Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia
Wikipedia is a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors, known as Wikipedians, through a model of open collaboration. It is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
History
The concept of a new free encyclopedia began with the Interpedia proposal on Usenet in 1993, which outlined an Internet-based online encyclopedia to which anyone could submit content and that would be freely accessible. Early projects in this vein included Everything2 and Open Site. In 1999, Richard Stallman proposed the GNUPedia, an online encyclopedia which, similar to the GNU operating system, would be a "generic" resource.
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of qualified volunteer contributors and a considered multi-step peer review process.
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
Features
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity if they choose.
The site is a wiki-based site, meaning that anyone can edit any unprotected page and improve articles immediately for all readers. Wikipedia's editors are known as Wikipedians. The site is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also manages other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikimedia Commons.
Impact
Wikipedia has had a significant impact on the way people access information. It is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of May 2024, it was ranked fifth by Semrush, and sixth by Similarweb. 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". As of March 2023, it ranked 6th in popularity, according to Similarweb.
Wikipedia has also been involved in various controversies and criticisms. Some studies highlight the fact that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a "western cultural bias" or "Eurocentric bias". Due to this persistent Eurocentrism, scholars like Carwil Bjork-James call for a "decolonization" of Wikipedia. Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.
Governance and Community
The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.
Wikipedia isn't raised up wholesale, like a barn; it's assembled grain by grain, like a termite mound. This barrier to entry exists even in places where there are many experts and large volumes of material to draw from. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square.