Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia where content is contributed and moderated by users.
Description of user contribution system
Traditional encyclopedia publishers have acted as an intermediary between the writers that produce articles and the readers that consume them. Wikipedia enables writers to connect directly to readers, while a robust editing mechanism facilitates moderation of articles and helps ensure accuracy. The encyclopedia’s function has shifted from finding, paying for, compiling, and distributing information to providing an environment with carefully structured checks to increase the speed of delivery, number of subjects covered and accuracy of articles while reducing cost.
Wikipedia’s redefinition of the business function has brought them great success: they receive roughly 450 times more traffic than the online version of the Britannica, based on independent page-view statistics gathered by Alexa in the first three months of 2007.
Benefits for the users
Visitors can access many more articles than are available in conventional encyclopedias. For example, as of September 2008, Wikipedia featured 2.5 million English articles compared to 500,000 articles in Britannica. Also, articles are accessible at no charge, compared to $1000 for Britannica (24 volume 1980 edition).
Benefits for the creators of the system
450 times more traffic than the online version of the Britannica, based on independent page-view statistics gathered by Alexa in the first three months of 2007. Although it is a non-profit, its model enables the site to run on $4.6M per year, which it purportedly covers with donations.
History of the idea
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the counter-intuitive strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.
Scale
As of September 2008, Wikipedia has over 2.5 million English-language articles and 10 million articles in total.
More resources
See also on this wiki:
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