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[113] In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. | English |
"[114] This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. | English |
[115] The English Wikipedia has 6,238,672 articles, 40,838,998 registered editors, and 141,020 active editors. | English |
An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days. | English |
Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. | English |
Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references". | English |
[116] Editors who do not log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia,[116] as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation",[117] but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty. | English |
A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia [...] are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site". | English |
[118] Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits. | English |
"[113] However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most content in Wikipedia (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders". | English |
[113] A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others,[119][120] although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small. | English |
[121] According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content". | English |
[122] Several studies have shown that most of the Wikipedia contributors are male. | English |
Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. | English |
[123] Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage females to become Wikipedia contributors. | English |
Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. | English |
[124] Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, wrote in The New York Times that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior". | English |
[125] Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors. | English |
[126] There are currently 317 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). | English |
As of January 2021, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, Swedish, German, French, and Dutch Wikipedias. | English |
[127] The second and third largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013 had created about half the articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. | English |
The latter are both languages of the Philippines. | English |
In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Russian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Waray, Vietnamese, Japanese, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Arabic, Ukrainian and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Serbian, Indonesian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Korean and Finnish), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000. | English |
[128][129] The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 6.2 million articles. | English |
As of January 2019[update], according to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 57% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Russian: 9%; Chinese: 6%; Japanese: 6%; Spanish: 5%). | English |
[3] Distribution of the 55,727,399 articles in different language editions (as of January 30, 2021)[130] The unit for the numbers in bars is articles. | English |
Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). | English |
These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. | English |
colour versus color)[132] or points of view. | English |
[133] Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use. | English |
[134][135][136] Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". | English |
[137] Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. | English |
They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all its projects (Wikipedia and others). | English |
[138] For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia,[139] and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. | English |
[140] The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. | English |
It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. | English |
For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects. | English |
Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles. | English |
[142] Articles available in more than one language may offer "interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. | English |
A study published by PLOS One in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. | English |
It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple English Wikipedia. | English |
[141] On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years. | English |
"[143] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). | English |
The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. | English |
The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. | English |
Should this attrition have continued unabated at the quoted trend rate of approximately 20,000 editors lost within seven years, by 2021 there would be only 10,000 active editors on English Wikipedia. | English |
[143] In contrast, the trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. | English |
[143] No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively ameliorating substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia. | English |
[144] Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014[update]. | English |
[145][146] Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. | English |
In 2010, columnist and journalist Edwin Black described Wikipedia as being a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods". | English |
[147] Articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Journal of Academic Librarianship have criticized Wikipedia's Undue Weight policy, concluding that the fact that Wikipedia explicitly is not designed to provide correct information about a subject, but rather focus on all the major viewpoints on the subject, give less attention to minor ones, and creates omissions that can lead to false beliefs based on incomplete information. | English |
[148][149][150] Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black alleged (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) that articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an "ax to grind" on the topic. | English |
[147][151] A 2008 article in Education Next Journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin. | English |
[152] In 2006, the Wikipedia Watch criticism website listed dozens of examples of plagiarism in the English Wikipedia. | English |
[153] Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are carefully and deliberately written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. | English |
[154] However, a peer review in 2005 of forty-two scientific entries on both Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica by the science journal Nature found few differences in accuracy, and concluded that "the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. | English |
"[155] Joseph Reagle suggested that while the study reflects "a topical strength of Wikipedia contributors" in science articles, "Wikipedia may not have fared so well using a random sampling of articles or on humanities subjects. | English |
"[156] Others raised similar critiques. | English |
[157] The findings by Nature were disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica,[158][159] and in response, Nature gave a rebuttal of the points raised by Britannica. | English |
[160] In addition to the point-for-point disagreement between these two parties, others have examined the sample size and selection method used in the Nature effort, and suggested a "flawed study design" (in Nature's manual selection of articles, in part or in whole, for comparison), absence of statistical analysis (e.g., of reported confidence intervals), and a lack of study "statistical power" (i.e., owing to small sample size, 42 or 4 × 101 articles compared, vs >105 and >106 set sizes for Britannica and the English Wikipedia, respectively). | English |
[161] As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it. | English |
[162] Concerns have been raised by PC World in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[163] the insertion of false information,[164] vandalism, and similar problems. | English |
Economist Tyler Cowen wrote: "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." | English |
He comments that some traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases and novel results, in his opinion, are over-reported in journal articles and relevant information is omitted from news reports. | English |
However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them. | English |
[165] Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable. | English |
[166] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. | English |
[167] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. | English |
[168] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of "fake news" because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles. | English |
[169] Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia. | English |
[70][171]
In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal, to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. | English |
[172] The article stated that: "Beginning Monday [from the date of the article, June 16, 2014], changes in Wikipedia's terms of use will require anyone paid to edit articles to disclose that arrangement. | English |
Katherine Maher, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's chief communications officer, said the changes address a sentiment among volunteer editors that, 'we're not an advertising service; we're an encyclopedia. | English |
'"[172][173][174][175][176] These issues, among others, had been parodied since the first decade of Wikipedia, notably by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. | English |
[177] A Harvard law textbook, Legal Research in a Nutshell (2011), cites Wikipedia as a "general source" that "can be a real boon" in "coming up to speed in the law governing a situation" and, "while not authoritative, can provide basic facts as well as leads to more in-depth resources". | English |
[178] Most university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[179] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. | English |
[180][181] Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. | English |
[182] Wales once (2006 or earlier) said he receives about ten emails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia; he told the students they got what they deserved. | English |
"For God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," he said. | English |
[183] In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. | English |
[184] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[185] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything". | English |
In contrast, academic writing[clarification needed] in Wikipedia has evolved in recent years and has been found to increase student interest, personal connection to the product, creativity in material processing, and international collaboration in the learning process. | English |
[186] On March 5, 2014, Julie Beck writing for The Atlantic magazine in an article titled "Doctors' #1 Source for Healthcare Information: Wikipedia", stated that "Fifty percent of physicians look up conditions on the (Wikipedia) site, and some are editing articles themselves to improve the quality of available information. | English |
"[187] Beck continued to detail in this article new programs of Amin Azzam at the University of San Francisco to offer medical school courses to medical students for learning to edit and improve Wikipedia articles on health-related issues, as well as internal quality control programs within Wikipedia organized by James Heilman to improve a group of 200 health-related articles of central medical importance up to Wikipedia's highest standard of articles using its Featured Article and Good Article peer-review evaluation process. | English |
[187] In a May 7, 2014, follow-up article in The Atlantic titled "Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text? | English |
", Julie Beck quotes WikiProject Medicine's James Heilman as stating: "Just because a reference is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's a high-quality reference. | English |
"[188] Beck added that: "Wikipedia has its own peer review process before articles can be classified as 'good' or 'featured'. | English |
Heilman, who has participated in that process before, says 'less than one percent' of Wikipedia's medical articles have passed. | English |
"[188] In 2008, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that the quality of a Wikipedia article would suffer rather than gain from adding more writers when the article lacked appropriate explicit or implicit coordination. | English |
[189] For instance, when contributors rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. | English |
Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor, stated that American National Biography Online outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its "clear and engaging prose", which, he said, was an important aspect of good historical writing. | English |
[190] Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization [...] his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice [...] and [...] his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." | English |
By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull". | English |
Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the NPOV policy—[which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history". | English |
While generally praising the article on William Clarke Quantrill, he quoted its conclusion as an example of such "waffling", which then stated: "Some historians [...] remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero. | English |
"[190] Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. | English |
Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented, "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 percent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage. | English |
"[191] A study of Wikipedia articles on cancer was conducted in 2010 by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University. | English |
The study was limited to those articles that could be found in the Physician Data Query and excluded those written at the "start" class or "stub" class level. | English |