Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, polyglot and collaboratively edited encyclopedia. It is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization whose funding is based on donations. Its more than 58 million articles in 326 languages have been written together by volunteers from all over the world, which adds up to more than 3 billion edits, and allows anyone to join project to edit them, unless the page is protected from vandalism to avoid problems or disputes.

It was created on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and is the largest and most popular reference work on the Internet. Since its founding, Wikipedia has not only gained in popularity — it is among the 10 most popular websites in the world —, but also its success has led to the emergence of sister projects: Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikiquote , Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikispecies and Wikivoyages.

There are three essential features of the Wikipedia project that together define its role on the web. The motto “The free encyclopedia that everyone can edit” explains the three principles:

• It is an encyclopedia, understood as a support that allows the collection, storage and transmission of information in a structured way.
• It is a wiki, so, with small exceptions, it can be edited by anyone.
• It is open content.

According to its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, the project constitutes “an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia, of the highest possible quality, to every person on the planet, in their language,” to achieve “a world in which every person on the planet has free access to the sum of all the knowledge of humanity.” It is developed on the site Wikipedia.org using wiki software – a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb.

Of the 326 languages in which it is published, eighteen exceed 1,000,000 articles: English, Cebuano, Swedish, German, French, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Samaritan, Vietnamese, Japanese, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese and Ukrainian. A good part of its language editions are available for offline use, distributed on DVD or other media. Many of its editions have been replicated via the Internet — using ‘mirrors’ — and have given rise to derivative encyclopedias — forks — on other websites.

The encyclopedia has received various criticisms. Some have accused it of systemic bias and inconsistencies, with criticism of the policy of favoring consensus on credentials in its editorial process. Other criticisms have been focused on its susceptibility to vandalization and the emergence of spurious information or lack of verification, although scholarly studies suggest that Vandalism in general is undone promptly. Wikipedia has also been criticized for gender biases. Editing marathons have been held to encourage women editors and increase coverage of women’s issues.

Wikipedia is one of the 10 most popular websites according to the Alexa ranking, in April 2022 and The Economist magazine placed it as the “thirteenth most visited place on the web”. Without advertising, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.

Facebook announced that by 2017 it would help readers spot fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.

History of Wikipedia

Wales cites the essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” written by the Austrian economist and philosopher and Nobel Prize in Economics Friedrich Hayek, which he read as a student, as “central” to his thinking about “how to manage the Wikipedia project”. Hayek argues that the Information is decentralized—each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively—and, as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge, rather than by a central authority.

Wales reconsidered Hayek’s essay in the 1990s, while reading about the open source movement, which advocated free distribution of free software. He was particularly moved by the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” written by one of the movement’s founders, Eric S. Raymond and later adapted into a book. Wales claimed that such an essay “opened [their] eyes to the possibilities of mass collaboration.”

In March 2000, Jimmy Wales created Nupedia, a free encyclopedia project based on an ambitious and comprehensive peer review process, designed to make his articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias thanks to the participation of scholars – mainly doctoral students and academics – to whom he intended to collaborate on an unpaid basis.

The project had the financial support of the company Bomis, founded by Wales and managed by him together with a colleague since 1996,36 and the collaboration of Richard Stallman, who proposed the change to the GNU general public license, from the old Nupedia Open Content License. Larry Sanger, a doctor of philosophy, who had previously known Wales from having philosophical discussions with him on the Internet, was hired by wales and became editor-in-chief of Nupedia.

Due to the slow progress of the project, in 2001 a wiki – UseMod – was created linked to Nupedia whose initial purpose was to speed up the creation of articles in parallel, before they moved to the peer review system. There is some controversy among the founders of Nupedia about who originally proposed the idea of using a wiki to Jimbo Wales, whether Larry Sanger or a third person, but the fact is that the success of that “small side project” – Wikipedia – ended up eclipsing Nupedia, which stopped working in 2003.

The Wikipedia project was started on January 15, 2001. The oldest article that can be found on Wikipedia is UuU, created on January 16, 2001, in the English version; it consisted of three links to two articles about the United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay. Larry Sanger went on to collaborate with Wikipedia and worked actively on the organization and guidelines of the project; he left in 2002 due to disagreements with Wales.

That year, Wikipedia covered 26 languages, 46 in 2003 and 161 at the end of 2004. Wikipedia and Nupedia coexisted until the extinction of the latter in 2003. However, the possibility of using advertising on Wikipedia provoked a reaction from the contributors of the Spanish Wikipedia, which led to the creation of the Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español in February 2002. This episode could have in turn prompted the decision not to use advertising, the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the change to the new url.

Several other wiki-format encyclopedia projects have been initiated, largely under a different philosophy of openness and the editorial model of the “neutral point of view” developed by Wikipedia. For example, Wikinfo, one of the web portals, does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. There were also new Wikipedia-inspired projects—such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google’s Knol—where some of the fundamental aspects of Wikipedia are addressed differently, such as peer review policies, original research, and commercial advertising.

On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia reached 1 million articles in 100 languages. In 2007 the English version exceeded 2 million articles, becoming the encyclopedia with the largest number of articles in history and surpassing in that respect the Yongle Dadian of 1407, which held the record for several centuries. Because of its popularity and simplicity, the Oxford English Dictionary has considered introducing the term wiki.

In October 2011, Wikimedia announced the launch of Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to enable free mobile (data) access to Wikipedia in third-world countries through collaborations with mobile telecommunications operators.

Etymology

The word Wikipedia, a proper name coined by Larry Sanger in early 2001, is the contraction of wiki, a technology to create collaborative websites, coming in turn from Wikiwiki, ‘fast’ in Hawaiian, and encyclopedia, ‘encyclopedia’ in English. This name is pronounced in English as [ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə].

The Spanish Wikipedia, created months later, inherited the name. After a vote taken between September and November 2003 by the users of this, it was decided to continue with the same term. In the vote, the following names were considered -in order of popularity-: Librepedia, Huiquipedia, Uiquipedia, Güiquipedia, Viquipedia, Ñiquipedia, Velozpedia, Limonpedia, Güisquipedia and Velocipedia.

Others that also used the name Wikipedia were the languages —ordered according to ISO 639-3—: German, Breton, Corsican, Danish, Basque, Filipino, Finnish, Galician, Dutch, Indonesian, Icelandic,Italian, Nauruan, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Sicilian, Somali, Swahili and Swedish.

Other spellings for the title

This is a list of alternative spellings used to name Wikipedia in different editions:

• Bichipedia – Sardinian.
• Biquipedia – Aragonese.
• Güiquipeya – Extremadura.
• Uichipedia-Arrumano.
• Uiquipedia – Asturian.
• Uikipedias-Lojban.
• Vichipedia – Romansh.
• Vichipedie – Friulano.
• Vicipaedia – Latin.
• Vicipéid – Irish.
• Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Turco.
• Vikipedia/ויקיפידיה – Judeo-Spanish.
• Vikipedio-Esperanto.
• Vikipedija – Lithuanian.
• Vikipēdija – Latvian.
• Vikipediya – Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Uzbek.
• Vikipeedia – Estonian.
• Wikipedia – Võro.
• Vikipetã – Guarani.
• Vikipedėjė-Samogitiano.
• Vikipidiya – Roma.
• Viquipèdia – Catalan.
• Vitipetia – Tahitian.
• Vouiquipèdia – Franco-provenzal.
• Wicipǣdia/Ƿicipǣdia – Anglo-Saxon.
• Wicipedia – Welsh.
• Wikipaedia – Scottish.
• Wikipédia – French, Slovak, Hungarian, Portuguese.
• Википедия – Tatar.
• Wikipedia – Czech, novial.
• Wikipedia – Northern Sami.
• Wikipedijô-Casubio.
• Wikipedia – Ido.
• Wikipedia – Armenio.
• ويكيبيديا – Arabic.
• Wikipedia – Tailandés.
• Wikipedia – Japonés.
• Huiquipedia – Nahuatl.
• Oiquipedià – Occitan.
• ‘O Wikipikia – Hawaiian.
• uikiPEdi, as-Lojban.
• Uicchipèdie-Tarantino.
• Wikiibíídiiya-Navajo.
• Wikipedi-Bambara.
• Wikipedian – Bosnian, Croatian, Slovenian, Maltese, Serbo-Croatian.
• Wikipediya – Zazaki.
• Wikipidiya- Aimara, Quechua.
• Wîkîpediya – Kurdish.
• Wïkïpêdïyäa-Sango.
• Wikipedy – Frisian.
• Wikipedyjo-Silesio.
• Wikipeediya – Fula.
• Wikipidya -Bicolano central,cabilio.
• Wikkipedija – Fráncico ripuario.
• Wéijībǎikē / Wikipedia – Chino.
• רĻuaļĸłuaļłuałuaa
• Βικιπαίδεια – Greek, Pontic.
• Википеди -Chuvacho,osético.
• Википедия – Russian.
• Википедиесь-Moksha.
• Википедиja – Macedonian, Serbian.
• Вікіпедія – Ukrainian.
• Уикипедия – Bulgarian.
• ויקיפדיה – Hebrew.
• ויקיפעדיע-Yiddish.
• Wikipedia – Persa.
• Wikipedia – Georgiano.
• ویـکـ5 – Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit.
• Wikipedia – Telugú.
• Wikipedia – Cantonés

Corporate branding

Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has used different corporate brands. The common element in all of them is a sphere written as a central element, symbolizing the world and knowledge.

In 2003, the drawing of an incomplete sphere, known as a balloon-puzzle, composed of pieces of a puzzle of various colors, with blue links belonging to different scriptures of the world, was adopted by an international competition, thus symbolizing the condition of “work under construction” that Wikipedia has. The design that won the international competition underwent some modifications before being approved as the official logo, mainly the elimination of color and the replacement of links by graphemes of various writings of the world.

The denunciation of various errors and inconsistencies in the symbols included in the globe-puzzle and the possibility of designing an animated or photorealistic image prompted among various Wikipedia editors a debate on the possibility of making modifications to the graphic element. As a consequence, and after the work done through an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation together with thousands of volunteers to modify the interface of the encyclopedia, the drawing of the globe-puzzle was replaced in 2010 by a three-dimensional model, in which some symbols of the puzzle pieces were replaced by others, mainly those that constitute the first grapheme of the word.

“Wikipedia” in different Wikipedias that exist in the world. In addition, the typography of the word element — “WIKIPEDIA, The Free Encyclopedia” — was changed to use the open-source Linux Libertine, with the exception of the initial W, which is maintained with the Hoefler Text font and is also one of the official symbols.

Each Wikipedia according to language is autonomous and has the power to choose the brand that identifies it. Since 2003 they have all adopted basically the same, with the word element “Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia”—”Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”—translated into the language in which each one is written. The marks have been made voluntarily and free of charge by Wikipedia users, and their rights belong to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Editing and content on Wikipedia

There have been and are many online encyclopedias that competed with Wikipedia, such as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica; however, none have achieved the same success as Wikipedia. Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge, with each topic covered encyclopedically in an article. Because it has terabytes of available space, it can cover many more topics than any print encyclopedia. The exact degree and form of coverage on Wikipedia are under constant review by its editors, and disagreements are not uncommon, as evidenced by the content removal controversy.

According to a study conducted by the journal Nature in 2007, “Wikipedia reached the Encyclopedia Britannica” in quality, although there is controversy on this matter. In addition, its contents are available in printed form. Another study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center on the largest categories of articles on the English Wikipedia from July 2006 to January 2008 yielded the following results:

Interface

For viewing articles, the Wikimedia Foundation redesigned the interface with a theme or tapestry known as a vector, created in 2010. Before the update, years ago there was a classic interface known as Monobook with limited features. Within the interface, there are a variety of controls used to navigate or edit pages. For example, to search, go to other links or enlarge images like other websites. In addition, through the tabs, they can browse, interact or collaborate with other pages. Although some maintenance activities, they are hidden from users not registered in the project.

To edit an article, the wiki code is used in a text box through the “Edit” tab that is not always available in case of any prevention against vandalism. Among its controls, they do not resemble the classic HTML; for example, brackets are used for links, equal signs for titles, among others, which can give a bad impression to those people who do not have knowledge in Computer Science.

Language editions of Wikipedia

As of October 2016, Wikipedia covered 284 “active” editions in different languages and dialects.

Each edition works independently, is not required to include the content of other editions, and must only respect global policies such as maintaining a “neutral point of view”. However, some articles and images are shared between the various Wikipedia editions or through the Wikimedia Commons repository, and organized translations of articles from other editions are requested. Translated articles represent only a small part of the total in any of them.

The five editions with the most articles are, in descending order, English, Swedish, Dutch, German and French. As of January 2011, Wikipedia contained 278 edits—268 active ones—in various development stages, totaling more than 17 million articles.

The list of languages includes artificial languages such as Esperanto, indigenous or aboriginal languages such as Nahuatl, Maya and the languages of the Andaman Islands, or dead languages, such as Latin, Classical Chinese or Anglo-Saxon.

On March 1, 2006, the English Wikipedia became the first to exceed one million articles, followed on December 27, 2009, by the German Wikipedia, on September 21, 2010, by the French Wikipedia, on December 17, 2011, by the Dutch Wikipedia, on January 22, 2013, by the Italian Wikipedia, on May 11 of the same year by the Russian Wikipedia, on the 16th of the same month by the English Wikipedia, on June 15 by the Swedish Wikipedia and on September 24 by the Polish Wikipedia. During the first half of 2014, three Asian language editions also reached one million articles: the Vietnamese Wikipedia, the Samaritan Wikipedia and the Cebuano Wikipedia.

The following is a list of the sixteen largest editions sorted by number of articles. The figures, which are referenced respectively to each version, are current.

Stand	Edition	Articles	Stand	Edition	Articles
1	English	6,512,407 items	2	Cebuano	6 125 842 items
3	German	2 697 760 items	4	Swedish	2 551 370 items
5	French	2 430 001 items	6	Dutch	2 092 682 items
7	Russian	1 827 489 items	8	Spanish	1 782 231 items
9	Italian	1 758 483 items	10	Egyptian Arabic	1,584,045 items
11	Polish	1 525 308 items	12	Japanese	1 329 688 items
13	Vietnamese	1 273 143 items	14	Samareño	1 265 751 items
15	Chinese	1 282 575 items	16	Arabic	1 170 954 items

Many Wikipedia editions—such as Swedish, Dutch, and Russian—use bots for automatic sketching, which is why the number of articles is not necessarily a valid reference to their status or quality. A different categorization would be the average size per article; thus, a Wikipedia with numerous articles of only a few bytes would be placed below another with fewer entries but more worked. It should also be noted that many Wikipedias—such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew—use non-Latin alphabets, syllabaries, or ideological systems, and this increases the size of databases.

Distribution of publishers by country

Countries from which the articles are edited.

• German Wikipedia: Germany (68%), Austria (7.8%).
• Spanish Wikipedia: Spain (18.4%), Mexico (16.5%), Argentina (13.1%).
• French Wikipedia: France (65.8%), Canada (5.3%).
• English Wikipedia: USA: (32%), UK (9.4%), India (5.7%), Canada (5.3%).
• Japanese Wikipedia: Japan (86%), China (1.8%).

Access

According to Statistics from Wikipedia, in 2020 about 1600 million devices enter the site monthly, taking the average of the last twelve months.

Apart from the website, other alternative versions have been developed that fulfill the mission of viewing articles despite criticism of article censorship.

Wikipedia on mobile

In August 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation released an official Wikipedia app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that can be downloaded from the App Store. This app is free, free and only works on iPhone 3G or newer versions. There is also an Android version. As regards access via the website, alternatives such as the Wapedia site already existed; however, Wikipedia has its own mobile version of the site, available online.

On physical support

Other versions published by the Wikimedia Foundation were the physical distributions on CD (2003) and DVD (2005), which included the German, Polish, Portuguese and English versions. This is done using free Software Kiwix that allows direct installation. These features allow it to be possible to be used on computers without an internet connection, allowing interactivity and communication between different positions such as children’s centers.

In print versions

On Wikipedia, there are services that offer the printed version. MediaWiki has incorporated a collection tool to export articles to ODF or PDF. There is also the possibility of printing books via PediaPress, a partner program of the Wikimedia Foundation, by the same request.

Access Restrictions

Since October 2005, China had blocked access to Wikipedia, as the government routinely blocks access to websites it deems subversive and filters Internet pages with terms it deems sensitive. A year later, Wikipedia was unblocked on Chinese territory, although censorship was partially maintained with the terms “sensitive,” such as Tibet or Falun Gong.

In 2008, several schools in the United States banned the use of Wikipedia from their premises as unreliable. Also in the same year, 160,000 users requested through the Care 2 website the removal of images of Muhammad from Wikipedia articles. In this case the petition was rejected.

In October 2011, due to the passage of the gag law, the Italian Wikipedia had to suspend activities for fear of the severe fines they would execute on their biographical contents. Similarly, in January 2012, the English version censored itself to protest the SOPA law for an entire day. One of Twitter’s delegates, Dick Costolo, called the website “closing a global business for a single matter of national politics crazy.”

Community on Wikipedia

The Wikipedia community is a network of volunteers, sometimes known as “Wikipedians” and sometimes simply called “users”, who make contributions to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. There is a hierarchy by which certain editors are chosen to have greater editorial control of community members.

Emigh and Herring argue that “a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve maximum control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing the voices of contributors.” The community has also been criticized for responding to complaints about the quality of an article by advising people who complain to fix the article themselves. Professor James H. Fetzer has criticized Wikipedia in that he could not change the article about himself; to ensure fairness, Wikipedia has a policy that discourages editing biographies of the subjects themselves except in “clear cases,” such as reversing vandalism or corrections about outdated or erroneous data.

The community has been described as “cult”, although not always with negative connotations at all.

Wikipedia does not require its users to identify themselves. This means that multiple people may use one account or, more frequently, one person may use multiple accounts, often in an attempt to influence the content of articles, or help build consensus in editorial disputes. The latter practice is known as “sockpuppet users”, which is actively discouraged on Wikipedia.

In April 2008, writer and professor Clay Shirky and computer scientist Martin Wattenberg estimated the total effort to create Wikipedia at approximately 100 million man-hours.

Culture

Projects such as Wikipedia, Susning.nu or the Free Encyclopedia are wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal review criterion. Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in terms of number of articles or words ever written. Unlike many others, your content is released under open content licenses.

In the case of Spanish Wikipedia, anyone has the possibility to create a new article and almost any visitor can edit the content, except for articles that are protected. However, in English, unregistered users cannot start articles from scratch. Wikipedia was created with the idea of producing quality texts from the collaboration between users, similar to free application development projects.

Articles evolve over time, and this is visible in their edit history. Usually, some of the edits are vandalism—of content unrelated to Wikipedia or false information—and sometimes editors with conflicting views produce what is known as edit war.

This occurs when two or more editors enter a cycle of mutual reversals due to disputes caused by differences of opinion over the content of the article. Do not confuse vandalism – which often affects an article or articles only once – with edit warfare, which repeatedly affects the same article in a short period of time. Among the articles frequently vandalized in the Spanish edition are: George W. Bush, Benedict XVI or Jehovah’s Witnesses; while articles with strong edit wars are Cuba or Comunidad Valenciana, due to the disparity between the opinions of their editors.

Each chapter of Wikipedia has a group of staff, charged with cooperation. This list mentions administrators, whose fundamental functions are to do maintenance – such as deleting articles, blocking vandals and other functions – and to be at the service of compliance with the rules that govern it. The chapter with the most administrators is the English Wikipedia, with a total of more than 1600.

Mascot

Due to its considerable popularity, there were pet proposals that represented Wikipedia in an unofficial way. The first to appear was that of Wikípedo, a working ant dedicated to the maintenance of his contributions. His popularity was low.

In 2004, in a vote to be replaced or abandoned, the community chose Wikipe-tan, an OS-tan type character drawn by a graphic designer user for an anime and manga project. However, it has been criticized for being sexed, considered offensive by parts of the community.

Wikipedia policies

Wikipedia has a series of policies established by the participants themselves, whose joint purpose is to maintain the identity of the project as an encyclopedia and promote the quality of its contents. Each chapter of Wikipedia adopts its own policies, although some are common to all of them. Once the community reaches consensus on the application of a standard, all publishers are obliged to respect it.

Some of these policies are:

• Due to the diversity and number of participants and ideologies, coming from all over the world, Wikipedia tries to build its articles as thoroughly as possible. The goal is not to write articles from a single point of view, but to openly present each position on a certain topic. Obviously, not all positions fit, since the inclusion of contributions from those who exalt or defend ideas that imply hatred or violence would not be admitted, for example, phrases in favor of characters who have promoted the genocide of races considered inferior would not be admitted.
• A number of conventions are followed with regard to the naming of articles, preferably opting for the most commonly used version in their respective language.
• Discussions about the content and editing of an article occur on talk pages and not about the article itself.
• There are several topics that are excluded from Wikipedia because they do not constitute encyclopedic articles strictly speaking. For example, Wikipedia does not contain dictionary definitions—such as verbs, adjectives, etc.—that can be found in the Wiktionary.

Content neutrality

Wikipedia is a project aimed at —literally—everyone and editable by—literally—anyone. This characteristic is one of its greatest advantages, but it also generates a problem: there are people who introduce – deliberately or not – partial information, either by creating a biased approach, or by omitting points of view that they do not share or that do not interest them.

The policy that is responsible for combating this problem is the neutral point of view, which, basically, establishes the absolute and non-negotiable necessity of bringing together in the articles susceptible to controversy all the significant points of view. In addition, free content licenses ensure that such content can be republished as many times as necessary and by anyone if the purpose of editing is improvement. According to Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, collaboration produces positive and widely accepted effects.

For the computer engineer trained in philosophy Joaquín Siabra Fraile, Wikipedia is first a set of rules and procedures and, only later, contents, the rules are a virtual mechanism designed to achieve content fruit of rational consensus. For Siabra, the Wikipedian is given what Habermas considered as criteria of the participant in an ideal situation of communication: truth, rectitude and veracity.

Relevance of content

Wikipedia, due to its status as a non-profit electronic encyclopedia and in permanent growth both in terms of its content and its number of editors – the vast majority of whom collaborate altruistically – admits information that would have no place in a conventional encyclopedia, the latter limited by the physical space – number of volumes – in which this information is confined, for the number of editors hired by the publisher and for the time spent making the work.

However, not all information has a place, and there are criteria of relevance established by community consensus, so that, although no article is rejected a priori, new creations are investigated and those that do not meet certain requirements are discarded. For example, self-promotional items are not supported; that is, no person can publish an article about himself, about a close person – family, for example – or about the company in which he works. When the subject enjoys minimal – and necessary – relevance, it comes to capture the attention of at least some reputable media outlet – book, magazine, newspaper – and it is the latter who, according to Wikipedia rules, must be used to create the article. These criteria are covered by several policies, namely “Self-Promotion Pages”, “Criteria for Speedy Deletion”, “Wikipedia is not a primary source”, “Verifiability” and “Reliable sources”.

According to unofficial statements by a Colombian “librarian” —administrator— of the Spanish Wikipedia, the “librarians” of this Wikipedia delete more articles than those of other versions of Wikipedia.

Content License

The textual content is under the GNU and Creative Commons licenses; the latest version was updated by a vote between April 12 and May 3, 2009. By the motto, The free encyclopedia was understood, in the manner of free software, as a product of free and unrestricted distribution. Also, it is considered software by the coding of MediaWiki, under GPL. This redistribution presents the requirement that it must be accredited, that is, its attribution must be mentioned, since the license includes Share-Alike; in addition, it is necessary to keep this license – or another similar one – avoiding its distribution protection. However, work had been underway on the switch to Creative Commons licenses, because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are incompatible.

Each author, editor or illustrator who contributes to the encyclopedia is always credited with copyright under the Berne Convention. An author may also copy content from another with the appropriate permission, particularly in the case of freely licensed content, but content that prohibits its distribution, reproduction or modification may not be used in an unlawful manner, because that would safely limit its use and lead to policy problems. Therefore, in the English Wikipedia, any illustrative image can appear as long as it does so in a lawful manner.

Except for the content and several of its characteristics, the isologo of this corporate brand is protected, so its distribution is not allowed without prior authorization.

Data protection on Wikipedia

For the foundation, the privacy of information is as important as the prevention of vandalism. Many articles are reverted or even hidden from the history —in the image—, the latter is achieved with the elimination of information through suppressors that have specific tools for it. This, for example, removes insulting or intimidating edits and avoids confusing overloads in the article’s history.

As for the community, users do not give up too much information and it is the community itself that easily decides to save from any threat. That makes it possible to attribute in an ‘anonymous’ manner and minimizes the work. To manage, for example, statistics are made, to organize visits, articles, among others; it may be unusual to census communities. As for the attribution, Creative Commons, for its part, does not guarantee the content for the image rights that have been assigned.

On the German Wikipedia articles are not published until they have been reviewed by an expert editor. The possibility of applying the same measure on the English Wikipedia is being considered.

Operation

Wikipedia is being edited by thousands of people around the world. With the exception of certain persons paid by the Wikimedia Foundation, the rest, known in Wikipedia jargon as Wikipedians, always act free of charge and on a voluntary basis. In total, the community is made up of more than 400 million registered users worldwide, including just over 1,700,000 in the Hispanic version, where 13% are women.

On Wikipedia’s internal pages, primarily aimed at contributors, users are encouraged to participate actively in the project. There are several ways to collaborate: from creating new articles, expanding existing ones, or correcting texts that do not comply with established style conventions or whose information is erroneous or inaccurate, to classify articles by subject, add images and other multimedia materials from the Commons repository, remove copyrighted texts, provide suggestions, or, for the most inexperienced, simply point out any defects found in order for others to correct. Currently, 63 are human administrators and 32 are robot maintenance systems as “automatic workers” of maintenance.

Anonymous user

To collaborate it is not necessary to register. For that reason, contributors who do not register, known as anonymous users, are identified in their edits with an IP number instead of an alias. Because they are not registered, they are restricted from certain actions, such as voting in decision-making.

Registered user on Wikipedia

On Wikipedia, registration is free and instant. The registered user, unlike the anonymous user, identifies himself with an alias and a user page of his own, note in addition to being able to customize his wiki editing interface. A necessary condition when registering is to choose an alias that is not offensive or difficult to write.

Some users who have been editing Wikipedia without problems for some time are assigned the category of autoconfirmed; their edits appear on the recent changes page with a different background than the rest of the users. It is a measure of the economy of efforts that allows users who are dedicated to combating vandalism and reverting incorrect edits, based on the trust in these users, to refrain from checking their edits and thus focus their work on the rest of the edits, reducing the volume of work with less risk of making mistakes.

To date, there are 6,566,163 registered users in the Spanish edition, of which less than 0.3% are active users – users who have taken at least one action in the last 30 days. According to Christian Stegbauer, a German sociologist, “by the number of contributors it cannot be defined whether Wikipedia is democratic or not.” In his own words, and referring to the German Wikipedia: “our conclusion is that in the background there are less than 1000 people who decide on this digital encyclopedia”.

It has been proven that certain users create so-called particular purpose accounts; these users register for the sole purpose of entering information that benefits their own interests, which is why on many occasions their edits are biased, partial or useless from the encyclopedic point of view.

According to an analysis published on April 1, 2009 by Spanish researcher José Felipe Ortega, of the Libresoft group at the Rey Juan Carlos University, Wikipedia had suffered “a notable decline in editors” in all its language versions between 2007 and 2009. The news was widely picked up by the media. That latter assertion was refuted by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Management features

A small portion of Wikipedia users—about 0.5% of active users and 1 ^o/oooo of the total number of registered users on the Spanish Wikipedia — are engaged in administrative duties. These users exercise these functions – after being proposed by another user or users, usually veterans – in a democratic vote open to the entire community of registered users, and the requirements and rules of that vote – and of any vote in general – are included in a policy called “Voting”.

According to the German sociologist Christian Stegbauer, “the interesting thing is that administrators are elected, and thus obtain a kind of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, only a part of the people actively participate in such a choice, and many of them are already administrators. If it is an administrator who proposes a candidate, the probability of being elected is greater than if the proposal comes from another member.”

The Wikimedia Foundation describes the following main administrative positions, unnecessary for editing, but necessary for protection and coordination issues in the software:

• Edit suppressors are users who delete edits, deciding how in complex ways.
• “Librarians” are users who can block other users from editing, and they can also delete articles with unnecessary information.
• So-called checkusers can track an IP address to verify identities. This is necessary to avoid a duplication system called so-called sockpuppet users used for voting advantage or deception purposes.
• So-called “bureaucrats” have permissions to grant administrator status, control bots, and change usernames.

According to unofficial statements by a Colombian librarian of the Spanish Wikipedia, there is a problem of communication between the librarians of this Wikipedia in the exercise of policies and some people who consider themselves experts in certain topics, and this problem is detrimental to the encyclopedia. It also states that librarians on the Spanish Wikipedia remove more articles than those on other versions of Wikipedia. In any event, the statements of Wikipedia users, whether they hold administrative office or not, must be taken as a mere personal opinion without the slightest representativeness, since, although librarians are democratically elected by the rest of the users, their functions do not include those of representing the community or Wikipedia or of establishing authority beyond that conferred on them by the exercise of policies.

Bots of Wikipedia

Various automatic editing systems regularly operate on Wikipedia. They are called bots (robot contraction), and they fulfill the performance of certain tedious tasks for editors, such as the creation of links between the different editions of the encyclopedia, small internal adjustments of the wiki code, the correction of spelling mistakes, etc. Some Wikipedia editions also use bots for mass article creation, usually stubs. To be considered as such they must have at least the BOT affix and a supervisor, which is the owner user.

Software and hardware

Wikipedia runs on the free software MediaWiki. MediaWiki is phase III of the program, whose development story is as follows:

• Phase I: Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, created by Clifford Adams. At first it was necessary to use CamelCase for the links; later this was solved and it was possible to use double brackets.
• Phase II: In January 2002, Wikipedia began operation on a PHP wiki engine with MySQL database. This software, phase II, was written by Magnus Manske specifically for the Wikipedia project. Later many improvements and modifications were implemented to increase performance due to the increasing demand.
• Phase III: Finally, the software was rewritten by Lee Daniel Crocker. Established in July 2002, this phase III of the program was called MediaWiki. It is covered under the GPL license and is used by all Wikimedia projects.

Various MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of the MediaWiki software.

In July 2013, after extensive beta testing, the WYSIWYG extension of the visual editor was opened to public use. The feature was changed to default later.

Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated groups of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu). As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam. By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2017, Wikipedia had installed a caching cluster at an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia.

Wikimedia Foundation and sister projects

The Wikipedia website is maintained exclusively by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization established under the laws of Florida (United States) whose purpose is to promote in the world economic and social support for various collaborative projects of free content. Its existence was officially announced by Bomis CEO and Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales on June 20, 2003.

Complementary support projects of Wikipedia

Two of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects act as complements to the rest of the projects, including Wikipedia. One is a multimedia content store that the editors of the rest of the projects can embed as illustrations, and the other takes care of the software that supports all the projects:

• Wikimedia Commons: Also called Commons or The Commune, it is a common repository of images and free multimedia content for the Wikimedia Foundation’s sister projects. Before its existence, to use an image in a certain Wikipedia you had to upload it to the corresponding edition, which cloned the same content several times, something really inefficient. For this, massive upload scripts were used, which have now fallen into disuse due to the existence of Commons.
• Meta-Wiki: It is a website whose system manages the wiki technology for the visualization of the pages of the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Sister projects

There are contents that have no place in Wikipedia because they are not encyclopedic information. For this reason, several sister projects have been developed independent of each other that collect this other type of information. All of them are also multilingual and free and are managed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• Wiktionary: It is the project of the Wikimedia Foundation for the construction of a free dictionary. It has a complementary function to Wikipedia, since a large number of articles, due to their non-encyclopedic nature, are intended for the dictionary.
• Wikibooks: It aims to make available to anyone textbooks, manuals, tutorials or other pedagogical texts of free content and free access.
• Wikiversity: Supported by the previous one, it is proposed as an online educational platform, free and free, where it is possible to create learning projects at any educational level, participate in a learning group, create didactic content such as exams, practice exercises, etc.
• Wikiquote: It is an open online compendium of famous phrases in all languages, including the sources – when they are known.
• Wikinews: It is a source of news of free content.
• Wikisource: It is an online library of original texts that have been published under a GFDL license or are in the public domain.
• Wikispecies: It is an open and free repertoire of biological species whose objective is to cover all known life forms .
• Wikivoyage: It is a free tourist guide.

The Wikipedia’s popular impact

Wikipedia is one of the most visited and referenced websites in the world on the Internet, and consequently is one of the first sites – or even the first, in many cases – among those that appear in the results of search engines. This fact, added to the increasing influence of the Internet on people, results in an enormous popular impact of the collaborative encyclopedia at all levels, an impact that increases as time goes by.

In recent years, Wikipedia has been significantly influencing the media, especially journalistic media, which on numerous occasions copied information from the encyclopedic web, most often without citing the source. In that regard, the experiment carried out by Shane Fitzerald, a 22-year-old Dublin university student, published on 6 May 2009 by the newspaper IrishTimes.com: is quite illustrative.

After learning of Maurice Jarre’s passing a few hours earlier, Shane edited the composer’s article to include a fictitious quote:

One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.

“I could say that my life itself has been a long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and as music I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, which only I will be able to hear.”

Shortly thereafter the quote appeared in the obituary sections of The Guardian and The London Independent newspapers, on The BBC Music Magazine website and in newspapers in India and Australia.

This experiment demonstrates the strength of the Internet on a global scale. The journalists who used this quote obviously relied on Wikipedia as a source of information; perhaps they could not afford to conduct further research under the pressure of the need to be the first to publish the quote, and as a result provided readers with false information. As for Wikipedia, errors are usually corrected promptly, although, in cases like the one reported, not enough to get ahead of events.

These types of experiments are rarely performed on Wikipedia, and editors who are discovered receive severe punishments from administrators that, depending on the severity of their fault, can lead to blocking their IP address in perpetuity.

On the other hand, there are people who accuse Wikipedia of defamation, and the case of Alejandro Peña Esclusa is illustrative, who claimed that the government of his country was carrying out a campaign against him in which the encyclopedia collaborated. In any case, Wikipedia, as a non-primary source project, is based on a series of policies that promote verifiability and the use of reliable and reputable sources. From this point on, Wikipedia delegates any kind of responsibility at the time it publishes the name of the source from which the information was obtained. Hence, among other things, the importance of verifiability, one of the five basic pillars on which the project is based.

There have been several cases in which political leaders, or people close to them, modified Wikipedia articles interestedly.

In another order of things, versions have been created that parody it. Among the best known are, in English, Uncyclopedia and Encyclopædia Dramatica, and, in Spanish, La Frikipedia and Inciclopedia. In humorous comics, Skeletorappears vandalizing the He-Man article.

Awards and recognitions

Due to its merits and popularity, the website has obtained over the years several awards and mentions. Samples include:

• In April 2004, Jonathan Dee of The New York Times, and Andrew Lih, at the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism (2004), cited the importance of Wikipedia not only as a reference encyclopedia but also as a source of up-to-date information due to the speed with which articles on recent events appeared.
• On 23 June 2004, Wikipedia received the Golden Nica award for Digital Communities in the annual Prix Ars Electronica competition, endowed with one thousand pounds sterling.
• In the spring of 2004, he was awarded the Webby Award in the category “Best Community”.
• In 2006, Time magazine named “You” as “Person of the Year,” recognizing the accelerated success of online collaboration and interaction among millions of users around the world; he also cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of “Web 2.0” services, along with YouTube and MySpace.
• On January 26, 2007, Wikipedia ranked fourth in a survey of brandchannel.com readers, receiving 15% of the vote in response to the question “Which brand had the greatest impact on our lives in 2006?”
• On October 24, 2008 Wikipedia participated, along with 23 other nominated websites, in the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. The winner was the Spanish division of Google.
• In 2010, Google donated two million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation while mentioning Wikipedia as “one of the great triumphs of the internet.”
• In 2013, Andriy Makukha of Wikimedia Ukraine proposed the name “Wikipedia” to asteroid 2008 QH24. (274301) Wikipedia is a main-belt asteroid discovered in 2008. The designation was endorsed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

The official designation of the asteroid “Wikipedia” reads:

Wikipedia is a free, copyleft and collaboratively edited encyclopedia launched in 2001. In 11 years of its collection it became one of the most important reference works and one of the most visited sites on the Internet. It is developed by enthusiasts from all over the world in more than 270 languages.

• On June 17, 2015, it was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation.

An important example of international cooperation, democratic, open and participatory, in which thousands of people of all nationalities collaborate selflessly, which has managed to make universal knowledge available to everyone in a line similar to that achieved by the encyclopedic spirit of the eighteenth century.

Stimuli

Wikipedia users organize regular and occasional events with the aim of promoting the creation and editing of articles. For example, in 2006 a project called Wiki-challenge: 250k was created, dedicated to increasing the number of articles, which reached the end of the year to 250,000 articles on the Spanish Wikipedia. such or similar projects are organized each year. On the other hand, there are a number of projects included in the website itself that are called Wikiprojects, each of which is dedicated to working on a specific topic – spelling corrections, creation and expansion of articles of a certain field, handling of illustrations, etc.

Outside of the website, others have expressed the personal impressions the site produced to them. For example, Vicente Verdú, in an article in the digital version of the Spanish newspaper El País, described the experience of using Wikipedia as “a fun and multitudinous way to enjoy, play, love and hang out.” For its part, in an opinion piece in Terra Networks Peru, its disorderly and excessive use was considered to cause ‘wiki addiction’.

In an interview with Jimmy Wales, representative of the Wikimedia Foundation, for EFE, he explained his belief that the expansion of the Internet in other countries would expand the use of Wikipedia especially in underdeveloped places, thus creating a connection of cultures. On the occasion of Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary, Wales himself declared his desire for Wikipedia to reach 1 billion users by 2015.

On the economic front, Alex Konanykhin, founder and president of non-Wikimedia WikiExperts.us, presented Wales with a proposal for collaboration. The plan was to offer the services of a network of writers by contract to all companies or entities that met the requirements of rigor demanded by Wikipedia to create their own articles in an encyclopedic way. According to Konanykhin, this financial model would secure the future of Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia, far from presenting economic difficulties, has broken its fundraising record in the campaign carried out for the year 2011, with 16 million dollars from 500,000 donors from 140 countries, all in just one and a half months.

Reviews

Criticism of Wikipedia has been directed towards its content, procedures, the character and practices of the Wikipedia community, as well as its nature as an open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The main concerns of its critics are the reliability of the content, the writing of its prose, the organization of the articles, as well as the existence of systemic, gender and racial biases among the publishing community. Wikipedia has also been criticized for its uneven handling, acceptance, and retention of articles on controversial topics.

Other concerns include vandalism produced by anonymous editing, the formation of publisher communities and their complicated forms of government, which require frequent discussion and sometimes employ “judicial” rhetoric. Some critics predict the end of Wikipedia for these reasons.

Reliability and accuracy on Wikipedia

There is controversy over its reliability and accuracy. The scientific journal Naturestated in December 2005 that the English Wikipedia was almost as accurate in scientific articles as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The study was conducted by comparing 42 articles of both works by a committee of experts without them knowing which of the two encyclopedias they came from. The result was that Wikipedia had almost the same level of accuracy as the Encyclopedia Britannica, but averaged one more error per article.

On the other hand, and according to a report published in June 2009 also by the newspaper El País in Madrid, a 2007 study, directed by the French journalist Pierre Assouline and carried out by a group of students of the Master’s Degree in Journalism of the Institute of Political Studies of Paris to analyze the reliability of the project, it materialized in the book The Wikipedia Revolution (Editorial Alliance) whose conclusions were quite critical. Among other things, he claimed that the Nature study was lax and biased, as well as that, according to his own study, Britannica remained 24% more reliable than Wikipedia.

Lack of references and content

Since its birth, Larry Sanger already disagreed about the possible lack of veracity, and was followed later by other authors, such as Arias Maldonado (2010, p. 15-31) or Assouline et al. (2008). Even those who defend it as a documented work, in the case of Tim O’Reilly, place it in the last places. Ndesanjo Macha indicates that many times the most enriching thing is in the discussions and not in the article itself, because there the different points of view and the existing gaps can be better reflected.

For Bob McHenry, former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the biggest risks facing Wikipedia is the entry of people convinced that their point of view is the true one, preventing them from including any other. It is for this reason that the really valuable can appear in the discussions and not the article, as Ndesanjo Macha confirms.

For Assouline et al. (2008, p. 12)Wikipedia is killing the values of verification and consultation of primary sources that journalists, historians or knowledge professionals in general should have. According to the author “this online encyclopedia is also the ideal tool for misinformation” when edited by political parties and other pressure groups.

It also presents problems in the differentiation of the important and the superfluous: thus, in the French version, the entry on Albert Londres began by saying “French Jewish journalist […]” as if his religion were the second most important fact of the summary, uncertain at the same time because he was a Londoner and a Catholic, the result of a campaign to discredit him by passing him off as a Jew. Another example was the article about Alexandre Solzhenitsyn that dedicated half of its content to the writer’s relationship with Spain, for having made a comment about Francisco Franco that the editor did not like.

The examples given by Assouline about the excessive extension of some contents compared to others were endorsed by a study led by the University of Minnesota, along with three others, in 2011. The conclusion was that the English Wikipedia showed that articles made by women, presumably intended more for a female audience, were significantly shorter than those written by men or by men and women. In that same year the University of Oxford showed that 84% of references to localities were located in Europe and North America, in the same way that Antarctica had more articles than Africa or South America.

Errors and vandalism on Wikipedia

Two of the main reasons why Wikipedia is criticized for the accuracy and reliability of its content are the persistence of erroneous details that are difficult to detect —inaccuracies that are not necessarily malicious, but that can remain in an article for a long time.

On the other hand, vandalism, inappropriate or offensive modifications of the articles that hinder the development of the project, constitute an important factor in the problems of content, whose long-term solution does not pass – as in the other two cases – by a constant improvement of quality or by the incorporation or progressive expansion of articles. While content inaccuracies and irregular growth trends can be remedied as the project continues to evolve—and article edits increase—vandalism represents a constant threat that increases in proportion to Wikipedia’s exponential growth. For example, exposure to a greater influx of visits to articles published in various media outlets involved a very high percentage of vandalism, including by public figures, almost as much as that of constructive changes.

But it’s not just about edits within articles, there are also fake entire articles. The English Wikipedia has an entry dedicated only to them, as well as the Spanish Wikipedia. The existence of fake articles with a duration of almost ten years sows doubts about Wikipedia’s ability to self-correct. In other cases, in addition to the duration, the successive filters through which they passed stand out, in the case of the Bicholim Conflict that was drafted without anyone noticing the fraud, proposed to Bueno, chosen as a Good Article, proposed to Featured and rejected for technical reasons without anyone checking the veracity of the contents.

Similarly happened with the article Gaius Flavius Antoninus, the alleged murderer of Julius Caesar, whose entry remained eight years in the form of a sketch. One of the most controversial was Santiago Swallow, a fictional lecturer created by Kevin Ashton who was discovered when a press article was published where the author stated that he “invested 68 dollars to make him famous”. In 2014 an algorithm made by the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications was developed on the basis of the Bayesian network, a method similar to spam detection; it is thought that the system will be implemented in the near future.

A paradigmatic example of mass vandalism occurred on July 31, 2006, as a result of a call for participation by Stephen Colbert, a well-known American comedian and television host, in a section of his program The Colbert Report that he titled Wikiality: after some gags around the possibility of changing the location of states and countries in their respective Wikipedia definitions, he encouraged viewers to modify the entry ‘elephant’ to show that, instead of decreasing, the population of the African elephant had tripled. As an immediate result, up to twenty English Wikipedia entries referring to elephants were either blocked by their administrators, or became semi-protected, only modifiable by registered users with a minimum of seniority.

For all the examples cited and their variants, apart from the corrective measures carried out in the form of reversal, warning or blocking, the community of Wikipedians creates and maintains – as happens among volunteer programmers in free software environments – a whole series of tools and technical implementations aimed at acting against vandalism, from forums and specific IRC channels to parallel detection and warning programs, to users who are actually bot programs whose mission is exclusively to combat vandalism. It seems that with these modifications that problem began to be under control since 2007, but limited the chances of survival of Wikipedia.

At other times the mistakes come from confusion. Some have confused “Wikipedia” with “WikiLeaks,” a leaked document storage site known for the Cablegate controversy. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, explained that, when WikiLeaks began its activities in 2006, it presented itself as the ‘Wikipedia of secrets’. When Wales founded Wikipedia he created an organization called Wikia. This organization was responsible for registering the domains under the term Wiki, and allowed WikiLeaks in its beginnings to use the term Wiki and its corresponding domain. However, currently — in January 2011 — the domains acquired by WikiLeaks are about to expire, and Jimmy Wales has no intention of renewing the contract since, in his own words, he does not want Wikipedia to be linked to WikiLeaks.

Manipulations and bias

The project has significant subsidies from US multinationals, of capitalist interests. On the other hand, in the opinion of César Rendueles, doctor of philosophy, associate professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and User of Wikipedia, “everything [on Wikipedia] is much more domestic than some people imagine”. In his opinion, “the encyclopedia is “controlled” by all those who generously devote their time regularly to the editing of articles”, and states that as a result the encyclopedia reflects the predominantly conservative profile –although in many cases for the writing of articles, it shows the liberal side, giving greater emphasis on freedom of content than on the cooperation of the same—of those who have more free time.

He concludes by saying that “a greater presence of the university and school community would be a real breath of fresh air” for the encyclopedia. Opinion contrary to other authors such as Daniel Rodríguez Herrera, for whom Wikipedia has a clear leftist tendency, which is verified by seeing the summaries of Stalin and other communist leaders who are not called at any time “dictators”, only leaders.

Some companies have repeatedly tried to manipulate the information that appears about them on Wikipedia by emphasizing the positive aspects and softening or eliminating the negatives in order to improve their corporate image. For example, Microsoft deleted a paragraph showing bugs from its Xbox 360 console, and the Chevron-Texaco oil consortium deleted entire text about biodiesel. In 2013 the economic newspaper Expansióndenounced the actions of some of the main Spanish companies to manipulate their history or favorably alter the biographies of their managers. Changes of this type can be detected with the use of a tool called WikiScanner.

Other criticisms, in addition to their accuracy, have been referring to the violation of the privacy of some people, to the addition of images interpreted as child pornography, the low certainty in the entries on health issues, or the creation of biographical articles on animals. Some complaints became very notorious and serious, such as the use of the shield belonging to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in one of its articles.

A topic of controversy in certain media is the work of some administrators – “librarians” – who overreach in their functions by blocking other users and generating anger, which is why several want to keep their incognito for fear of reprisals. The Wikipedia environment also allows and even encourages such performances; for, according to Arias Maldonado, one of the fun parts of Wikipedia is conspiring. Evidence from FiveThirtyEight on the 100 most edited articles in the English version shows that the most controversial topics for Wikipedia are sports, American entertainment characters, politics and religion. At the top of the list are articles about the United States, Michael Jackson, Jesus Christ and WWE wrestlers, the latter much larger than the Real Madrid article.

Gender

The gender gap in Wikipedia, also called gender bias in Wikipedia, refers to the fact that between 84 and 91 percent of those who edit the community are male, even though they are 50 percent of the world’s population. This bias is one of the main criticisms of Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has acknowledged the situation and launched several initiatives to reduce bias. In August 2014, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, announced in an interview with the BBC the foundation’s plans to balance the representation of both genders in the community. According to Wales, the organization proposes to allocate more funds to research and modify the software to encourage female participation.

A study on the unequal treatment in the contents of the largest encyclopedia on the web found that only large women are well represented in the encyclopedia and articles about them present gender inequalities.

Reduction in the number of visits and editors

Despite the fact that more and more people are informed on Wikipedia, this website has seen a significant drop in its visits in the Google search engine, about 250 million in three months (April-June 2015) representing about 11%, as reported by a study by Similar Web, a British technology and information company and then corroborated by the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. One of the reasons for this sharp drop may be that the search engine gives a direct reference to Wikipedia on the right side of the screen, which would remove the need to click on the link.

In a report by Hackernoon, an American website in technology publishing, Wikipedia had lost +3k million page views in 2019. By January 2020, it had lost 14% of its traffic compared to the same month in 2019. The main culprit of this download is the Google search engine, which among its many functions and tools, often shows extracts from Wikipedia when doing a search and usually gives priority to YouTube videos, a platform it owns. Similar situation is occurring due to Alexa and Siri assistants. This fashionable search system is called click-free search and causes Wikipedia to lose visits at high speed.

As for the number of editors, according to Ortega Soto (2009) the main versions of Wikipedia (English, German, Japanese, Spanish, etc.) were losing users because the new editors did not compensate in number to the veterans who left the edition. In addition, the average time it took for an editor to give up had decreased. This trend was confirmed in 2013 by Tom Simonite of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), when he confirmed that the Wikimedia Foundation itself recognized that the online encyclopedia had problems in the face of the increasingly pronounced lack of volunteers.

In contrast, the trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining its active editors in a renewable and sustained manner, with a relatively constant number.

Scientific research on Wikipedia

In 2010, Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg published research on the use of Wikipedia by college students. The study took place at seven universities in the United States, and aimed to show how often, for what reason and at what point in academic work, this encyclopedia is used. The result positioned it as the sixth source of consultation and the second non-academic; the favorite encyclopedia to get a general background on a topic. It ranked ahead of government sites, classmates, personal collections of books, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was relegated to eleventh place (61%).

Position	Fountain	Percentage
1	Course readings	97%
2	Google Search	95%
3	Academic databases	93%
4	Online Public Access Catalog	90%
5	Instructors	87%
6	Wikipedia	85%

A 2018 Carolina University study concluded that Wikipedia is the most widely used open educational resource by students, and argued that educational institutions should focus their attention on it (e.g., supporting resident Wikipedians).

References (sources)