Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwikiˈpiːdi.ə/, /ˌwikiˈpeːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ (Audio (U.S.) (help·info)) is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.
As of August 14, 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 7.9 million articles in 253 languages, 1.95 million of which are in the English edition.[1] It has been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception,[3] it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[4] Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers located in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Due to Wikipedia's open nature, critics have questioned its reliability and accuracy.[5] The site has been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information,[6] uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[7] and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[8] Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[10] Two scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived[11] and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as other encyclopedias.[12]
Wikipedia, along with other interactive websites such as YouTube and Facebook, won the Time Person of the Year, awarded to the most influential of that year in 2006. The award praised the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world made possible through the World Wide Web.
Founding
Wikipedia's English edition was launched on January 15, 2001, as a complement to Nupedia, an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were identified as co-founders of Wikipedia in 2001. Wikipedia's official personnel page from September 2001 states that Wales and Sanger were the two co-founders, and that there was no editor-in-chief.[2][14][15][16][17] Wales, creator of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, today claims to be the sole founder of Wikipedia and has told The Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder.[18] However, Sanger strongly contests that description. He was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia at least as early as September 2001 and referred to himself that way as early as January 2002.
Authorship and management
Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteers; these include developers, on the MediaWiki software, and other trusted users with various permission levels including "steward", "bureaucrat" and "administrator."[21] Administrators are the largest group of specially privileged users, and have the ability to delete (remove) pages, lock articles from being changed, and deter users from editing.[22] Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.[23] The Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and holds regular fundraisers;[24] the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over $1 million.
Software and hardware
The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates modern programming features, such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.
Overview of system architecture, May 2006. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.
Overview of system architecture, May 2006. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.
Wikipedia runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers in Florida and in four other locations.[27] Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world.[27]
Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.
Language editions
Wikipedia in Hebrew.
Wikipedia in Hebrew.[28]
Wikipedia has been described 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".[29] There are presently 253 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, the top 14 have over 100,000 articles and the top 139 have over 1,000 articles.[1]
Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (this is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts about spelling[30] or points of view.[31] The English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 51% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining 49% split among the other languages (Spanish: 15%, Japanese 5%, German: 5%, French: 4%, Polish: 3%, Portuguese: 2%, Arabic: 2%).[3]
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 in their use of non-free images.[32][33]
Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia and maintain a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small townships of the United States might only be available in English.
Multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to translate articles manually; automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed.[34] Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.[35] Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, usually in their left margin, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. Images and other non-verbal media are shared among the various language editions through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Beyond translations, some multilingual efforts are also realised thanks to the Multilingual coordination.
Content redistribution
Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by many sites including database dumps.[citation needed] There is a free downloadable DVD version[36] developed by Linterweb which contains "1964 + articles"
Reliability and bias
Wikipedia appeals to the authority of peer-reviewed publications rather than the personal authority of experts. Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published sources.
Wikipedia tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced a scale against which the quality of articles is judged; other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1500 articles have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.
In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.[39]
In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[40]
In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, for contributing to the creation of a generation of “intellectual sluggards”.[41] He also stated 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,” He also stated that “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the internet” was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on the academics who cite Wikipedia that:
“You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she said. “The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the internet in a critical and appropriate way.
Criticism and controversy
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[5] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[43] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is usually reliable, but that it is not always clear how much.[8] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[7] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[44] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[45] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[46] Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[47] Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."[48]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[49] and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[50] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[51][52] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[6] has been noted,[53] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[54] Some claim that Wikipedia's political articles have been taken over by left-wing partisans.[55] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[56]
Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[57] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[58] and criticised for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[59]
Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[60] Several scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived,[11] and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other online encyclopedias.[12] With nearly hundreds of thousands of contributors, nearly 2 million articles in English, hundreds of thousands of articles in other languages, the sheer scope of Wikipedia dwarfs traditional encyclopedias in size of content, human investigative resources, peer-review and editorial efforts and is unrivaled in human history as a collaborative effort in the written language.
Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[61] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.[62] Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.
In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.[63] On 26 January 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[64] Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006.[65] In 2006, the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised[66] by the Russian government agency FAPMC.
In November 2006, Turkish Wikipedia was nominated under the Science category for the Altın Örümcek Web Ödülleri (Golden Spider Web Awards), which are commonly known as the "Web Oscars" for Turkey. In January 2007, Turkish Wikipedia was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. The award was given in a ceremony on January 25, 2007 at Istanbul Technical University. Due to the large amount of links and content citations needed, wikipedia is not very compliant with screen reading technology.
Cultural significance
Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[67][68] The Canadian Parliament website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for Civil Marriage Act.[69] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Office[70] — though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[71] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[72] sometimes without attribution; several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[73][74][75] In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30 minute documentary on BBC Radio 4[76] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st Century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th Century terms as hoovering or coke. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".[56] Websites such as Uncyclopedia have also been set up parodying Wikipedia; its Main Page claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[77] parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its Main Page.
Related projects
A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been emulated on a website[78]. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users.
Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki",[79] created in October 2002,[80] detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006.[81] Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[82] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects.[83]
A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.[84]
Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, h2g2 and Everything2.
Conservapedia is a wiki encyclopedia project with goals similar to Wikipedia, but attempts to write articles from a socially and economically conservative perspective. It was started in late 2006 by Andrew Schlafly, a son of Phyllis Schlafly, who felt Wikipedia had a liberal bias in its articles. Conservapedia is not affiliated with Wikipedia or Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, although both use the free MediaWiki software to power their site.
Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[85] said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields:[86] "We welcome a diversity of efforts. If Larry's project is able to produce good work, we will benefit from it by copying it back into Wikipedia."[87]
Films
The first documentary film about Wikipedia, entitled Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, is scheduled for 2008 release. Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Wikipedia and feature interviews with Wikipedia editors around the world
Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwikiˈpiːdi.ə/, /ˌwikiˈpeːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ (Audio (U.S.) (help·info)) is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.
As of August 14, 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 7.9 million articles in 253 languages, 1.95 million of which are in the English edition.[1] It has been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception,[3] it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[4] Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers located in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Due to Wikipedia's open nature, critics have questioned its reliability and accuracy.[5] The site has been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information,[6] uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[7] and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[8] Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[10] Two scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived[11] and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as other encyclopedias.[12]
Wikipedia, along with other interactive websites such as YouTube and Facebook, won the Time Person of the Year, awarded to the most influential of that year in 2006. The award praised the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world made possible through the World Wide Web.
Founding
Wikipedia's English edition was launched on January 15, 2001, as a complement to Nupedia, an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were identified as co-founders of Wikipedia in 2001. Wikipedia's official personnel page from September 2001 states that Wales and Sanger were the two co-founders, and that there was no editor-in-chief.[2][14][15][16][17] Wales, creator of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, today claims to be the sole founder of Wikipedia and has told The Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder.[18] However, Sanger strongly contests that description. He was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia at least as early as September 2001 and referred to himself that way as early as January 2002.
Authorship and management
Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteers; these include developers, on the MediaWiki software, and other trusted users with various permission levels including "steward", "bureaucrat" and "administrator."[21] Administrators are the largest group of specially privileged users, and have the ability to delete (remove) pages, lock articles from being changed, and deter users from editing.[22] Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.[23] The Wikimedia Foundation currently relies primarily on private donations, and holds regular fundraisers;[24] the January 2007 fundraiser raised just over $1 million.
Software and hardware
The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates modern programming features, such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.
Overview of system architecture, May 2006. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.
Overview of system architecture, May 2006. See server layout diagrams on Meta-Wiki.
Wikipedia runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers in Florida and in four other locations.[27] Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world.[27]
Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Wikipedia's traffic load.
Language editions
Wikipedia in Hebrew.
Wikipedia in Hebrew.[28]
Wikipedia has been described 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".[29] There are presently 253 language editions of Wikipedia; of these, the top 14 have over 100,000 articles and the top 139 have over 1,000 articles.[1]
Since Wikipedia is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (this is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts about spelling[30] or points of view.[31] The English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 51% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining 49% split among the other languages (Spanish: 15%, Japanese 5%, German: 5%, French: 4%, Polish: 3%, Portuguese: 2%, Arabic: 2%).[3]
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 in their use of non-free images.[32][33]
Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia and maintain a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small townships of the United States might only be available in English.
Multilingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to translate articles manually; automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed.[34] Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions.[35] Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, usually in their left margin, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. Images and other non-verbal media are shared among the various language editions through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Beyond translations, some multilingual efforts are also realised thanks to the Multilingual coordination.
Content redistribution
Wikipedia's content has been mirrored and forked by many sites including database dumps.[citation needed] There is a free downloadable DVD version[36] developed by Linterweb which contains "1964 + articles"
Reliability and bias
Wikipedia appeals to the authority of peer-reviewed publications rather than the personal authority of experts. Wikipedia does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published sources.
Wikipedia tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced a scale against which the quality of articles is judged; other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1500 articles have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.
In a study of Wikipedia as a community, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.[39]
In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[40]
In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, for contributing to the creation of a generation of “intellectual sluggards”.[41] He also stated 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,” He also stated that “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the internet” was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on the academics who cite Wikipedia that:
“You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she said. “The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the internet in a critical and appropriate way.
Criticism and controversy
Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[5] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[43] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is usually reliable, but that it is not always clear how much.[8] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[7] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[44] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[45] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[46] Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[47] Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."[48]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[49] and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[50] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[51][52] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[6] has been noted,[53] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[54] Some claim that Wikipedia's political articles have been taken over by left-wing partisans.[55] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[56]
Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like,"[57] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[58] and criticised for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[59]
Wikipedia's content policies[9] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[60] Several scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived,[11] and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other online encyclopedias.[12] With nearly hundreds of thousands of contributors, nearly 2 million articles in English, hundreds of thousands of articles in other languages, the sheer scope of Wikipedia dwarfs traditional encyclopedias in size of content, human investigative resources, peer-review and editorial efforts and is unrivaled in human history as a collaborative effort in the written language.
Awards
Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004.[61] The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.[62] Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.
In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Wikipedia was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1.[63] On 26 January 2007, Wikipedia was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"[64] Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006.[65] In 2006, the Russian Wikipedia won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised[66] by the Russian government agency FAPMC.
In November 2006, Turkish Wikipedia was nominated under the Science category for the Altın Örümcek Web Ödülleri (Golden Spider Web Awards), which are commonly known as the "Web Oscars" for Turkey. In January 2007, Turkish Wikipedia was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. The award was given in a ceremony on January 25, 2007 at Istanbul Technical University. Due to the large amount of links and content citations needed, wikipedia is not very compliant with screen reading technology.
Cultural significance
Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.[67][68] The Canadian Parliament website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for Civil Marriage Act.[69] The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Office[70] — though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.[71] Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism,[72] sometimes without attribution; several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.[73][74][75] In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30 minute documentary on BBC Radio 4[76] which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st Century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th Century terms as hoovering or coke. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".[56] Websites such as Uncyclopedia have also been set up parodying Wikipedia; its Main Page claims that it is the "content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[77] parodying the English Wikipedia's welcome message on its Main Page.
Related projects
A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been emulated on a website[78]. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Wikipedia, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users.
Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki",[79] created in October 2002,[80] detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006.[81] Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[82] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects.[83]
A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia.[84]
Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Wikipedia. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, h2g2 and Everything2.
Conservapedia is a wiki encyclopedia project with goals similar to Wikipedia, but attempts to write articles from a socially and economically conservative perspective. It was started in late 2006 by Andrew Schlafly, a son of Phyllis Schlafly, who felt Wikipedia had a liberal bias in its articles. Conservapedia is not affiliated with Wikipedia or Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, although both use the free MediaWiki software to power their site.
Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[85] said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields:[86] "We welcome a diversity of efforts. If Larry's project is able to produce good work, we will benefit from it by copying it back into Wikipedia."[87]
Films
The first documentary film about Wikipedia, entitled Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, is scheduled for 2008 release. Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Wikipedia and feature interviews with Wikipedia editors around the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Growing pains for Wikipedia
http://news.com.com/Growing+pains+for+Wikipedia/2100-1025_3-5981119.html
Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story
http://wikidocumentary.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Wikipedia to clean up act with credential verification
http://www.techspot.com/news/24573-wikipedia-to-clean-up-act-with-credential-verification.html
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama[2][3]) is an American Internet entrepreneur known for his role in founding, running, and promoting Wikipedia.[4][5][6] He is also involved in other wiki-related projects, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimbo_Wales
Can we really trust Wikipedia?
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/highlights?articleid=3115718
It's the tenth most visited website in the world and millions rely on it for information, but can we really tsust Wikipedia? Sarah Freeman asked Yorkshire poets, authors and politicians to rate their entries.
We all know that we shouldn't believe everything we read... except, it seems, when it comes to Wikipedia.
It was 2001 that Jimmy Wales, a man who describes himself as pathologically optimistic, launched an online encyclopaedia to suit the digital age.
There was, he believed, no need for banks for grey-suited researchers methodically checking facts and figures, instead the public would be responsible for writing, editing and updating entries.
The move sent shudders down the spine of those who don't write a postcard without consulting Encyclopaedia Britannica, but Wales insisted his experiment "based on the twin pillars of trust and tolerance" would be a success.
In many ways, he was right, today the site employs just five full-time staff, yet seven billion entries are viewed each month and tap in the name of any celebrity into Google and their Wikipedia entry is likely to be in the top five hits.
But with more and more people viewing the site as the internet equivalent of the Word of God, there have been inevitable questions about its accuracy.
Just this week it was revealed workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted polishing the more unsightly facts from entries on former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon while on this side of the Atlantic an anonymous internet surfer from inside Millbank deleted a section in the Labour Party profile which suggested the party's student movement was no longer seen as radical.
More fuel was added to the fire when one of Wikipedia's editors known only as Essjay, who had described himself as a professor of religion, was unveiled as a fake. To much embarrassment, he was forced to confess that his PhD was bogus and most of his knowledge had been taken from text books, including Catholicism for Dummies.
While hardly a scientific experiment, in the hope of shedding some light on the Wikipedia date, we asked a group of Yorkshire celebrities to cast their eye over their entries.
GP Taylor
Former Scarborough vicar and now best-selling author
It's the best work of fiction I have read in years.
I really would have loved to have been born in 1961 but sadly I was born in 1958 – thankfully this is not as bad as the Sun which once had me born in 1945. The rest is nearly true. The facts of the financial rewards have been totally wrongly quoted and it would appear that whoever put this together did this from a series of press articles that hadn't been fact checked before publication. The worrying thing is that this site is open to editing from any source. I have noticed that entries for people like JK Rowling are strictly controlled and Joe Public can't alter or add anything to them but others are able to go on to people's entries and say what they want.
I am actually published in 48 languages and have been read by several million people and all my books are optioned for movies so things seem to be out of date.
I like Wikipedia because it is packed with trivia and I spend a lot of time looking things up on the site and always cross check their facts just to be sure. This is what the internet is about – ordinary people being able to contribute to history and education. It is very 1984... Orwellian in the extreme. To get the full effect of its sinister nature, the best way to read Wikipedia is to cut a football in half and put it on like a bald head. Wear a rather smart jacket and tie put on a pair of large false ears – look into the mirror and read it in the voice of William Hague. I have just tried it and it has changed my life.
Jilly Cooper
Journalist and author
I'm completely computer illiterate, I don't even use email, so I had never heard of Wikipedia, but I was quite touched by the entry. I felt it was by somebody who'd really taken the trouble to read the books and say really sensible, perceptive things about them.
There are some little gripes, the entry implies our son Felix is older than our daughter Emily, but it's the other way round and while my stories do "heavily feature not only adultery, sexual infidelity, general betrayal, money worries and domestic upheavals" I would like to add they are also about great heroism and the triumph of true love.
Amusingly when thy write about my column in The Sunday Times which lasted 13 years it's described as being about "marriage, sex and housework".
Although I did refer to Leo a lot and sex a lot, I think I only wrote about housework once. I did other quite jolly things like interviewing Margaret Thatcher twice and I also wrote big pieces on a visit to Moscow, the Common Market and Oxford dons.
Keith Hellawell
Chief Constable of West Yorkshire from 1997 to 2001 and the Government's former anti-drugs co-ordinator.
I can't really take any issue with what's been written. There are a few minor points in that I seem to have lost my honorary doctorate from Huddersfield University and while they correctly refer to a fire at our property in the South of France in 2003, it was the chalet, not the house which burnt down, but other than that it seems spot on.
Joanne Harris
Former French teacher at Leeds Grammar school and now Huddersfield-based author
My grandmother was not a witch although this "fact" seems to appear in a lot of different places on websites and in articles and I've never actually corrected it.
Chocolat was actually based in the Gers area of France, not the Loire Valley. It's right in saying the movie rights were sold to Miramax Pictures and while it did bring me "wide recognition in North America" it was also popular in more than 40 countries. They are all very small points so all in all the entry is pretty accurate.
Michael Meadowcroft
Former Liberal MP for West Leeds from 1983-87 and now election observer overseas.
I didn't realise that there was an entry until a friend mentioned it recently. Reading it reveals that it has been culled from my profile the Dictionary of Liberal Biography which means that it is worryingly accurate.
However, my main complaint is that it personalises events that were much more co-operatively organised. For instance it calls the continuing Liberal Party "Meadowcroft's party" which it has never been.
Another problem is the updating. My involvement with assisting new and emerging democracies is listed as covering 33 missions in 19 countries, whereas the up to date figures are 48 missions to 35 countries. In my case this isn't desperately significant but Wikipedia's reliance on voluntary contributions inevitably means that, without assiduous and efficient contributors, entries can get dangerously out of date.
Even so, the concept of Wikipedia is great and I use it a lot.
Ian McMillan
Poet, broadcaster and Yorkshire Post columnist
They've got my date of birth right at 1956 when a number of my books put it at 1957, and one press release that came out in the 1990s had me born in 1950. The educational history and the fact that I'm still in Darfield is completely on the button.
What I like best about the entry is that it gives equal importance to everything; the fact that I've got my own show on Radio 3 is given as much weight as my judging a competition for Central Trains in December 2006. This gives your life an oddly skewed quality and it also underlines the fact that judging a poetry competition for Central Trains is, in many ways, as important as being on Have I Got News For You?
If I could add anything I'd show off about my three honorary degrees; one from Sheffield Hallam University, one from Staffordshire University and one from a university that I can't name because it's not been officially announced yet.
Three degrees, eh? That's what's known in the academic community as a "When Will I See You Again?"
And I'd like to make one thing up to put in my entry, just to alter the course of history a little: "In 1996 McMillan walked through Whitby wearing only a strategically placed Yorkshire Pudding to advertise the Whitby Festival."
Reginald Hill
Former English lecturer at Doncaster College of Education turned crime writer.
There's nothing in it which has got me reaching for my horsewhip or my lawyer.
I would like to think that when they describe me as being born to a "very ordinary working class family with its redundant adverb was not the direct quotation the inverted commas suggest, or that at least it was taken from something I said rather than wrote, but, that apart, the only positive inaccuracy is the very minor one of turning Doncaster College of Education (i.e an establishment where pre and post graduate students were trained to be teachers) into Doncaster College of Further Education.
The bibliography has an inaccurate publication date (Captain Fantom 1978 not 1980), an omission (The Forging of Fantom 1979), a repetition (A Very Good Hater 1974) and a title I do not recall writing (The Four Clubs 1997) though if anyone would care to send me the royalties, I won't object!
Joolz Denby
Bradford-based writer.
It's 10 out of 10 for accuracy and it's also pretty well up-to-date which is amazing (except it's now 23 Glastonburys!)
I can't honestly say there's anything misleading, inaccurate or missing in my particular bit though I can't vouch for the bits on Punk or other highlighted topics. Personally, I love Wikipedia but I'd never kept updated on my bit mostly because I'm too busy but I shall certainly be directing anyone wanting biographical info on me to it in future.
Kate Rusby
Folk singer from Barnsley
There's an awful lot of detail in the entry so perhaps it's inevitable that there are a few errors.
My birthday is wrong, I was born on December 4 not the 1 and while I was married to John McCusker, but we have since divorced. It mentions winning an award for the song Lullabye, but it's actually called Who Will Sing Me Lullabies.
Also it doesn't mention a children's animation that I wrote some music for, called Jack Frost, but apart from that, I am very impressed.
Wikipedia: Rogue editor EssJay resigns in shame
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/10241/53/
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AEssjay&diff=111847534&oldid=111838285
The scandal over EssJay, or Ryan Jordan’s credentials as a ‘professor with doctorates in religion’ has resigned, after it emerged he was really a 24-year-old Kentucky college dropout.
When news of the latest Wikipedia scandal broke, concerning EssJay, or rather Ryan Jordan, who had claimed to be a professor teaching at a private university, and was uncovered by “The New Yorker” last week, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, professed not to be worried about it and appeared to sweep the whole episode under the carpet.
Unfortunately for Jimmy Wales and Ryan Jordan, the Internet community was horrified that yet again, Wikipedia was in the news for all the wrong reasons.
EssJay, or Jordan, had worked on over 16,000 Wikipedia entries, either writing or editing them, and had been invited by Jimmy Wales to work on the commercial Wikia project which sells Wiki style websites to anyone that wants them.
Jimmy Wales has claimed that he has been in a remote part of India since the scandal erupted, and despite initially being quoted that he wasn’t worried about EssJay’s use of a pseudonym, he has since decided to ask Ryan Jordon to resign his ‘positions of trust’ over his nonexistent degrees on March 3 from both Wikipedia and Wikia.
On March 4, Jordan agreed to resign, and offered his personal apology not only to Wales, but to the entire Wikipedia community.
Jordan had claimed he fabricated his persona to avoid cyberstalking from users whose entries he had edited, and claimed that he was shocked that the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Stacy Schiff from the New Yorker would publish the information from Jordan’s user page which now claims that Jordan has ‘retired’. Jordan said that “It was, quite honestly, my impression that it was well known that I was not who I claimed to be, and that in the absence of any confirmation, no respectable publication would print it.”
Unfortunately for Jordan, Wikipedia gives the impression that what it prints is correct, even though it has been shown to have published incorrect information which has needed to be corrected on a range of occasions. Because Wikipedia is built, according to Wales, “(among other things) twin pillars of trust and tolerance”, it is hardly surprising that Schiff would assume that an entry on a Wikipedia administrator would be completely truthful.
On the page, linked above, on Wikipedia relating to the resignation of Ryan Jordan, Wikipedia states that: “Wikipedia allows its users to be anonymous, by creating usernames as pseudonyms. However, it is considered unethical to purposely misrepresent oneself to the media, or to use unjustified claims to qualifications to support arguments with other contributors”.
It is understood that Wikipedia is now checking the credentials of all its editors and other ‘official’ Wikipedia staff to ensure that a similar scandal will not eventuate in the future.
Wikipedia Edited by CIA Computers
Using Griffith's software, this author could identify 297 edits that can be tracked back to CIA IPs
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=377662&rel_no=1
According to a CIA spokesperson, the U.S. Intelligence agency is editing Wikipedia pages in order to save Americans lives. Between June 29, 2004, and July 30, 2007, Wikipedia pages have been edited 297 times by some individual(s) using computers that belong to the CIA network.
Among the pages that were edited by the CIA individual(s), we find:
The 2003 invasion of Iraq (modified on 2004-11-09 15:57:47)
William Colby (modified on 2005-06-23 22:45:00, 2005-06-24 16:32:11, 2005-06-24 16:34:19 and 2006-06-20 18:32:45)
The Iraq Intelligence Commission (modified on 2005-06-30 21:27:22)
The Central Intelligence Agency (modified on 2005-07-18 17:54:46)
The United States Intelligence Community (modified on 2005-08-15 15:05:43)
Ahmed Chalabi (modified on 2005-12-09 18:13:04)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (modified on 2005-12-15 16:38:49)
The National Counter Terrorism Center (modified on 2005-12-22 16:24:26)
The National Security Council (modified on 2005-12-27 13:42:09 and 2005-12-27 13:44:14)
Porter J. Goss (modified on 2006-01-25 00:08:00 and 2006-01-25 00:10:10)
George Tenet (modified on 2006-02-10 10:36:53)
Kyle Foggo (modified on 2006-05-08 17:00:42)
Encryption (modified on 2006-10-27 16:41:05)
The list of Yale University student organizations (modified on 2007-01-23 23:54:42)
China and Weapons of Mass Destruction (modified on 2007-02-05 17:27:24)
The Director of National Intelligence (modified on 2007-04-24 20:07:24).
On May 8, 2006, I wrote the following in an OhmyNews article discussing the resignation of CIA former Director Porter Goss.
"Goss's 19-month tenure was marked by low morale at the agency, turf battles with the director of national intelligence, and a fair number of scandals.
Soon after his nomination, Goss appointed Michael Kostiw as executive director. Then, someone leaked embarrassing information about Kostiw's past. Kostiw had been forced to leave the CIA 20 years earlier. Two officers resigned in protest.
Goss picked Kyle Foggo to replace Kostiw. The CIA's inspector general is examining whether Foggo arranged for any contracts to be granted to companies associated with Brent R. Wilkes.
Wilkes is a contractor who had connections to Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. The Congressman has been sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption. Wilkes and Foggo are long-time friends. The agency confirmed that Foggo and Wilkes attended private poker games (also attended by a fair number of prostitutes) at a Washington hotel."
Upon hearing Goss's announcement, Foggo announced his resignation. On the same day this article was published in OhmyNews, someone, using a CIA computer (IP 198.81.129.194) edited the Wikipedia page of Kyle Foggo. The following innocent statement was added by the CIA user.
"He [Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo] resigned from the CIA on May 8, 2006, stating that a new director should be able to choose his own deputies."
On July 26, OhmyNews alleged that Wikipedia may have been infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. The story attracted more than 50,000 readers in just three days, was highly debated on the Web, and translated in several languages. Wikipedia quickly reacted to the news and hired Virgil Griffith, one of the best known American hacker, to investigate the matter.
On Aug. 14, Wired reported that Griffith had completed a new software utility known as the "Wikipedia Scanner". The software is capable of tracking millions of Wikipedia article edits back to their originating IP addresses. Thus, it is now straightforward to identify any corporations or organisation editing article on the world famous free encyclopedia.
Using Griffith's software, I could identify 297 edits that can be tracked back to the following IPs: 198.81.129.193, 198.81.129.194, 198.81.129.186, and 198.81.129.34. All IPs 198.81.129.(0 to 255) belong to the CIA computer Network.
"I cannot confirm that the traffic came from agency computers," a CIA spokesperson stated. "I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work."
"Technically, we don't know whether it came from an agent of that company, however, we do know that edit came from someone with access to their network," Griffith wrote on the Wikipedia Scanner site.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.
As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.
Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.
One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.
Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
See Who's Editing Wikipedia -- Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3482054&page=1
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
Share Your Sleuthing!
Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers' discoveries here.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.
As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.
Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.
One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.
Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
CIA, Vatican try hand at Wikipedia
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-uswiki081707,0,5798268.story
Guess who's been messing with Wikipedia, which bills itself as the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit?
The CIA, the Democratic Party, the Vatican and the voting machine supplier Diebold. All have anonymously edited articles, according to the British Broadcasting Corp. and various technical publications.
The invisible editors were outed by Wikipedia Scanner, an application recently invented by graduate student Virgil Griffiths, which has compared 5.3 million edits in the past five years against more than 2 million Internet addresses whose owners are public knowledge.
A computer traced to a CIA address added "Wahhhhhh!" to a profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
CIA employees, perhaps seeking distraction from their jobs, also made tweaks on articles about TV shows.
Someone using a computer owned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh "idiotic," a "racist" and a "bigot," and said of his listeners: "Most of them are legally retarded."
Vatican computers removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 about Gerry Adams, leader of Ireland's Sinn Fein party. The articles alleged Adams' fingerprints were found on a car used in a double murder in 1971. A section that was titled "Fresh murder question raised" is no longer accessible.
Computers registered to the Church of Scientology were used to remove criticism of the church from the page about it.
Diebold, which supplied machines used in some controversial votes, removed 15 paragraphs from the entry about it. One had named its chief executive as a top fundraiser for George W. Bush. Others contained information about and links to charges that the 2000 presidential election was rigged. The paragraphs have since been reinstated.
Griffiths notes that the program cannot identify the individuals editing the articles.
"Technically, we don't know whether it came from an agent of that company; however, we do know that edit came from someone with access to their network," he wrote on the Wikipedia Scanner Web site.
Diebold did not respond to requests to comment. Other organizations responded the way the CIA did. "I cannot confirm that the traffic came from agency computers," a CIA official told the BBC. "I'd like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of the agency is there, on that decisive work."
Wikipedia Scanner may also protect Wikipedia. It "may prevent an organization or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to," a Wikipedia official said.
CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1642896020070816
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.
The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.
The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.
The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.
WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.
Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.
Aerial and satellite images of the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were removed using a computer traced to the FBI, WikiScanner showed.
CIA spokesman George Little said he could not confirm whether CIA computers were used in the changes, adding that "the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly."
The FBI did not have an immediate response.
Computers at numerous other organizations and companies were found to have been involved in editing articles related to them.
Griffith said he developed WikiScanner "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike (and) to see what 'interesting organizations' (which I am neutral towards) are up to."
It was not known whether changes were made by an official representative of an agency or company, Griffith said, but it was certain the change was made by someone with access to the organization's network.
It violates Wikipedia's neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization.
However, she said, "Wikipedia is self-correcting," meaning misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.
WikiScanner can be found at wikiscanner.virgil.gr/
Is Wikipedia becoming a hub for propaganda?
Tracking website shows thousands of changes to articles originated from federal government offices
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070816.wwiki0816/BNStory/Technology/home
A website that tracks the origins of millions of edits to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, shows that computers inside federal government offices are responsible for more than 11,000 changes to articles, including some significant edits of entries about parliamentarians.
WikiScanner, a website launched on Monday by a U.S. graduate student, shows that changes to articles originated from computers inside a variety of government offices, such as the House of Commons, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Environment Canada and the Auditor-General of Canada. The site, however, does not reveal the identity of the individual who made the edits.
While many of the Wikipedia edits clean up grammar or correct facts about Canadian historical figures, geography or pop-culture icons, a significant number of edits were made to articles about politicians that removed criticisms, added positive comments and, in some cases, inserted negative comments to the pages of political rivals. And while users within the self-policing Wikipedia community often restore the undoctored versions of the articles, some have not been touched by the site's moderators.
MPs whose Wikipedia pages were significantly altered include Toronto-area Liberal Dan McTeague, Calgary Conservative Jason Kenney and Southern Ontario Conservative Jeff Watson, who serves on the Commons' access to information, privacy and ethics committee. No one from the offices of those MPs would offer comment yesterday on edits to Wikipedia articles.
Rick Broadhead, a Toronto-based Internet consultant, says in some cases finding the originating point of a Wikipedia edit is the cyber-equivalent of discovering a "prostitute's black book."
"It can be detrimental to the subject of an article that has information that casts you in a negative light or brings up events that you would rather forget about; hence, the desire to modify the entries so that particular events are recast or deleted altogether. You can't do this with Encyclopedia Britannica, but you can do this with Wikipedia," Mr. Broadhead said. "But to be seen deleting factual information - to me that borders on being scandalous. This would be a public relations nightmare ... to rewrite history in this manner."
While the technology to track down who is behind Wikipedia edits has been available for some time, it required a significant amount of technical know-how to navigate the Internet to find the same information WikiScanner can find in seconds.
Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez says that, although articles are collaboratively written, they are always "live" and the threat of distortion and online vandalism will always be present.
"Wikipedia kind of works as a bazaar. You have all these groups and individuals contributing and reviewing articles and entries, so it's really hard for one person to really ruin the integrity of an entry for a long period of time," Ms. Ordonez said.
Carleton University political science professor Jonathan Malloy says in an environment such as Wikipedia, where anything goes, it's not surprising that articles on politicians have been heavily edited from inside government offices.
"It's certainly a bit unethical and it's also low-end. More senior, experienced politicians realize that dirty tricks rarely work and tend to backfire on you," Prof. Malloy said.
One user, with an IP address that points to a government office in Ottawa, removed Wikipedia's entire entry on homosexuality several times on July 20, 2005, and replaced it with such sentences as: "Homosexuality is evil," "Homosexuality is wrong according to the Bible" and "Homosexuals need our help and counselling." The IP address responsible for that edit continued to deface the entry on homosexuality a total of 24 times between July, 2005, and July, 2006, and also edited more than 500 other Wikipedia articles on topics such as epidemiology, Ebola and Deal or No Deal (a TV game show starring a Canadian host).
Government computers also edited Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Wikipedia entry 10 times between Aug. 26, 2005, and Aug. 8, 2006. Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion's page was edited four times on Aug. 30, 2004, by someone at a computer traced to the House of Commons, and twice more on Oct. 3, 2006, from a computer inside a Public Works and Government Services office in Gatineau, Que.
Other pages edited from government equipment include Maher Arar's Wikipedia page, which was edited three times on Feb. 27, 2007, from a computer traced to Public Works and Government Services, and the entry on Pierre Trudeau, which was edited nine times between Oct. 7, 2002, and Feb. 22, 2007, from four different IP addresses.
Collette Dery, spokeswomen for House Speaker Peter Milliken, who also serves as chief administrative officer of the House of Commons, says there is no policy in place to prohibit any staffer in the House of Commons from editing Wikipedia articles.
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How Wikipedia works
Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia controlled and maintained by its community of readers. Anyone may contribute to an article, inserting or subtracting text regardless of its veracity or point of view. However, with thousands of users constantly monitoring content, the site operates on a kind of honour system in which users monitor articles for inflammatory or false information.
Wikipedia features more than five million articles in more than 100 languages, and is one of the top 10 most-visited websites in the world.
The online hub is maintained by the Wikipedia Foundation Inc., a non-profit charitable organization, with assets totalling more than $1-million (U.S.).
Although Wikipedia maintains a log of changes made to all of its articles, editors are tracked by their user name (if logged into the site) or an IP address if the changes are made anonymously.
David George-Cosh
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Electronic fingerprints
Earlier this week, California Institute of Technology graduate student Virgil Griffith created the WikiScanner (http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr), which allows users to search a database of millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits that cross-references the Internet Protocol address (IP) - sort of a digital fingerprint consisting of 4 to 12 different combinations of numbers - to the organizations where the edits originated.
The website allows users to search by listing specific organizations or a range of IP addresses to determine who edited which Wikipedia article. A field to search for who edited the exact Wikipedia URL was disabled after heavy site traffic.
Canadian government computers used to edit articles can be found by searching for the domain suffix "gc.ca" in the "organization name" field. From there, computers located in the House of Commons have the IP address range of 192.197.82.0 to 192.197.82.255, which was verified using commonly available WHOIS searches.
David George-Cosh
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Some infamous edits
In February of 2005, former MTV VJ Adam Curry was discovered by online sleuths to have anonymously edited his own Wikipedia page to make his role in the early days of podcasting more significant than they were.
A Wikipedia user published false information in May, 2005, suggesting that Tennessee
newspaper editor and publisher John Seigenthaler, Sr. may have been involved in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The hoax was revealed several months after the information was posted and led to Wikipedia implementing stricter controls over how to edit pages.
In January of 2006, several U.S. congressional staffers were found inserting negative comments in Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor's Wikipedia page and removing criticisms on Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman's and Massachusetts Congressman Marty Meehan's pages.
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