Wikipedia

What if we could get every one in the world together to record what they know in one place?

— Wikipedia

At present I am overworked and the [Nupedia] project is suffering to some extent as a result… I just don't have the time to find lead reviewers for the articles listed [in "General and Other"]. The problem is that it is VERY difficult to find *specialists* on each of those topics.

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We wouldn't call it "the Nupedia wiki" though that's what it would be. … On the "wikipedia" we would say that this is a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently.

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Hello, World!

— Wikipedia

…why 2 sites, or 2 encyclopedias? My impression of them is Wikipedia is the "everyman's" encyclopedia and Nupedia is for the university elite. I looked at being a writer [for Nupedia] but I really felt I wouldn't be welcome since I'm just a college graduate of a two year program for corporate communications.

— Wikipedia

After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process. As it turns out, Wikipedia is dramatically more successful on some measures, … The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive.

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The Wikipedia, perhaps one of the greatest testaments to the generosity on the web, has just hit a milestone of 100,000 articles, a week after its second birthday. … What makes the Wikipedia so compelling – and this article so hard to finish – is the way everything is so massively linked. You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds. But more than that, anyone can add to or edit an entry, or even create another one.

— Wikipedia

This may sound like a recipe for disaster, but the results are impressive. While many of the site's 130,000-plus articles are definitely works in progress, many are rich, concise, and polished. … Surprisingly, our time spent on Wikipedia turned up no junk entries and no defacements. … A few of the articles seemed a bit dated, and we came across many red links or blue links that led to single-sentence placeholders. But for the most part, the items were useful and thoughtful.

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I take a half-full-glass view, based on a different understanding of what [Wikipedia’s competition is]: not the traditional professionally produced encyclopedias, but the legions of sites that, springing up all over the Web, purport to contain answers, unverified and often unverifiable, to every topic on earth. Against that standard, Wikipedia is a resounding success.

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Wikipedia is, at least to some extent, a revenge site. People (like [Don] Murphy) who have a knack for angering and upsetting others are primary targets for that sort of treatment. This is not rocket science, folks. … As the level of perceived “obnoxiousness” required to make someone a [Wikipedia] target continues to drop, the question becomes, how far will it drop?

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Wikipedia is so dangerous. You go online to look up the definition of eclampsia, and three hours later you find yourself reading this earnest explanation of tentacle porn in anime.

— Wikipedia

The only solution is to shut [Wikipedia] down and scatter it to the four winds. The idea that experts don't matter but 12 year old Canadians in their basements do is beyond untenable. … What gives any anonymous douchebag the qualifications to write about ME and then call it encyclopedic? The project has failed from the top down. There is no fixing.

— Wikipedia

Intuitively [students] are using Wikipedia as one of those [new] tools, creating a new layer of information-filtering to help orient them in the early stages of serious research. As a result, Wikipedia's role as a bridge to the next layer of academic resources is growing stronger.

— Wikipedia

The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know. Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table. If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.

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I am astonished at the ethical blindness of Bell Pottinger's reaction. That their strongest true response is they didn't break the law tells a lot about their view of the world, I'm afraid.

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Wikipedians […] act as de facto topic moderators, they often end up being biased and frequently quirky. … Articles are often edited with the sensibility of adolescent too-clever-by-half males[, which] describes a lot of Wikipedians.

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It is partly a product of history, where we came from in the early days. We were really a child of the dot-com crash. There was no investment money. We were just a group of people on the internet trying to do something cool. A lot of the volunteers wanted to put it into the non-profit [Wikimedia Foundation] – made sense to me.

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The site I avoid at all cost is Wikipedia, which for many subjects I’ve found to be a trove of misinformation. I don’t even have any desire to read my own Wikipedia article.

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As they say, history is written by the victorious Wikipedia editors.

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Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. …less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide. … To summarize a key result of this study…: No wikipedia, no ascent.

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It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade.

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You'd be amazed at the number of times I've been with top professors in the field and I've asked them a question and they've said, 'I'm not too sure about that, let me check', and gone straight to Wikipedia.

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Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do.

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When Wikipedia launched, it raised immediate concerns about the sanctity of accreditation – could knowledge be created by amateurs? But its steady rise in utility meant that, in time, nearly everyone made their peace with it – some more happily than others.

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The Wikimedia Foundation has gotten far off track. Every year, it builds its campaign around a budget many millions larger than the year before.

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If you’re selling to customers that you’re familiar and competent with new media, and you can’t manage something like Wikipedia, that’s a failure.

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A lot of students write a paper for a class, and eventually it winds up in the dustbin. When students write an article for Wikipedia, they have to learn to collaborate, to research and to write for a popular audience, and their work will benefit the millions of people using the site.

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Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood.

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For a website with no paid writing staff that is still overcoming an out-of-date reputation for inaccuracy, Wikipedia punches above its weight. …it is especially powerful in an election season: On the day of the 2012 election, Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s entries alone were read 1.6 million times. […] you can see a virtual version of the presidential race playing out every day.

— Wikipedia

It turns out there are people, typically they're probably unemployed kids with student debt you know that are stuck in their parents' basement with Cheetos stains on their t-shirts that haven't been able to get their first job so what they do is they play games to see how long they can edit Wikipedia pages in order to have games with their friends all around the world. So my advice to you is, if you do have a Wikipedia page, check it once in a while…

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... what Wikipedia and Facebook teach us is that social models of content curation and collaboration do scale. …organisations will increasingly need to crowd-source a lot of their meta-data. … In other words, [organisations] will need to build a Corporate Data Catalogue that looks and feels a lot like Wikipedia, but which borrows the “like” and “share” concepts from Facebook.

— Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the most comprehensive compendium of up-to-date knowledge assembled at gargantuan scale almost entirely by volunteers. It works, too, because they form a huge community that for reasons of camaraderie, rivalry, vanity, purity and sometimes just deep suspicion constantly monitor and vet one another’s work. There are flaws in the process, but each entry is a living organism that matures and self-corrects over time.

— Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an exceptional case. If we can figure out how it becomes sustainable, that would be a major contribution. Because it’s a new way of managing human resources.

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We thought, let’s not fight Wikipedia, but instead teach students to use it better.

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Like many university lecturers, I used to warn my own students off using Wikipedia (as pointless an injunction as telling them not to use Google, or not to leave their essay to the last minute). I finally gave up doing so about three years ago,…

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Two years before Wikipedia, I had the dream, the vision, of a free encyclopedia written by volunteers in all the languages of the world. This inspiration came to me from watching the growth of free software, open-source software, as most people know it. And watching programmers coming together and giving away their work for free online.

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In India and Nigeria, over 75% of participants said they had never heard of Wikipedia.

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Progress has been slow, but several independent ventures show how the attitudes of major players in the biomedical ecosystem are beginning to shift further, and take Wikipedia more seriously.

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Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That’s opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. … Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests.

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…phishing on Wikipedia is effective enough – and lucrative enough – to retain the interest of the dark net’s richest dwellers. … Although Wikipedia’s editors work to root out the false links, it’s a slow and never-ending fight.

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The researchers […] found that the Wikipedia entries were written at a much higher reading level compared with the medication guides and well above the average consumer reading level, which could contribute to patient misunderstanding of medication information. … The study authors conclude that as the public use of Wikipedia increases, the need for health care professionals and the pharmaceutical industry to actively educate and provide reliable resources to patients remains important.

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Page views of Wikipedia are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude.

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For the record the Daily Mail banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability.

— Wikipedia

The fate that befell the Mail happened for one reason, and one reason alone: it’s terrible, and by banning it, Wikipedia sends a message that it values its credibility.

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Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued – for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit. … Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors.

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However clumsy the Youth Parliament’s approach to Wikipedia may be, it’s still an improvement on a government order issued by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last August, when he established a working group to study the creation of an all new Russian-engineered Wikipedia clone.

— Wikipedia

…for an organisation that calls itself a ‘small non-profit’ business and begs users for donations (‘the price of a cup of coffee’) to keep it afloat, it enjoys bulging cash reserves. The Foundation’s accounts show it has assets of more than $90 million (£73 million), and spent $31 million (£25 million) in salaries last year, up from $26 million (£21 million) the year before. … Are these amounts not excessive?

— Wikipedia

…this ban has set a dangerous precedent, raising profoundly troubling questions about free speech and censorship in the online era. …a social media giant whose pages are riddled with inaccuracies, unilaterally deciding, at the request of a handful of people, that a major newspaper is somehow not valid.

— Wikipedia

False information is being disseminated at a far greater rate when it seems to have been vetted by a brand name and Wikipedia’s branding is global. It would be ideal if a more credible site like Encyclopedia Britannica or a useful news site like Reuters could be granted the “zero-rate” – but those sites […] do [not] have the same foundational interest in spreading their content without financial gain that Wikipedia has.

— Wikipedia

I fear we are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, teachers and students, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those with achievement in an area and those with none.

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Despite being an American-born site, its popularity and utility have expanded around the world since its foundation in 2001.

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Wikipedia has often been treated by news organizations like the black sheep of the information business. … But as trust in the media wanes and news organizations struggle to engage with readers, Wikipedia has emerged as a leader in transparency and user growth…

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The cyber age has tremendous potential, as indicated by Wikipedia. But if it bypasses space and time where there’s just this obsession with the present – this neglect of our heritage and history – then our world will change.

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For the benefit of Wales as a nation, it is crucial that Wikipedia contains a wealth of knowledge about its history and culture and that the range of articles on the Welsh language Wicipedia covers the widest possible range of subjects.

— Wikipedia

Unlike some commercial companies, Wikimedia has no incentive to cave into authoritarian demands to self-censor.

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The online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is perceived as increasingly trustworthy, […] with immediate impacts on scientific literacy.

— Wikipedia

As the originator of and the first person to elaborate Wikipedia's neutrality policy, and as an agnostic who believes intelligent design to be completely wrong, I just have to say that this article is appallingly biased. … I'm not here to argue the point, as I completely despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways.

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In many ways Wikipedia pioneered the [fake news] phenomenon, and journalists' lazy reliance on using it as a source helped falsities to propagate on a scale never seen before.

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As we are trying to deal with all this terrorism, [Wikipedia] makes us look like we work with terror groups.

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Why is Wikipedia so good? I’m not sure, but part of it is the internal review process started by Jimmy Wales. Other Wikis fail miserably; I no longer look at WikiAnswers, because I rarely get good help from it. So a publicly edited encyclopedia isn’t obviously going to work, but somehow Wikipedia pulled it off.

— Wikipedia

I’d argue that Wikipedia’s biggest asset is its willingness as a community and website to “delete.” It’s that simple. If there’s bad information, or info that’s just useless, Wikipedia’s regulatory system has the ability to discard it.

— Wikipedia

With its nationalist sentiments, factual mistakes, lack of academic references and omitted facts about World War II history, Croatian Wikipedia is not a reliable source, analysts have told BIRN.

— Wikipedia

When [people] get their information not from us – but […] through something like Siri or […] Alexa – that opportunity to either contribute back as an editor is broken, and that opportunity to contribute, to donate is also broken.

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The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker reported incorrectly last month that Pompeo was an Army officer who served in the 1991 Gulf War. … The situation shows how much major media outlets have come to rely on Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit that employs less than 300 people.

— Wikipedia

In this era where we've seen the rise of these fake news websites and so forth, Wikipedia has had almost no problems with this at all. Simply because our community is quite – you know, it's their hobby to debate about the quality of sources, and it's very difficult to fool the Wikipedia community with this.

— Wikipedia

[Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee], which typically decides matters of user behavior, not content, doesn’t lean left or right. Occasionally you could say there are people who are stricter or more lenient in terms of the spirit of the law or letter of the law.

— Wikipedia

… independent bloggers Markus Fiedler and Dirk Pohlmann have found [that Wikipedia's] 'freely editable' model definitely doesn't mean an absence of censorship and biased political activism. …the online encyclopedia is home to a major edit war where corrections are constantly added, information removed, and value judgements made to fit a specific narrative. … [An inner circle of manipulators] are referees and players combined into one.

— Wikipedia

Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the public in this way. … the Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.

— Wikipedia

…Wikipedia has forced academics to re-examine how they validate sources. We should have been doing that all along. We should have been approaching an Encyclopaedia Britannica article with a certain level of distrust and questioning: What are the biases of people writing this? What are they leaving out? What communities are not included in this conversation?

— Wikipedia

[Wikipedia's] worst failing, much like BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, is to portray subjects that are racked with unresolved controversy as if they were settled. … and while I was inside it, it was a tiny, infuriating nightmare of totalitarianism. One day soon, I suspect this particular dream is all too likely to come true in the solid world.

— Wikipedia

[YouTube,] a megacorporation with billions of dollars and thousands of brilliant employees is relying on a volunteer-run platform anyone can edit to fact-check information? It is odd. But it’s also a validation of Wikipedia’s mission and a reminder of its importance.

— Wikipedia

[Wikipedia] is therefore a reflection of the world’s biases more than it is a cause of them. … If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don’t recognize the work of women, Wikipedia’s editors have little foundation on which to build. … We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with.

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… debilitating factors – such as excessive bickering and poorly worded arguments – have led to about one-third of RfCs [i.e. Request for Comment deliberation processes] going unresolved. … the experience of participants and the length of a discussion are strongly predictive of the timely closure of an RfC.

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Medical images and articles found on Wikipedia may help patients better understand their radiology reports, … And despite both internal and external metrics concluding Wikipedia’s health information to be variable in quality, but continually improving, the authors believe the website’s detailed information could pair well with the lay-definitions housed within the PORTER [i.e. Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporter] glossary.

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Many professors are ditching the traditional writing assignment and instead asking students to expand or create a Wikipedia article on the topic.

— Wikipedia

Wikipedia is not going anywhere. It’s definitely part of everyone’s life. But the question of accuracy is one of the most important aspects of it. … Our purpose here is not to evaluate whether Wikipedia is good or bad. … It’s not so much about warning people about what Wikipedia is. It’s about showing what it is. … Librarians are interested in trying to broaden our community’s education with information in general, be it digital or otherwise.

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Wikipedia’s extreme form of democracy sounds even stranger in 2019 than it must have sounded in 2001.

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Wikipedia has become an ideological battleground in recent years, with zealots from both left and right using it to mock and smear their enemies.

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Supporting Wikipedia is […] a shrewd business decision that will likely benefit Google for years to come.

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Whereas a true scientist, confronted with a glimpse of the unknown, would pursue the inexplicable, the Skeptics close their eyes and ears to anything that challenges their Newtonian world-view. Worse, armed with the formidable propaganda tool that is Wikipedia, they force their lack of curiosity on others, closing the lines of inquiry for millions who might otherwise be interested in pursuing some healing modality not fully explained by scientific orthodoxy.

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Wikipedians in residence (WIR) have been around since at least 2010, with the first one hired by the British Museum in the U.K. Since then, other museums as well as universities, archives, libraries, art galleries and health organizations, have followed suit with a total of 165 WIRs hired worldwide. According to the Wikimedia Foundation […], right now 65 WIRs are actively working — and registered — with the foundation.

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Indeed, Fram seemed like the perfect test case for a new kind of enforcement from the foundation – a prolific user whose bad behavior warranted a severe sanction short of a lifetime ban. But as is the case in so many enforcement decisions on social platforms, the ban created more questions than it answered.

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The real cause of the Fram flare-up wasn’t the sudden overreach by the foundation, but the community’s own laissez-faire attitude about toxic users. ... The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion, which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.

— Wikipedia