Sunday, October 29, 2006

Wikipedia

Sunday, October 29, 2006

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. You can view the changes at the Recent changes page. New articles are also being recorded. Many different kinds of people help to write Wikipedia articles.Wikipedia also has many ongoing projects. The hope of any contributor is to provide useful and accurate information to others, and the projects help coordinate efforts. Most articles start as stubs, but after many contributions, they can become featured articles.If you can't find what you are looking for, see Where to ask questions for a list of departments where our volunteers answer questions, any question you can possibly imagine.Once you've determined that there is no article on Wikipedia on a topic you are interested in, you may want to request the article be written (or you could even research the issue and write it yourself).You can also view random articles.You might also enjoy reading Wikipedia in other languages. Wikipedia has more than two hundred different languages (see other language versions), including a Simple English version, and related projects include a dictionary, quotations, books, manuals and scientific reference sources, and a news service (see sister projects). All of these are maintained, updated and managed by separate communities, and often include thought-provoking information and articles which can be hard to find through other common sources.Basic navigation in WikipediaWikipedia articles are all linked, or cross-referenced. Wherever you see highlighted text like this, it means there is a link to some relevant article or Wikipedia page with further in-depth information elsewhere if you need it. Holding your mouse over the link will often show you where a link will take you. You are always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached.There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external web sites and pages, reference material, and organized categories of knowledge which you can search and traverse in a loose hierarchy for more information.Some articles may also have links to dictionary definitions, audio-book readings, quotations, or the same article in other languages.You can add further links if a relevant link is missing, and this is one way to contribute.Using Wikipedia as a research toolAs a wiki, articles are never complete. They are continually edited and improved over time, and in general this results in an upward trend of quality, and a growing consensus over a fair and balanced representation of information.Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start. Indeed, many articles commence their lives as partisan, and it is after a long process of discussion, debate and argument, that they gradually take on a consensus form. Others may for a while become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint which can take some time - months perhaps - to extricate themselves and regain a better balanced consensus.In part, this is because Wikipedia operates an internal resolution process when editors cannot agree on content and approach, and such issues take time to come to the attention of more experienced editors.The ideal Wikipedia article is balanced, neutral and encyclopedic, containing notable verifiable knowledge. An increasing number of articles reach this standard over time, and many already have. However this is a process and can take months or years to be achieved, as each user adds their contribution in turn. Some articles contain statements and claims which have not yet been fully cited. Others will later have entire new sections added. Some information will be considered by later contributors to be insufficiently founded, and may be removed or expounded.While the overall trend is generally upward, it is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source, since individual articles will, by their nature, vary in standard and maturity. There are guidelines and information pages designed to help users and researchers do this effectively, and an article that summarizes third party studies and assessments of the reliability of Wikipedia.Who writes Wikipedia?Unlike with other encyclopedias, the volunteer authors of Wikipedia articles don't have to be experts or scholars, although some certainly are. They can be anyone, including you! Volunteers do not need any formal training before creating a new article or editing an existing article. Many people have created or edited articles in Wikipedia. They come from countries all around the world, from all ages and backgrounds. Anyone who contributes to this encyclopedia is called a "Wikipedian" or "Wiki." It is Wikipedia policy to add to the encyclopedia only statements that are verifiable, and not to add original research. The Wikipedia style guide encourages editors to cite sources. Sometimes Wikipedians do not follow these policies because they forget or because they are not aware of the policy. Then readers of the article cannot be sure that a statement is verifiable.When a number of people are working to compile information on a given topic, disputes will inevitably arise from time to time. A useful feature of Wikipedia is the ability to tag an article or a section of an article as being the subject of a dispute about a neutral point of view. This feature is especially popular for controversial topics, topics subject to changing current events or other topics where divergent opinions are possible. To resolve the dispute, the interested editors will share their points of view on the article's talk page. They will attempt to reach consensus about how to edit so that both their perspectives are fairly represented. This allows Wikipedia to be a place not only of information but of collaboration.Many users of Wikipedia consult the page history of an article in order to assess the number of people who have contributed to the article. An article can be considered more likely to be accurate when it has been edited by many different people (since most edits are constructive changes rather than destructive ones). You may also consult the talk page of any article to see what other readers and editors have to say about it.One list of articles that has been edited by many people is the list of featured articles. These articles are considered to be of high quality when they are granted featured article status, and if later edits reduce the quality of the page a user can nominate an article for removal from that special status.How Wikipedians improve articlesWhenever a reader finds something in an article that he or she doesn't think should be there, that person can edit the article and help make Wikipedia more accurate and useful. Someone may place a notice at the top of the article indicating that it needs to be cleaned up. It is also possible to create a new article to share information that is not already in Wikipedia.When they first hear about Wikipedia, many people think that articles are created by people adding a few words at a time. Many edits are very minor and just fix spelling, rephrase a sentence or add a fact or two. But some editors who are interested in a particular subject contribute paragraphs or whole articles at a time; these editors might be professors, hobbyists or just someone wanting to fill a hole in the encyclopedia.Assembling text piece by piece doesn't necessarily take into account the bigger picture, so sometimes an editor will reorganize an article or rewrite it, keeping the same facts but making them flow more smoothly. Material also sometimes needs to be moved into other articles for any of these reasons: if it's been put in the wrong place, if one article has become too big and needs to be split up, if two articles on the same subject have accidentally been created or if there are many small articles that need to be combined into one larger one. Profanity is usually removed immediately.Who keeps order?Most Wikipedia editors discuss article content in a friendly way or gingerly improve each other's work. Most mistakes or bad edits are corrected by someone who notices them and changes them back or cleans them up. Publicly available tools like the recent changes page and personal watchlists help editors find bad edits without having to continually check all the pages on the site.Some problems are more serious, including vandalism (blatant stupidity, jokes that aren't funny, placing pornography in articles, deliberate defacement or falsification), disputes which result in edit wars (where editors change an article back and forth and fight instead of being discussed), and disruptive behavior. To deal with these cases, several hundred Wikipedia administrators have the power to protect (lock) articles, and to block individual editors. These administrators are elected by the community to enforce the site's policies and guidelines.The administrator power is granted by a small number of bureaucrats and stewards, who in turn have been granted their power by developers - the volunteers (and two paid employees) who have physical or online access to the servers that power the site. The hardware that runs the site is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a charitable organization financed by your donations. The Board of Trustees and the site founder Jimmy Wales oversee all the projects of the foundation, which is not limited to the encyclopedias. They have largely delegated authority for arbitrating day-to-day disputes on the English Wikipedia to our local Arbitration Committee, a collection of appointed and elected volunteers who act like judges in a court. (You might think of the community of administrators as the local volunteer police force - they have special but limited powers, and their actions are subject to review by the court and by each other.)How to edit a page?Editing most Wikipedia pages is not very difficult. Simply click on the "edit this page" tab at the top of a Wikipedia page (or on a section-edit link). This will bring you to a new page with a text box containing the editable text of the original page. If you just want to experiment, please do so in the sandbox; You should write a short edit summary in the small field below the edit-box. You may use shorthand to describe your changes, as described in the legend, and when you have finished, press the Show preview button to see how your changes will look. You can also see the difference between the page with your edits and the previous version of the page by pressing the "Show changes" button. If you're satisfied with what you see, be bold and press the Save page button. Your changes will immediately be visible to other Wikipedia users.You can also click on the "Discussion" tab to see the corresponding talk page, which contains comments about the page from other Wikipedia users. Click on the "+" tab to add a new section, or edit the page in the same way as an article page.You should remember to sign your messages on talk pages and some special-purpose project pages, but you should not sign edits you make to regular articles. In page histories, the MediaWiki software keeps track of which user makes each change.Minor editsWhen editing an article page on this site, a logged-in user can mark that edit as being "minor". Minor edits generally mean spelling corrections, formatting, and minor rearrangement of text. It is possible to "hide" minor edits when viewing the recent changes. Marking a significant change as a minor edit is considered bad behavior, especially when it involves the deletion of some text (not counting errors such as repeated words). If you accidentally mark an edit as minor, you should edit the source once more, mark it major (or, rather, ensure that the check-box for "This is a minor edit" is not checked), and note that your previous edit was major in the new edit summary.Major editsAll editors are encouraged to be bold, but there are several things that a user can do to ensure that major edits are performed smoothly. Before engaging in a major edit, consider discussing proposed changes on the article discussion/talk page. During the edit, if doing so over an extended period of time, the {{inuse}} tag can reduce the likelihood of an edit conflict. Once the edit has been completed, the inclusion of an edit summary will assist in documenting the changes. These steps will all help to ensure that major edits are well received by the Wikipedia community.
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Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website.A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. An encyclopedia comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically.Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates the Wikipedia project, and several other wiki projects, including Wiktionary and Wikinews. He is also founder of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is the parent organization of the Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior), Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Meta-Wiki collaborative projects. It is a not-for-profit corporation based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida. Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who was hitherto running Wikipedia within his company Bomis, on June 20, 2003. Its approval by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, by letter in April 2005, as an educational foundation in the category "Adult, Continuing Education" means all contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Currently Wikipedia has more than 5 million articles in many languages, including more than 1.4 million in the English-language version. That number excludes redirects, discussion pages, image description pages, user profile pages, templates, help pages, portals, articles without links to other articles, and pages about Wikipedia. Including these, we have 6,166,784 pages. Users have made 86,876,932 edits, an average of 14.09 per page, since July 2002. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 17 of them have more than 50,000 articles each.English (1,452,014)German (485,896)French (382,582)Polish (308,402)Japanese (277,257)Dutch (235 513)Italian (208,517)Portuguese (191,033)Swedish (189,542)Spanish (164,118)Russian (110,066)
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