Wikipedia \n \nWikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a copyleft encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to standard encyclopedic knowledge, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs and gazetteers, as well as coverage of current events.
All original material contributed to Wikipedia is free content under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning that it may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.
Wikipedia's content is created by its users. Pages are always subject to editing, so no article is ever finished. As such, Wikipedia is subject to some unique hardships [1] that do not affect traditional encyclopedias. It has self-healing systems in place to deal with these challenges, and even a page designed to explain them [1].
Wikipedia began as an English language project on January 15, 2001, and soon gained its first other language, French, on March 23, 2001. There has since been a great deal of effort devoted to making it multilingual, and it currently contains over 310,000 articles in English and over 530,000 in other languages (as of July 2004 [1]).
Vandalism\nOne pertinent issue on Wikipedia is "vandalism": silly or offensive edits of the site's articles. For example, Sarah Lane, presenter of "Sarah's Blog Report", part of The Screen Savers TV program on TechTV, "vandalized" the Wikipedia page on monkeypox live on air [1] - leading to a surge of vandalism on that page by viewers of the TV show. Lane later wrote that: "Although this excites me in its ease and simplicity, it's a little frightening. I mean, what if I had instead written 'My boss is a big fat **** and his phone number is ****'? Sure, somebody would delete it, but this calls for some seriously dedicated moderators." [1] "Because Wikipedia is a radically free, open project, it attracts an anarchistic element," Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, admitted to Wired News. "Fortunately, most of us are willing to take a definite stand against vandalism ... and to get rid of it instantly." According to a Wall Street Journal article from February 2004, researchers have found that instances of vandalism at Wikipedia are often quickly resolved:
Policies\nWikipedia's participants (Wikipedians) commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies.
Personnel\nWikipedia has been edited by thousands of people (referred to as Wikipedians). There is no editor-in-chief, as such. The founders of Wikipedia were Jimmy Wales (former CEO of the small Internet company Bomis, Inc.) and Larry Sanger, and the wikipedia.com domain is registered to Wales. For the first thirteen months, Sanger was paid by Bomis to work on the project. Sanger was said to have taken a role of mediator at times, making decisions on issues that aroused contention. This was based not on formal authority, but on demands from users at large. Funding ran out for his position, leading to his resignation in February of 2002. Other current and past Bomis employees who have done some work on the encyclopedia include Tim Shell, one of the co-founders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmers Jason Richey and Toan Vo.Software and hardware
The software that originally ran Wikipedia was UseModWiki, written by Clifford Adams ("Phase I"). At first it required CamelCase for links; soon it was also possible to use the current linking method with double brackets. In January 2002, Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine, which used an underlying MySQL database, added many features (and abolished the behaviour of CamelCase words automatically becoming links), and was specifically written for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske ("Phase II"). After a while, the site started to slow down to such an extent that editing became almost impossible. Several rounds of modifications to the software provided only temporary relief. Then Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the software from scratch. The new version, a major improvement, has been running since July 2002. This "Phase III" software is now called MediaWiki, and is used by many other wiki projects. Brion Vibber has since taken the lead in fixing bugs and tuning the database for performance.
In late 2003, server outages began to seriously diminish the productivity of Wikipedia contributors. Many reported difficulty editing articles as a result of time-outs and severe slowness. This was due to congestion on the single server that was running all the Wikipedias at the time.
As of June 2004, the project runs on nine dedicated servers, located in Florida. This new configuration includes a single database server and four web servers, all running Fedora Core. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Cached requests are served by two Squid servers; the new servers are linked via two file system NFS servers (one primary and one backup — the primary NFS server is currently also the email server).
Sister projects\nWikipedia has the following sister projects:\n*Wiktionary, a free dictionary project\n*Wikibooks, a free textbook project\n*Wikiquote, a free encyclopedia of quotations\n*Wikisource, a repository of source texts in any language which are either in the public domain or are released under the GFDL There are many other conceptually related projects, including Wikitravel.Downloading the database\nAnyone who wishes to use Wikipedia's open content may at any time download a nearly-current version of the entire article database to use for any purpose, within the terms of the GFDL. [1] A number of sites, such as Wikinfo, "4reference.net" and "nationmaster" have used this to mirror or fork Wikipedia's content.Awards and nominations\n2004\n* Prix Ars Electronica, winner - in the category of Digital Communities; The World Starts With Me also won.\n* The Webby Awards, winner of the "Community" section; was also nominated in the "Best Practices" section. See the winner's listExternal links\nRelated sites\n*Meta-Wikipedia\n*MediaWiki Phase III Software at SourceForge\n* OpenFacts: Copies of Wikipedia content\n* The Wikipedia Cafeshop\n* archive of Wikipedia press releases\n* Wikipedia Trophy Box.Essays\n*The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource by Richard Stallman (RMS)\n*IBM History Flow: Technical experiment on "visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors". Uses various Wikipedia articles as example data.\n*Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website, November 2002, by Lars Aronsson, founder of susning.nu.Peer-revieweded articles\n*“Phantom authority, self–selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia”, December 2003, by Andrea Ciffolilli.\n*"Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource" (PDF), April 2004, by Andrew Lih.Reviews, endorsements, and discussion of Wikipedia\n* Official Wikipedia press coverage\n* News articles that mention Wikipedia (updated regularly): Yahoo Google\n* August 2003 CNN Article about Wikipedia\n* November 2001 RMS describes Wikipedia as "exciting news"\n* July 2001 Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias - Larry Sanger's response to Britannica's decision to charge fee (July 2001).\n* 1999 FSF endorsement of Wikipedia Category:Encyclopedias\nCategory:Websites\nCategory:Wikimedia projects roa-rup:Uichipedia\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nnds:Wikipedia\n\n\n\nsimple:Wikipedia\n\n\n\ntokipona:lipu sona Wikipesija\n\n\n\nzh-cn:维基百科\nzh-tw:維基百科 |
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"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.C.) |
