KramarDanIkabu/OSC Project |
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. It has around 200 different Language editions. It contains over 1.5 million articles, 600,000 of which are in English. Wikipedia is often mentioned on popular news websites such as Slashdot. Wikipedia is also used as a reference sometimes, although many question how reliable it is as a reference.
=History=
Wikipedia has a short but storied history. Its beginnings truly stem back to Nupedia, an encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia.
==Nupedia==
Nupedia began in March 2000 as a free online encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales was the founder and Larry Sanger was the editor-in-chief. It started with a homegrown license, but switched to the GNU Free Documentation License in early 2001. Nupedia was characterized by a long peer-review process, which some believed undermined the concept of free software. The idea of Nupedia was to create the most accurate free encylopedia that existed. By the time it was closed, only 24 articles had made it into the encyclopedia, although there were 74 articles still up for consideration. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation had started the project known as GNUPedia which carried many of the same ideals as Nupedia. However, the next idea that Wales brought to the table ended up nixing both pedias.
==Beginning==
Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 as a complement to Nupedia. Nupedia would remain a largely scholarly encyclopedia, but Wikipedia was begun with the idea that anyone could begin articles that would later be incorporated into Nupedia. Ironically, this is exactly the opposite of what happened, as Wikipedia grew until Nupedia was shut down and its text transferred to Wikipedia. The project reached 1,000 articles in February 2001, and grew to 10,000 in only September of that year. After year one, Wikipedia had over 20,000 articles. It was growing at around 1,500 articles a month.
==Wikimedia==
The Wikimedia was founded on 20 June 2003 to have a centralized group of people who would be largely responsible for Wikipedia. The name was a play-on of Wikipedia, and is criticized for its similarity. Wikimedia owns Wikipedia and all of its sister projects, which include: *Wiktionary, a wiki Dictionary *Wikiquote, a collection of [Quote:
]s *Wikibooks, free e-book texts *Wikisource, a source text repository In addition, it maintains other projects: *September 11 Memorial *Nupedia Wikimedia and the projects are maintained largely by the Board of Trustees, a board which consists of the founder Wales and two of his business partners. Elections have been held for two new members of the board in early summer since 2004.==Today==
Wikipedia has over 1.6 million articles in total on around 200 different language editions. Wikipedia and its parent foundation are frequently mentioned on both niche websites such as Slashdot and have been featured in Wired magazine and PC World . In PC World s top 100 products of the year, Wikipedia was named number 60. The site has also gained mentioned in popular newspapers such as The New York Times . Despite having only been around for four years, Wikipedia is likely more well-known than Apache, just as popular as Mozilla Firefox, and nearly as known as Linux. Wikipedia s number of articles is growing at an incredible rate, and it is showing no signs of slowing down.
=Purpose=
Wikipedia was created to be a free-content encyclopedia editable by anyone and everyone. It licenses its content under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning its content can be used as well by anyone. Although the encyclopedia project is owned by Wikimedia, the content is owned by no one. The only content on Wikipedia that is not free are some images that are used under Copyright laws. Wikipedia has been used as reference material in Media. There are those, however, that criticize Wikipedia s potential use as scholarly reference.
Wikipedia attempts to separate itself from large print encyclopedias such as the ed.
==Editing==
Just about anyone with an Internet connection can edit the pages on Wikipedia. Wikipedia believes that this openness will allow articles to improve over time, just as any piece of software does. Unfortunately, this ideal of everyone being able to edit often leads to edit wars between users and groups of users, which is a point that critics of Wikipedia bring up. One of Wikipedia s main policy is the neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which aims to keep articles from being biased towards one way or the other. This also encompasses potentially offensive viewpoints and original research from surfacing.
While Wikipedia has thousands of users, many of its editors remain anonymous and can be identified only as IP addresses. Wikipedia does have maintenance staff and administrators, who handle tasks that cannot be handled by the average user. Wikipedia has been accused of promoting communism in its views; the founder and former editor-in-chief have responded handily to such claims. Although Wikipedia does employ several policies, it has been critized for its openness and unreliability.
=Backbones=
Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites are run at a server cluster in Florida off of MediaWiki Software.
==Software==
The changing of Wikipedia s underlying software is split up into phases as termed. Wikipedia is currently in Phase III, and it will likely be there for the rest of its lifetime.
===Phase I===
When it was launched, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki. The software is a wiki package released under the GNU General Public License. Unlike MediaWiki, UseModWiki was based on the Perl programming language rather than PHP, and its pages were stored in computer files instead of Databases. It was based on other previous wiki software. Wikipedia and its sister projects were changed to a new software until 2002. This was retroactively defined as Phase I of Wikipedia s software evolution.
===Phase II===
Wikipedia was changed to a new piece of wiki software in 2002. It was defined as Phase II of the Wikipedia software chain. Unlike Phase I , it ran on PHP and used MySQL to store its articles in databases. In 2003, the software was named MediaWiki and Wikipedia advanced to Phase III .
===Phase III===
MediaWiki is the software currently used by Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects. MediaWiki is a wiki software package released under the GNU General Public License. It is an improvement upon the previous ( Phase II ) software; it was given the name MediaWiki in mid-2003. Many new users are confused because of its similarity to the name of the foundaiton, Wikimedia. Its current stable version is 1.4, but all Wikimedia projects are in the process of being upgraded to 1.5.
==Hardware==
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are centered in Florida. They run off of around 60 servers, an incredible amount needed for the staggering amount of users that continually access Wikipedia. Many companies such as Yahoo! have also donated to the Wikimedia Foundation and it is likely that the foundation will receive support in terms of hardware.
=Criticism=
Despite its s, and others as well.
==Reliability==
Wikipedia is criticized by the scholarly field for the truthfulness and overall reliability of its articles. People who argue this point say that Wikipedia s policy of allowing anyone to edit ends up in articles that are non-factual and poor in comparison to encyclopedias such as Brittanica , who makes sure their articles are as accurate as possible. Most academics dismiss it immediately as a reference because of this supposed unreliability. People say that there is no way of knowing how true an article s material is, and thus it can never be an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is often accused of systemic biases, which arise from certain subject matter being covered more extensively than others. Wikipedia s articles on Technology and current events are often much more comprehensive than articles in other categories. However, articles which were cited as examples of this in 2004 have since been balanced out. Whether or not this proves that continuous editing leads to overall improvement is up to interpretation. Eventually Wikipedia hopes to be the best encyclopedia for any kind of information.
==People==
Wikipedia s community is criticized because of many of the natures of its users. One of its accusations of communism comes from editors who modify to their own design. This is exactly the opposite of what Wikipedia wants, as users who force their ideals on articles are often involved in edit conflicts which usually result in bannings. However, because Wikipedia has such a great community of users, it allows articles to be seen from many different views and thus an article can be great to everyone s standards.
=Workings=
Wikipedia and MediaWiki use special markup codes for their pages. Many common HTML elements are replaced with markup of Wikimedia s own design. For example, rather than using the <b> tags to bold a piece of text, the text is surrounded with three single quotes on each side. These both produce the same effect, but MediaWiki provides a simple way to format text. MediaWiki uses double brackets ([[]]) to produce links between pages within the wiki. This is signified in the logo for MediaWiki where a flower is surrounded by two brackets on each side. MediaWiki uses similar markup to produce images, and add links to other language editions of the same article. This unique way of producing articles make Wikipedia one of the most technologically improved resources of today.
=Conclusion=
In spite of strong criticism, Wikipedia remains a popular website for information, and its users are dedicated to producing a great encyclopedia. It is the desire for perfection that drives Wikipedia on. It is clear that in the future, Wikipedia will be the most valuable resource for information in the world.