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What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a Web-based free content encyclopedia that is openly edited and freely readable. It has 187 independent language editions sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Entries on traditional encyclopedic topics exist alongside those on almanac, gazetteer and current events topics. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving around 80 million hits per day.[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#fn_Openfact)
Wikipedia contains approximately 1.3 million articles, over 480,000 of which are in its English language edition. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on 15 January 2001. Its name is a combination of Wiki, a Hawaiian word meaning "quick" adopted to describe a kind of collaborative software, and encyclopedia. Having steadily gained in popularity,[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#fn_Popularity) it has spawned numerous conceptually related sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews.
Wikipedia has been praised for being free, being openly accessible, covering a wide range of topics, and being detailed. It has been criticized for lack of authority versus a traditional encyclopedia, systemic bias, and for deficiencies in traditional encyclopedic topics. It is also a large-scale experiment of a discourse as defined in social sciences: "an institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic", in a global internet context of the early third millennium.
The idea of a free, open community, united by technology, where increasingly vast amounts of content are actively authored, reviewed, and debated for public consumption, makes the Wikipedia distinctive not only amongst encyclopedias but amongst informational resources in general. However, by its very nature of being open for anyone to edit, it is the responsibility of the individual editor and of the Wikipedia community to be on constant guard against blatant acts of vandalism and lack of objective viewpoint. The credibility of Wikipedia has often come into question, because the fact that the content can be freely edited by anyone who so chooses opens the door for a certain degree of inaccuracy and poorly researched content. Vandalism is a persistent problem, though to the community's credit it is typically caught and reverted within minutes.
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© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
