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.
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.
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. There are currently 342 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). The results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. According to a 2009 study, there is “evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content”. Experienced editors are encouraged to not “bite” the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere.
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In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes.W 20 A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia’s page-protection policies as “perhaps the most important” means at its disposal to “regulate its market of ideas”. Due to Wikipedia’s increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA. Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page.
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.
This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. The top left panel display’s Today’s featured article. BOXThe prefix “en” in the url is the for English language. We begin WikipediaAcademy by acquainting you first as a user and later as an editor.
Impacts of generative AI on Wikipedia views
Many parodies target Wikipedia’s openness and susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project’s articles. Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. 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.
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In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called “wikification”, and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote in Nature that the “wisdom of crowds” approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes.
Coverage of topics and systemic bias
Wikipedia’s original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection. There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia’s articles into printed book form.W 103 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. Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or re-distribute it at no charge.W 96 The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website.
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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.
The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 86 Wikimedia’s online newspaper The Signpost was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who would join the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees in 2008. In 2019, the level of contributions were reported by the Wikimedia Foundation as being at $120 million annually,W 85 updating the Jaffe estimates for the higher level of support to between $3.08 million and $19.2 million annually. She stated that one of her focuses would be increasing diversity in the Wikimedia community. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.W 57 The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.W 58 The foundation’s 2020 Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million, with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost $11 million.W 59
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