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”.
Welcome to Wikipedia
Viewers of the show tried to add the episode’s mention of the page as a section of the actual Wikipedia article on negotiation, but this effort was prevented by other users on the article’s talk page. A working group led by Peter Stone (formed as a part of the Stanford-based project One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence) in its report called Wikipedia “the best-known example of crowdsourcing … that far exceeds traditionally-compiled information sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, in scale and depth”. Wikipedia’s content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.W 117 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. There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.update Noam Cohen wrote in Wired that Wikipedia’s effort to combat misinformation related to the pandemic was different from other major websites, opining, “Unless Twitter, Facebook and the others can learn to address misinformation more effectively, Wikipedia will remain the last best place on the Internet.” In October 2020, the World Health Organization announced they were freely licensing its infographics and other materials on Wikimedia projects.
Kinds of dead links
Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger’s accusation, saying that Wikipedia did not have “material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it.” Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom after the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) decided the album cover was a potentially illegal indecent image and added the article’s URL to a “blacklist” it supplies to British internet service providers. The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from the German rock band Scorpions—features a picture of the album’s original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven, with Africa being the most underrepresented.
Editors
Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a “western cultural bias” (or “pro-western bias”) or “Eurocentric bias”, reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, “similar biases that are found in the ‘ivory tower’ of academic historiography”. In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appeared to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much “leftist bias”. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.
Shorter URL
The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 86 Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.W 75 According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government. These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups. Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 61 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 62 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. 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 $11 million.W 59
Community
The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 7,118,741 as of January 2026.b It contains 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias,b although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We can use localurl for a link to a project which uses the same string in the URL between the server name and the question mark ($wgScript, on Wikimedia “/w/index.php”), but not for links to other projects. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative. 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.
Retrospective: 25 years of Wikipedia
The edition’s one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format.
One principal concern cited by The New York Times for the “worry” is vegas casino 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 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. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content on Wikipedia or its related projects but merely a hosting service for contributors to and licensors of Wikipedia, a position which was successfully defended in 2004 in a court in France. Two projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and the “Thank” tab in the edit history, which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).W 74 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.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.
English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. 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. The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.
“Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men.” In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.W 56 Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, becoming the third woman to ever receive the award. Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women’s topics. After some editors who volunteered to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part of his co-founder status. In 2011, Wales claimed that the unevenness of coverage is a reflection of the demography of the editors, citing for example “biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare”. Interdisciplinary scholarly assessments of Wikipedia articles have found that while articles are typically accurate and free of misinformation, they are also typically incomplete and fail to present all perspectives with a neutral point of view.
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.
- Under this system, new and unregistered users’ edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.
- Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia’s inception.
- The edition’s one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million.
- Due to Wikipedia’s increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases.
- 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.W 24
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”.W 41 Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Spanish, Russian, Italian, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Waray, and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Indonesian, Korean, Serbian, Chechen, and Norwegian), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.W 36W 35 The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 7.1 million articles. 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.
References
A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, “The Decline of Wikipedia”, questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. Wikipediac is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Other projects may also use different strings in place of “/w/” and “/wiki/” in URLs. Since Wikipedia is continually updated, encyclopedic articles on major news events appear within minutes.
- 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.
- For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.W 45
- Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”.
- 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.
Jimmy Wales once argued that only “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore “much like any traditional organization”. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia’s earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous. 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.
Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia’s participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide. In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.
A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms “followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)”. The article contained Talk page topics found on Wikipedia, like discussions of changes in the articles priority level. “My Number One Doctor”, a 2007 episode of the television show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.
Experienced editors are encouraged to not “bite” the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 33 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them.
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.W 18 The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.W 9 A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to “increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits”. After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors appears to have peaked around early 2007. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.
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. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains “stable versions” of articles which have passed certain reviews.W 21 Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the “pending changes” system in December 2012. 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. A frequently vandalized article can be “semi-protected” or “extended confirmed protected”, meaning that only “autoconfirmed” or “extended confirmed” editors can modify it.