The encyclopedia is home to 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003). English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 7,118,808 as of January 2026.b It contains 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias,b although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia website in 344 languages of the world in which 342 languages are currently active and 14 are closed. Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).W 119 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. 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 95 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.
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Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors. 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. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimédia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups.
Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia’s domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a “feeder” project for Nupedia. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. Other projects may also use different strings in place of “/w/” and “/wiki/” in URLs.
Nupedia
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. 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. 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.
- They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation’s wiki devoted to maintaining all its projects (Wikipedia and others).
- Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, said that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to “ugly, intimidating behavior”.
- Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this.
- According to the TechCrunch website, on 23 January 2020, Wikipedia reached more than 6 million articles on the English Wikipedia.
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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. In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of “fake news” because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles. In contrast, the trend analysis for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) shows success in retaining active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles.
A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. This pattern is attributed to the status of English as a global lingua franca, leading to contributions from many editors for whom English is a second language.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name ,W 4 and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. By replacing “en” with the code for another language, you can reach the Main Page of the wikipedia in that language, if it exists. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. 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. A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used on Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications.
Contents
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.W 27 A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in reliable sources that are independent of the article’s subject. Wikipedia is composed of 11 different namespaces, with its articles being present in mainspace. Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia’s inception.
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”. 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 free alternative. The Talk page concerned a fictional article describing the unintended consequences of the release of a plastic-eating fungus to clean up an oil spill. 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. Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”.
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On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, “according to the ratings firm comScore”. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project’s increasing exclusivity and resistance to change. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Launched in 2001, Wikipedia developed by 2006 into the largest encyclopedia in the world, and has consistently been one of the 10 most popular websites in the world. In other cases the URL may redirect to a valid one (for example, page titles are converted to their canonical form as they are when they appear in wikilinks).
Disputed articles
Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Wikipedia contributors. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that “anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia … are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site”. Wikipedia’s community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations. Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.W 31 When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted.
The user interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008. 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. Several interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded.
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. Wikipedia’s content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The article stated it had been approved by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China in 2011. However, unlike Wikipedia, the website’s contents would only be editable by scholars from state-owned Chinese institutions.
In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. 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. There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia’s articles into printed book form. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, 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).
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”. Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users. This is while Wikipedia faces “a more concerning problem” than funding, namely “a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website”. 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 means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”.
- Wikipedia publishes “dumps” of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023,update there is no dump available of Wikipedia’s images.
- There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format.
- These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimédia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups.
- Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project’s utility and status as an encyclopedia.
Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes, the influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources. Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page’s title or categorization, manipulate the article’s underlying code, or use images disruptively.W 24 In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored “creative construction” over “creative destruction”.
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. 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. The encyclopedia’s assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the US federal courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization—though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case. 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.” In October 2020, the World Health Organization announced they were freely licensing its infographics and other materials on Wikimedia projects. 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 vegas casino root out ‘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.
There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.update The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009.W 115 The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia. In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,W 114 Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001.