. The article contained Talk page topics one might find on Wikipedia, like discussions of changes in the articles priority level combined with seemingly desperate posts about death tolls and bunkers. Concluding commentary said the article was motivated by stories of technological solutions that themselves become a problem.

Sister projects – Wikimedia

Main article: Wikimedia project

Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. These other Wikimedia projects include Wiktionary, a dictionary project launched in December 2002,[W 125] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations created a week after Wikimedia launched,[303] Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts,[W 126] Wikimedia Commons, a site devoted to free-knowledge multimedia,[W 127] Wikinews, for collaborative journalism,[W 128] and Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities.[W 129] Another sister project of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, is a catalog of all species, but is not open for public editing.[304] In 2012, Wikivoyage, an editable travel guide,[305] and Wikidata, an editable knowledge base, launched.[W 130]

Publishing

A group of Wikimedians of the Wikimedia DC chapter at the 2013 DC Wikimedia annual meeting standing in front of the Encyclopædia Britannica (back left) at the US National Archives

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 product that is essentially free.[306][307][308] Nicholas Carr's 2005 essay "The amorality of Web 2.0" criticizes 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."[309] Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes.[310]

Wikipedia's influence on the biography publishing business has been a concern for some. Book publishing data tracker Nielsen BookScan stated in 2013 that biography sales were dropping "far more sharply".[311] Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and author of two biographies wrote, "The worry is that, if you can get all that information from Wikipedia, what's left for biography?"[311]

Research use

Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing.[312][313] In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called "wikification",[314] and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation.[315] Methods similar to wikification can in turn be used to find "missing" links in Wikipedia.[316]

In 2015, French researchers José Lages of the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon and Dima Shepelyansky of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse published a global university ranking based on Wikipedia scholarly citations.[317][318][319] 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)".[319][320] The study was updated in 2019.[321]

A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used on Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications.[322][323]

Studies related to Wikipedia have been using machine learning and artificial intelligence [282] to support various operations. One of the most important areas is the automatic detection of vandalism[324][325] and data quality assessment in Wikipedia.[326][327]

In February 2022, civil servants from the UK's Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities were found to have used Wikipedia for research in the drafting of the Levelling Up White Paper after journalists at The Independent noted that parts of the document had been lifted directly from Wikipedia articles on Constantinople and the list of largest cities throughout history.[328]

Related projects

Several 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 more than a 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.[329]

Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2),[330] with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).[W 131] One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative.[331]

Subsequent collaborative knowledge websites have drawn inspiration from Wikipedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium.[332][333] The latter was started by Sanger in an attempt to create a reliable alternative to Wikipedia.[334][335]