The successful free encyclopedia turns 20
Can you trust it or can´t you? Wikipedia turns 20 and the discussion about the free encyclopedia written by its users, is still ongoing. The site was launched by entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on December 15, 2001. Some say its information is biased and untrustworthy as amateurs write and edit its information while supporters say that the fact that it is so popular and frequently used means that any misinformation is discovered and corrected by the amateur editors.
Sometimes, such corrections lead to fight between editors not agreeing on what is correct. Editors harass each other with edits and re-edits. The Wikimedia Foundation, that runs the site, has introduced codes of conduct trying to limit controverses and harassments.
Despite animated discussions, Wikipedia remains a success. Alexa Internet, a web-analysis firm, ranks Wikipedia as the 13th-most-popular site on the internet, ahead Netflix and Instagram.
Searching facts about Wikipedia at Wikipedia, you can learn that it comprises more than 55 million articles that have been edited 3 billion times, has 1.7 billion unique visitors every month and covers 316 languages. It has 6.2 million articles in English with 127 117 active contributors in the month prior to the anniversary.
It is rare among success stories on the Internet. It has not made billions, it has no shareholders and it does not sell advertising. It is run by not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation financed by donations and user contributions.
The name “Wikipedia” is a mix of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia.
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. For the covid 19, some restrictions have been introduced to prevent Wikipedia to be used by conspiracy advocates, anti vaxxers etc.
Magazine Economist, that as Moonshot also has been noting the Wikipedia anniversary, quoted a former president of the American Library Association who in 2007 wrote: “A few endorse Wikipedia heartily. This mystifies me. A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything.”
The magazine noted that despite numerous academic studies highlighting its reliability, the magazine´s fact checkers “frown on relying on it”.
However, when the whole world was looking for information about the covid pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) in October last year decided to cooperate with Wikipedia to secure spread of correct information.
Wikimedia itself is modest saying: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time. This means that any information it contains at any particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or just plain wrong. Biographies of living persons subjects that happen to be in the news, and politically or culturally contentious topics are especially vulnerable to these issues. Edits on Wikipedia that are in error may eventually be fixed. However, because Wikipedia is a volunteer-run project, it cannot monitor every contribution all the time. There are many errors that remain unnoticed for days, weeks, months, or even years. Therefore, Wikipedia should not be considered a definitive source in and of itself.”
Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also run a number of other projects:
Comments (free media repository), MediaWiki (wiki software development), Meta-Wiki (wikimedia project coordination), Wikibooks (free textbooks and manuals), Wikidata (free knowledge base), Wikinews (free-content news), Wikiquote (collection of quotations), Wikisource (free-content library), Wikispecies (directory of species), Wikiversity (free learning resources), Wikivoyage (free travel guide), Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus).
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