Wikipedia

1
Wikipedia

• By
• Bálint Bognár
• Göröcs Anita

2
What is Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia
  project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia
  Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the
  words wiki (a technology for creating
  collaborative websites) and encyclopedia.
• Its 10 million articles, about a quarter of
  which are in English, have been written
  collaboratively by volunteers around the world,
  and almost all of its articles can be edited by
  anyone who can access the Wikipedia website.
• Launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
  it is currently the largest and most popular
  general reference work on the Internet.
• Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia,
  a now-abandoned project to produce a free
  encyclopedia. The domain was eventually changed
  to the present wikipedia.org when the nonprofit
  Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new
  parent organization.

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Wikipedia

• The first particular "Web 2.0" service
• Originally developed from another encyclopedia
  project, Nupedia
• Policy of "neutral point-of-view
• Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia

4
Nature of Wikipedia

• Editing model
• No article is owned by its creator or any other
  editor (Except for a few vandalism-prone pages )
• Wikipedia does not censor itself
• In 2008 two researchers proved the hypothesis
  that the growth of Wikipedia is sustainable

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Nature of Wikipedia

• Wikipedia community
• The community has a power structure
• "administrators largest group of privileged
  users, who have the ability to delete pages, lock
  articles from being changed
• The roles of administrators, often described as
  "janitorial
• "Who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the
  questions frequently asked on the project.

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Nature of Wikipedia

• Signpost
• The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper
  on the English Wikipedia
• Was founded by Michael Snow
• It covers news and events from the site

7
Operation

• Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
• Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia
  Foundation
• Wikimedia participates in the promotion, the
  development and the funding of the project.

8
Operation

• Software and hardware
• The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki,
  a custom-made, free and open source wiki software
  platform
• programming features such as a macro language,
  variables, a transclusion system for templates,
  and URL redirection
• licensed under the GNU General Public License and
  used by all Wikimedia projects

9
License and language editions

• All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free
  Documentation License (GFDL)
• Some language editions, include non-free image
  files, while the others have opted not
• There are currently 262 language editions of
  Wikipedia
• The five largest language editions are English,
  German, French, Polish and Japanese Wikipedias

10
Cultural significance

• Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites
  world-wide
• Of the top ten, Wikipedia is the only non-profit
  website
• Wikipedia's content has also been used in
  academic studies, books, conferences, and court
  cases
• Wikipedia has also been used as a source in
  journalism
• In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a
  30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4

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Languages

• In May 2001, a wave of non-English Wikipedias was
  launched in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto,
  French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese,
  Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish
• These were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian.
• In September, Polish was added
• At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and
  Serbocroatian versions were announced.

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Wikipedia contributors

• Anyone with web access can edit Wikipedia
• 75,000 editors ,from expert scholars to casual
  readers ,regularly edit Wikipedia
• these experienced editors often help to create a
  consistent style throughout the encyclopedia,
  following a so called Manual of Style

13
Employees

• The functions of the Wikimedia Foundation were,
  for the first few years, executed almost entirely
  by volunteers
• In the spring of 2005, the foundation only had
  two employees, Danny Wool and Brion Vibber
• Though the number of employees has grown, the
  bulk of foundation work continues to be done by
  volunteers, with the foundation having very few
  employees

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Exploring Wikipedia

• Many visitors come to this site to acquire
  knowledge, others to share knowledge
• In fact, at this very instant, dozens of articles
  are being improved, and new articles are also
  being created
• You also can view random articles
• You also might enjoy reading Wikipedia in other
  languages
• Wikipedia has more than two hundred different
  languages, including a Simple English version
• related projects include a dictionary,
  quotations, books, manuals, and scientific
  reference sources

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Some interesting facts

• Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown
  rapidly into one of the largest reference Web
  sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors
  yearly by 2008
• There are more than 75,000 active contributors
• They work on more than 10,000,000 articles in
  more than 250 languages
• As of today, there are 2,583,692 articles in
  English
• every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from
  around the world make tens of thousands of edits
  and create thousands of new articles

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and some more

• Wikipedia has launched its web application for
  iPhones as well which lets you easily read,
  search and browse Wikipedia articles right on
  your device
• The application formats the articles perfectly
  for the iPhone's display, and even allows you to
  save articles for offline viewing
• In December 2007, it was revealed by The Register
  that former COO chief operating officer-Carolyn
  Doran was a convicted felon, with a DUI arrest
  during her tenure at the Foundation and a
  substantial criminal history, including shooting
  her boyfriend and charges of complicity in credit
  card forgery