The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool. The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.
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Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin. A study published by PLOS One in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. As of January 2021,update the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. 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”. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology.
Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses). 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. 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 is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. 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”.citation needed Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.
Other media coverage
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).
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. Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of vegas casino paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.W 48In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased).f Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%).
Lih fears for Wikipedia’s long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain and rival encyclopedias will not replace it. Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this. 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.
In the news
- Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as “verifiability, not truth” to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.
- 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.” However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping.
- 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.
- A notable discussion within the English Wikipedia community concerns the preference for national variety of the English language, particularly American English and British English.
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.
- Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, “the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created”.
- 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 104 As of February 2023,update it has over 101 million items.W 105 WikiReader is a dedicated reader device that contains an offline copy of Wikipedia, which was launched by OpenMoko and first released in 2009.W 106
- Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors.
- The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative.
- As of January 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, German, French, Swedish, and Dutch Wikipedias.W 35 The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013update had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias.
- 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.
In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views. According to the foundation, this growth is largely attributed to automated programs, or “scraper” bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use in training large language models and related applications. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.W 17 Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month.W 16 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”. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.W 5W 6 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former’s servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.
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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.
Page version status
Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article’s subject. 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. 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. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the “pending changes” system in December 2012.
Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language”. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as “neutral point of view”, they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use. There are currently 0 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. In particular, editors can choose to run for “adminship”, which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes.
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world’s seventh or ninth most visited website, according to differing sources on internet traffic. You can fetch the raw wikitext of a page using a URL like ///w/index.php? We can use localurl for a link to a project which uses the same string in the URL between the server name and the question mark ($wgScript, on Wikimedia “/w/index.php”), but not for links to other projects.
External links
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.
In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The English Wikipedia’s three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad. The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. Each article’s History page links to each revision.e On most articles, anyone can view the latest changes and undo others’ revisions by clicking a link on the article’s History page.
Systemic biases
Statistical analyses suggest that the English Wikipedia committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.W 28 Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. Registered users may maintain a “watchlist” of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes.W 22 “New pages patrol” is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.W 23 Editors also can make only one revert per day across the entire field and can be banned from editing related articles.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. This allows specifying the language (hereby ‘sl’ for Slovenian) of the interface messages that will be displayed when opening the page ‘Glavna stran’ in the Commons project. There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format. Featured articles are articles of the highest quality that can be found on Wikipedia. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote in Nature that the “wisdom of crowds” approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes. 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.
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 73 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. The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship. 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 51 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. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.W 49 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).
Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by “sharp” comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. These ideas include “featured articles”, the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short “stub” articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.
On 13 January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit was made by Steven Pruitt. In October 2014, the Wikipedia Monument was unveiled to the public in Poland to honor all the contributors of Wikipedia. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and from people who looked it up. Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales’ goal. The important people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the person in charge of Bomis, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief of Nupedia.
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