Editing In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, q uestioning users about the editing

mechanism.[27] In a departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia is largely open to editing. This means that, with the exception of particularly sensitive and/or vandalism-prone pages that are "protected" to some degree from editing,[2 8] the reader of an article can edit the text without needing approval, doing so anonymously or with a registered account. Different language editions modify th is policy; for example, only registered users may create a new article in the En glish edition.[29] No article is considered to be owned by its creator or any ot her editor, nor is it vetted by any recognized authority. Instead, editors are s upposed to agree on the content and structure of articles by consensus.[30] By default, an edit to an article becomes available immediately, prior to any re view. As such, an article may contain inaccuracies, ideological biases, or even patent nonsense, until or unless another editor corrects the problem. Different language editions, each under separate administrative control, are free to modif y this policy. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles,[31] which have passed certain reviews. Following the protracted trials and community discussion, the "pending changes" system was introduced to Englis h Wikipedia in December 2012.[32] Under this system, new users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles would be "subject to review from an e stablished Wikipedia editor before publication". Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red. Contributors, whether registered or not, can take advantage of features availabl e in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page belonging to each ar ticle records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed ret roactively.[33] Editors can use this page to undo undesirable changes or restore lost content. The "Talk" page associated with each article helps coordinate wor k among multiple editors.[34] Importantly, editors may use the "Talk" page to re ach consensus,[35] sometimes through the use of polling. In addition, editors may view the most "recent changes" to the website, which ar e displayed in reverse chronology. Regular contributors often maintain a "watchl ist" of articles of interest to them, in order to easily track recent changes to those articles. In language editions with many articles, editors tend to prefer the "watchlist" because the number of edits has become too large to follow in " recent changes." New page patrol is a process by which newly created articles ar e checked for obvious problems.[36] A frequently vandalized article can be semiprotected, allowing only well established users to edit it.[37] A particularly c ontentious article may be locked so that only administrators are able to make ch anges.[38] The editing interface of Wikipedia. Computer programs called bots have been used widely to correct common misspellin gs and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a sta ndard format from statistical data.[39][40][41] There are also some bots designe d to warn users making "undesirable" edits,[42] block on the creation of links t o particular websites, and block on edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges. Bots on wikipedia must be approved by administration prior to activatio n.[43] Organization of article pages Articles in Wikipedia are loosely organized according to their development statu s and subject matter.[44] A new article often starts as a "stub", a very short p age consisting of definitions and some links. On the other extreme, the most dev

eloped articles may be nominated for "Featured article" status. One "featured ar ticle" per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia.[4 5][46] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured stat us via the intensive work of a few editors.[47] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ine ffective in assessing the quality of articles.[48] In 2007, in preparation for p roducing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessmen t scale against which the quality of articles is judged.[49] A group of Wikipedia editors may form a WikiProject to focus their work on a spe cific topic area, using its associated discussion page to coordinate changes acr oss multiple articles. Vandalism Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia Any edit that changes content in a way that deliberately compromises the integri ty of Wikipedia is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of va ndalism include insertion of obscenities and crude humor. Vandalism can also inc lude advertising language, and other types of spam. Sometimes editors commit van dalism by removing information or entirely blanking a given page. Less common ty pes of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false informa tion to an article, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrel evant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorizati on, manipulate the underlying code of an article, or utilize images disruptively .[50] The opportunity for vandalism provides a number of unique challenges to Wikipedi a. One criticism is that, at any moment, a reader of an article cannot be certai n that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopdia Britannica editor-in-chief R obert McHenry once described the predicament using simile:[51] The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matte r of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may b e obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairl y clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certai nly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.[52] John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible researc h tool".[53] Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from wiki articles; in practice, t he median time to detect and fix vandalism is a few minutes.[20][21] However, in one high-profile incident in 2005, false information was introduced into the bi ography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected f or four months.[53] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA To day and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt Univer sity, called Wales and asked if he had any way of knowing who contributed the mi sinformation. Wales replied that he did not, although the perpetrator was eventu ally traced.[54][55] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifical ly targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of l iving people.[56] Rules and laws governing content and editor behavior Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, the copyright laws) of the United States and of the U.S. state of Florida, where the majority of Wik ipedia's servers are located. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelin es that are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are st ored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise the web site's policies and guidelines.[57] Editors can enforce rules by deleting or mod ifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia. The y have since diverged to some extent. English Wikipedia

Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20, 2010. The mobile version of the English Wikipedia Main Page in the Safari web browser on an iPod Touch Content policies According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia, to be worthy of inclusion, must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dic tionary entry or dictionary-like.[58] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's stand ards of "notability",[59] which usually means that it must have received signifi cant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major ac ademic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikip edia intends only to convey knowledge that is already established and recognized .[60] It must not present new information or original research. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikiped ia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the i dea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for check ing the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[61] T his can lead to the removal of information that is valid, thus hindering inclusi on of knowledge and growth of the encyclopedia.[62] Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides.[63] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources , must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article.[64] This is kno wn as neutral point of view (NPOV). Dispute resolution Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "BOLD, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which an editor changes something, another editor reverts the change, and then the two editors discuss the issue on a talk page. When edit when a change is repeatedly done by one editor and th ors disregard this process en undone by another an 'edit war' may be asserted to have begun.[65] The proven ance of this term "edit war" is unknown.[66] In order to gain a broader community consensus, editors can raise issues at the Village Pump, or initiate a Request for Comment. An editor can report impolite, uncivil, or otherwise problematic communications with another editor via the "Wi kiquette Assistance" noticeboard. [needs update] Such postings themselves have n o binding or disciplinary power. Specialized forums exist for centralizing discu ssion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted . Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians t o be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes.[67] Arbitration The Arbitration Committee is the ultimate dispute resolution method. Although di sputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how artic les should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule o n which view should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and focuses on the way disputes are conducted in stead,[68] functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between co nflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentiall y productive editors back in to participate. Therefore, the committee does not d ictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes w hen it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the ne w content is biased). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63.2 % of cases) and banning editors from articles (43.3%), subject matters (23.4%) o r Wikipedia (15.7%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instanc es of impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather anti-consensus or violating editing policies, warning s tend to be issued.[69] Privacy One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen t o remain private: to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in

the eyes of the law.[70] It is a battle between the right to be anonymous in cy berspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). Wikipedia Wat ch argues that "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy" an d that "a greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure" would be "the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem."[71] A particular pro blem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for w hom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes. In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Ge rmany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the cou rt ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wik ipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL direc tly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order ar ose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's sur name be removed from Wikipedia.[72] On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that T ron's right to privacy or that of his parents were being violated.[73] The plain tiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused in May 2006. Community Main article: Community of Wikipedia Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operat ed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[74] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[75] and criticized for failing to accommod ate inexperienced users.[76] The project's preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".[77] Power structure The Wikipedia community has established "a bureaucracy of sorts", including "a c lear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exerci se editorial control."[78][79][80] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship: this begins with "administ rator,"[81][82] a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages , lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, a nd block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any s pecial privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to block users making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).[83][84 ] As the process of vetting potential Wikipedia administrators has become more r igorous, fewer editors are promoted to admin status than in years past.[85] Contributors Demographics of Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia does not require that its users provide identification.[86] However, a s Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.[87] Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a fe w hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization." Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits were done by just 0.7% of the user s (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later d isputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large po rtions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.[88] A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College fou nd that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site."[89]

In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative dev elopment, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.[ 90] In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain ci tes Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered i nnovation on the web.[91] A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeabl e, open, and conscientious than others.[92][93] A 2009 study suggested there was "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content."[9 4] At OOPSLA 2009, Wikimedia CTO and Senior Software Architect Brion Vibber gave a presentation entitled "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Ru n as Smoothly as Your Site"[95] in which he discussed the challenges of handling the contributions from a large community and compared the process to that of so ftware development. Interactions Wikipedians and British Museum curators collaborate on the article Hoxne Hoard i n June 2010. Members of the community predominantly interact with each other via 'talk' pages , which are wiki-edited pages which are associated with articles, as well as via talk pages that are specific to particular contributors, and talk pages that he lp run the site. These pages help the contributors reach consensus about what th e contents of the articles should be, how the site's rules may change, and to ta ke actions with respect to any problems within the community.[96] The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia,[97] and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the former chair of the Wi kimedia Foundation board of trustees.[98] It covers news and events from the sit e, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.[99] Positive reinforcement Wikipedians sometimes award one another barnstars for good work. These personali zed tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyo nd simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types o f articulation work. The barnstar phenomenon has been analyzed by researchers se eking to determine what implications it might have for other communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.[100] New users Up to sixty percent of Wikipedia's registered users never make another edit afte r their first 24 hours. Possible explanations are that such users only register for a single purpose, or are scared away by their experiences.[101] Goldman writ es that editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as sign ing talk pages, implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders will target their contributions as a threat. Be coming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expect ed to build a user page, learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to an arcane dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with i n-jokes and insider references." Non-logged-in users are in some sense second-cl ass citizens on Wikipedia,[102] as "participants are accredited by members of th e wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the wo rk product, on the basis of their ongoing participation,"[103] but the contribut ion histories of IP addresses cannot necessarily with any certainty be credited to, or blamed upon, a particular user. A 2009 study by Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget[104] showed that in a random sample of articles most content in Wikipedia (measured by the amount of contributed text which survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders" (users with low edit counts), while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders" (a select group of established users). Demographics

Estimation of contributions shares from different regions in the world to differ ent Wikipedia editions. One study found that the contributor base to Wikipedia "was barely 13% women; th e average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s." Sue Gardner, Executive Direc tor of the Wikimedia Foundation, hopes to see female editing contributions incre ase to twenty-five percent by 2015.[105] Linda Basch, President of the National Council for Research on Women, noted the contrast in these Wikipedia editor stat istics with the percentage of women currently completing bachelor's degrees, mas ter's degrees and PhD programs in the United States (all at rates of fifty perce nt or greater).[106] In a research article published in PLoS ONE in 2012, Yasseri et al., based on th e circadian patterns of editorial activities of the community, have estimated th e share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regio ns of the world. For instance, it has been reported that edits from North Americ a are limited to almost 50% in the English Wikipedia and this value decreases to twenty-five percent in Simple English Wikipedia. The article also covers some o ther editions in different languages.[107] The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to inc rease the number of editors in the Global South to thirty-seven percent by 2015. [108] Language editions See also: List of Wikipedias Percentage of all Wikipedia articles in English (red) and top ten largest langua ge editions (blue). As of July 2007 less than 23% of Wikipedia articles are in E nglish. There are currently 285 language editions (or language versions) of Wikipedia; o f these, 4 have over 1 million articles each (English, German, French and Dutch) , 6 more have over 700,000 articles (Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Portuguese), 40 more have over 100,000 articles and 109 have over 10,000 ar ticles.[109] The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 4.1 million articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 54% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Japanese: 10%, German: 8%, Spanish: 5%, Russia n: 4%, French: 4%, Italian: 3%).[7] As of January 2013, the five largest languag e editions are (in order of article count) the English, German, French, Dutch, a nd Italian Wikipedias.[110] The coexistence of multilingual content on Wikipedia is made possible by Unicode, whose support was first introduced into Wikipedia in January 2002 by Brion Vibber after he had similarly implemented the alphabet of Esperanto.[111][112] Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same lan guage edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (a s is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some confl icts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour)[113] or points of view.[ 114] Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "n eutral 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.[115][116][117] Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free ency clopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."[118] Though each language edition functions more or less i ndependently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others).[119] For instance, Meta-Wiki provides i mportant statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia,[120] and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have.[121] The list concerns basic co ntent by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, tech nology, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly r elated to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be availabl

e in English, even when they meet notability criteria of other language Wikipedi a projects. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because fully automated translation of articles is disallowed.[122] Art icles available in more than one language may offer "Interwiki links", which lin k to the counterpart articles in other editions. History Main article: History of Wikipedia Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-la nguage encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownershi p of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were the Bomis CEO Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Rich ard Stallman.[123] Sanger and Wales founded Wikipedia.[124][125] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[126] [127] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[128] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[129] Wikipedia was formally lau nched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia .com,[130] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[126] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[131] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relat ively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[126] Number of articles in the English Wikipedia (in blue) Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web sea rch engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language ed itions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.[132] Nupedia and Wikiped ia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the two mill ion-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever a ssembled, eclipsing even the 1407 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.[133] Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users o f the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre i n February 2002.[134] These moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia wo uld not display advertisements, and change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[135] Growth of the number of articles in the English Wikipedia (in blue) Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[136] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2010 that average was roughly 1,000.[137] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[138] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called 'l have already been created ow-hanging fruit' topics that clearly merit an article and built up extensively.[139][140][141] In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three month

s of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same pe riod in 2008.[142][143] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented num bers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting". The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to su ch content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[1 44] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study.[145] Two years later, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011.[146] Nevertheless, in the same interview h e claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". In July 2012, the Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[147] In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top ten list of the mo st popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks Inc. Wi th 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked No. 9, surpassing the New York Times (#10) and Apple Inc. (#11). This marked a significant increase over J anuary 2006, when the rank was No. 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 mill ion unique visitors.[148] As of December 2012, Wikipedia is the sixth-most-popul ar website worldwide according to Alexa Internet,[149] receiving more than 2.7 b illion U.S. pageviews every month,[150] out of a global monthly total of over 12 billion pageviews.[151] Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012 On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinat ed protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress the Stop Onlin e Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[152] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page t hat temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[153][154] Analysis of content See also: Academic studies about Wikipedia and Criticism of Wikipedia Although poorly written articles are flagged for improvement,[155] critics note that the style and quality of individual articles may vary greatly. Others argue that inherent biases (willful or not) arise in the presentation of facts, espec ially controversial topics and public or historical figures. Although Wikipedia' s stated mission is to provide information and not argue value judgements, artic les often contain overly specialized, trivial, or objectionable material.[156] In 2006, the Wikipedia Watch criticism website listed dozens of examples of plag iarism by Wikipedia editors on the English version.[157] Wales has said in this respect: "We need to deal with such activities with absolute harshness, no mercy , because this kind of plagiarism is 100% at odds with all of our core principle s."[157] Accuracy of content Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopdia Britannica are careful ly and deliberately written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. Conversely, Wikipedia is often cited for factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations. However, a non-scientific report in the journal Nature in 20 05 suggested that for some scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopdia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors. "[23] These claims have been disputed by, among others, Encyclopdia Britannica.[2 4][158] Although, Nature gave a point by point rebuttal of Britannica's argument ,[25] the Nature report did agree that the structure of Wikipedia's articles was often poor. As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validit y" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appeari ng in it.[159] Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability th at results from users' anonymity,[160] the insertion of false information,[161] vandalism, and similar problems. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote: "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median

refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that some traditional source s of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases and novel results, in his opinion, are over-reported in journal articles and relevant information is omitted from n ews reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Inter net sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[1 62] Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable.[163] Some commentators suggest that Wik ipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not cle ar.[164] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopdia Britannic a have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[165] Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet troll s, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[33][166] The addition of politica l spin to articles by organizations including members of the US House of Represe ntatives and special interest groups[22] has been noted,[167] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles. [168] For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the so urces of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accoun ts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or gover nment agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[169] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[170] Quality of writing Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than maki ng full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled with in an entry. Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor, stated that American National Biography Online outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its "clear and engaging pros e", which, he said, was an important aspect of good historical writing.[171] Con trasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were e ssentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praise d "McPherson's richer contextualization... his artful use of quotations to captu re Lincoln's voice ... and ... his ability to convey a profound message in a han dful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he fi nds "both verbose and dull". Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling encouraged b y the npov policy [which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretiv e stance in Wikipedia history." By example, he quoted the conclusion of Wikipedi a's article on William Clarke Quantrill. While generally praising the article, h e pointed out its "waffling" conclusion: "Some historians...remember him as an o pportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."[171] Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are fac tually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Freq uent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented: "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another th en into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage."[172] A stud y of cancer articles by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Je fferson University found that the entries were mostly accurate, but they were wr itten at college reading level, as opposed to the ninth grade level seen in the Physician Data Query. He said that "Wikipedia's lack of readability may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing."[173] The Economist argued that better -written articles tend to be more reliable: "inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information."[174] Coverage of topics and systemic bias See also: Notability in English Wikipedia Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an onl ine encyclopedia, with each topic of knowledge covered encyclopedically in one a rticle. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than c

an be covered by any conventional printed encyclopedia.[175] It also contains ma terials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic (cf below).[176] It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the po licy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia reject ed an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its Engl ish edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically, religiously, and p ornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wi kipedia by national authorities in China,[177] Pakistan[178] and the United King dom,[179] among other countries. In addition, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipe dia, has criticized Wikipedia not for the pornographic content, but for the fact that the content is accessible to children, and contains extreme and detailed p hotographs and films.[180] A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alt o Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 200 6 to January 2008) in each field:[181] Pie chart of Wikipedia content by subject as of January 2008[181] Culture and the arts: 30% (210%) Biographies and persons: 15% (97%) Geography and places: 14% (52%) Society and social sciences: 12% (83%) History and events: 11% (143%) Natural and physical sciences: 9% (213%) Technology and the applied sciences: 4% (-6%) Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%) Health: 2% (42%) Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%) Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%) These numbers refer only to the quantity of articles: it is possible for one top ic to contain a large number of short articles and another to contain a small nu mber of large ones. Through its "Wikipedia Loves Libraries" program, Wikipedia h as partnered with major public libraries such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to expand its coverage of underrepresented subjects and art icles.[182] Furthermore, the exact coverage of Wikipedia is under constant review by the edi tors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see also deletionism and inclusionism) .[183][184] As of September 2009, Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Ea rth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are wri tten about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of la rge parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.[185] When multiple editors contribute to one topic or set of topics, there may arise a systemic bias, such as non-opposite definitions for apparent antonyms. In 2011 Wales noted that the unevenness of coverage is a reflection of the demography o f the editors, which predominantly consists of young males with high education l evels in the developed world (cf. above)[146] Systemic bias on Wikipedia may fol low that of culture generally, for example favouring certain ethnicities or majo rity religions.[186] It may more specifically follow the biases of Internet cult ure, inclining to being young, male, English speaking, educated, technologically aware, and wealthy enough to spare time for editing. Biases of its own may incl ude over-emphasis on topics such as pop culture, technology, and current events. [186] A "selection bias"[187] may arise when more words per article are devoted to one public figure than a rival public figure. Editors may dispute suspected biases and discuss controversial articles, sometimes at great length. Wales has noted t he dangers of bias on controversial political topics or polarizing public figure s.[188] Citing Wikipedia

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia Most university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in ac ademic work, preferring primary sources;[189] some specifically prohibit Wikiped ia citations.[190][191] Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not us ually appropriate to use as citeable sources, and should not be relied upon as a uthoritative.[192] In February 2007 an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[193] In June 2007 former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned W ikipedia, along with Google,[194] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a stead y diet of Big Macs with everything." He also said that "a generation of intellec tual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at un iversities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students fr om learning from the more rare texts which are found only on paper or subscripti on-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxfor d Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "Y ou cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Intern et when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whe ther it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way."[194] A Harvard Law textbook, Legal Research in a Nutshell (2011), cites Wikipedia as a "general source" that "can be a real boon" in "coming up to speed in the law g overning a situation" and, "while not authoritative, can provide basic facts as well as leads to more in-depth resources."[195] Wales once said he receives about ten e-mails weekly from students saying they g ot failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia. According to The Sunda y Times of London, Wales told the students they got what they deserved. "For God 's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia", he said.[196] Explicit content Problem? What problem? So, you didn t know that Wikipedia has a porn problem? Dr. Larry Sanger[180] Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing information of graphic content. Artic les depicting arguably objectionable content (such as feces, corpses, the human penis or vulva) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily availab le to anyone with access to the internet, including children. The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articl es. The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer a 1976 album from German heavy metal b and Scorpions features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. The original release cover caused controversy and was r eplaced in some countries. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Vir gin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the U nited Kingdom, after it was reported by a member of the public as child pornogra phy,[197] to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) which issues a stop list to ISP s. IWF, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, later criticized the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful."[198] In April 2010, Sanger wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, out lining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of U.S. federal obscenity law.[199] Sa nger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one a bout lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children", under the PROTECT Act of 2003.[200] That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images an d drawings of children that are obscene under American law.[200] Sanger also exp ressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.[201] Wikimed ia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger's accusation,[202] sa

ying that Wikipedia did not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we di d, we would remove it."[202] Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted se xual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteer t o maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wa les voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part o f his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation maili ng list that this action was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quic kly I acted."[203] Operation Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters Wikimedia Foundation logo Main article: Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organiz ation which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wiki books. The Wikimedia Foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fun d its mission.[204] The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of users and supp orters of the Wikimedia projects, also participate in the promotion, development , and funding of the project. Software and hardware See also: MediaWiki The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open so urce wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database sys tem.[205] The software incorporates programming features such as a macro languag e, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWik i is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimed ia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on U seModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorpora ted later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate t he exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Cr ocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed[206] to extend the functionali ty of the MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension[207][208] was add ed to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene fo r searching. The site currently uses Lucene Search 2.1,[209] which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3.[210] Overview of system architecture, December 2010. See server layout diagrams on Me ta-Wiki. Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.[211] Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squ id caching servers.[212] Further statistics are available based on a publicly av ailable 3-months Wikipedia access trace.[213] Requests that cannot be served fro m the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual S erver software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested , performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To incre ase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common pag e accesses. Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expande d into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master da

tabase server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers run ning the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers. Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu),[214][215] with a fe w OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida a nd 44 in Amsterdam.[216] Access to content Content licensing When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by GNU F ree Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistributi on, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors re tain copyright of their work.[217] GFDL was created for software manuals that co me with free software programs that are licensed under GPL. This made it a poor choice for a general reference work; for example, the GFDL requires the reprints of materials from Wikipedia to come with a full copy of the GFDL license text. In December 2002, the Creative Commons license was released: it was specifically designed for creative works in general, not just for software manuals. The lice nse gained popularity among bloggers and others distributing creative works on t he Web. The Wikipedia project sought the switch to the Creative Commons.[218] Be cause the two licenses, GFDL and Creative Commons, were incompatible, in Novembe r 2008, following the request of the project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to reli cense its content to CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009. (A new version of GFDL automati cally covers Wikipedia contents.) In April 2009, Wikipedia and its sister projec ts held a community-wide referendum which decided the switch in June 2009.[219][ 220][221][222] The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image f iles under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to, in part due to the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g., in Japanese copyr ight law). 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. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content, but merely a hosting serv ice for the contributors (and licensors) of the Wikipedia. This position has bee n successfully defended in court.[223][224] Methods of access Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or re-distribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published i n many forms, both online and offline, outside of the Wikipedia website. Web sites Thousands of "mirror sites" exist that republish content from Wikipedi a: two prominent ones, that also include content from other reference sources, a re Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to dis play Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itsel f did. Mobile apps A variety of mobile apps provide access to Wikipedia on hand-held de vices, including both Android and iOS devices (see Wikipedia apps). (See also Mo bile access). Search engines Some web search engines make special use of Wikipedia content whe n displaying search results: examples include Bing (via technology gained from P owerset)[225] and Duck Duck Go. Compact Discs, DVDs Collections of Wikipedia articles have been published on opt ical discs. An English version, 2006 Wi