Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the encyclopedia. For the different, similar terms related to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia (terminology).
For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia's multilingual portal shows the project's different language editions.
Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal.
URL www.wikipedia.org
Slogan The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Commercial? No
Type of site Online encyclopedia
Registration Optional
Available language(s) 236 active editions (253 in total)[1]
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2]
Launched January 15, 2001(2001-01-15)
Alexa rank #8[3]
Current status perpetual work-in-progress[4]

Wikipedia (pronunciation Spoken content icon) is a free,[5] multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 10 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website.[6] Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,[7] it is currently the largest and most popular[3] general reference work on the Internet.[8][9][10]

Critics of Wikipedia target its systemic bias and inconsistencies[11] and its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[12] Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue.[13] Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information.[14] Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.[15][16]

In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated.[17][18] When Time magazine recognized "You" as its Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.[19]

Contents

History

Main article: History of Wikipedia
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[20]

Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article)
Visitors to wikipedia.org in 2008

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia.[2][21] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[22] Sanger is usually credited with the counter-intuitive strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[23] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[24] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[25] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[26] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[27] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[22]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.[28] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[29]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[30] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[31] Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons. Wikinfo does not require neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia and Google's Knol[citation needed] — have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research and commercial advertising.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Wikipedia and Nupedia on June 20, 2003.[32] It applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia on September 17, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004, and in the European Union on January 20, 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet."[citation needed] There are plans to license the use of the Wikipedia trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.[33]

Nature of Wikipedia

Editing model

Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Wikipedia undergoes formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority. Except for a few vandalism-prone pages that can be edited only by established users, or in extreme cases only by administrators, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. Consequently, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content.[34] Wikipedia also does not censor itself, and it contains materials that some people, including Wikipedia editors,[35] may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.[36] For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site.[37]

Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) in Florida, United States, where Wikipedia servers are hosted, and several editorial policies and guidelines that are intended to reinforce the notion that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and thus is worthy of inclusion. A topic is deemed encyclopedic if it is "notable"[38] in the Wikipedia jargon; i.e., if it has received significant coverage in secondary reliable sources (i.e., mainstream media or major academic journals) that are independent of the subject of the topic. Second, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[39] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to reliable sources. Within the Wikipedia community, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers are left themselves to check the truthfulness of what appears in the articles and to make their own interpretations.[40] Finally, Wikipedia does not take a side.[41] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[42] Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[43] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags or modifying article materials failing to meet them. (See also deletionism and inclusionism.[44][45])

Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[46][47] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[48] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[16] or start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, at any point, a reader of an article cannot be certain, without consulting its "history" page, whether or not the article she is reading has been vandalized. Critics argue that non-expert editing undermines quality. Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Historian Roy Rosenzweig noted: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."[49] All of these led to the question of the reliability of Wikipedia as a source of accurate information.

In 2008 two researchers theorized that the growth of Wikipedia is sustainable.[clarification needed][50]

Reliability and bias

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia
See also: Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[13] critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[51] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.[12] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[52] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[53] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[54] 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.[55]

John Seigenthaler Sr. has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[56]

Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[57] the insertion of spurious information, vandalism, and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months.[56] Some critics claim that Wikipedia's open structure makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push.[58][46] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[14] has been noted,[59] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[60] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[61]

Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. But he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[62]

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[63] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[64] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything". He also said 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 academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. 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."[64]

There have been efforts within the Wikipedia community to improve the reliability of Wikipedia. The English-language Wikipedia has introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged;[65] other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 2000 articles in English 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.[66] In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing—but the community has been unable to form a consensus in favor of such changes, partly because they would require a major software overhaul.[67][68] However a similar system is being tested on the German Wikipedia, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version at some future time.[69] Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz is now being tested that will assign "trust ratings" to individual Wikipedia contributors, with the intention that eventually only edits made by those who have established themselves as "trusted editors" will be made immediately visible.[70]

Wikipedia community

Wikimania, an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The community has a power structure.[71][72] Wikipedia's community has also been described as "cult-like,"[73] although not always with entirely negative connotations,[74] and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.[75] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator",[76] the largest group of privileged users (1,594 Wikipedians for the English edition on September 30, 2008), who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making and are prohibited from using their powers to settle content disputes. The roles of administrators, often described as "janitorial", are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors in order to minimize disruption, as well as banning users from making disruptive edits such as vandalism.

As Wikipedia grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Wikipedia?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg.[77] Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". This was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content contributed by users with low edit counts.[78] A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site.[79] Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".[11]

In August 2007, a website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia by editors who are not logged in, which reveals that many of these edits come from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and are attempts to remove criticism.[80]

In a 2003 study of Wikipedia as a community, economics Ph.D. 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.[81] In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society cites Wikipedia's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web.[82]

Signpost

The Wikipedia Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Wikipedia, and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the current chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.[83] It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.[84]

Operation

Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters

Wikimedia Foundation logo

Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wikibooks. The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of Wikipedians, also participate in the promotion, the development and the funding of the project.

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.[85] The software incorporates 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.

Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu[86][87]), with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of February 2008, there were 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam, and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul.[88] 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 Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002;[143] Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free books. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, including Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities.[144]

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.[20]

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 Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2 and Everything2.

Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,[145] said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields:[146] "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."[147]

See also

Meta has related information at:

Further reading

Press coverage

Academic studies

See also: Academic studies about Wikipedia

Essays

Books

Learning resources

References

  1. ^ a b "Statistics". English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-06-21.
  2. ^ a b Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia", San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved on 15 October 2006. 
  3. ^ a b c "Five-year traffic statistics for wikipedia.org". Alexa Internet. Retrieved on 2008-07-15.
  4. ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a work in progress". Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-07-03.
  5. ^ Some versions such as the English language version contain non-free content.
  6. ^ In some parts of the world, the access to Wikipedia has (or had) been blocked.
  7. ^ Miliard, Mike (2008-03-01). "Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Wikipedia?", Salt Lake City Weekly. Retrieved on 21 February 2008. 
  8. ^ Tancer, Bill (2007-05-01). "Look Who's Using Wikipedia", Time. Retrieved on 1 December 2007. "The sheer volume of content [...] is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Wikipedia is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category"  (the author's blog post on the article)
  9. ^ Woodson, Alex (2007-07-08). "Wikipedia remains go-to site for online news", Reuters. Retrieved on 16 December 2007. "Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings." 
  10. ^ a b "Top 500". Alexa. Retrieved on 2007-12-04.
  11. ^ a b Larry Sanger, Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, Kuro5hin, December 31, 2004.
  12. ^ a b Danah Boyd (2005-01-04). "Academia and Wikipedia". Many-to-Many. Retrieved on 2007-02-11.[unreliable source?]
  13. ^ a b Simon Waldman (2004-10-26). "Who knows?". The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-02-11.
  14. ^ a b Ahrens, Frank (2006-07-09). "Death by Wikipedia: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles". The Washington Post. Retrieved on 2006-11-01.
  15. ^ Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Kushal Dave (2004). "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations" (PDF). Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (Vienna, Austria): p. 575–582. ISBN 1-58113-702-8, http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf. Retrieved on 24 January 2007. 
  16. ^ a b Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl (2007-11-04). "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" (PDF). Association for Computing Machinery GROUP '07 conference proceedings (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA.), http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf. Retrieved on 13 October 2007. 
  17. ^ Jonathan Dee (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out", The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved on 1 December 2007. 
  18. ^ Andrew Lih (2004-04-16). "Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource" (PDF). 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism (University of Texas at Austin), http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/utaustin-2004-wikipedia-rc2.pdf. Retrieved on 13 October 2007. 
  19. ^ "Time's Person of the Year: You", Time (2006-12-13). 
  20. ^ a b Stallman, Richard M. (2007-06-20). "The Free Encyclopedia Project". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved on 2008-01-04.
  21. ^ Meyers, Peter (September 20, 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", The New York Times. Retrieved on 22 November 2007. "I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph," said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales.
  22. ^ a b Larry Sanger (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir", Slashdot. 
  23. ^ "Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?". Retrieved on 2007-02-20.
  24. ^ Larry Sanger (January 10, 2001). "Let's make a wiki", Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 14 April 2003. 
  25. ^ "Wikipedia: HomePage". Archived from the original on 2001-03-31. Retrieved on 2001-03-31.
  26. ^ Larry Sanger (January 17, 2001). "Wikipedia is up!", Internet Archive. 
  27. ^ "Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia (January 21, 2007)
  28. ^ "Multilingual statistics", Wikipedia, March 30, 2005
  29. ^ "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. 18. (2007). Encyclopædia Britannica. 257–286. 
  30. ^ "[long Enciclopedia Libre: msg#00008]". Osdir.
  31. ^ Shirky, Clay (February 28, 2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, The Penguin Press via Amazon Online Reader. pp. 273. ISBN 1-594201-53-6, http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1594201536/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=spanish&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go%21#. 
  32. ^ Jimmy Wales: "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", June 20, 2003, <Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org>
  33. ^ Nair, Vipin (December 5, 2005). "Growing on volunteer power", Business Line. 
  34. ^ "Wikipedia:General disclaimer". English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-04-22.
  35. ^ Schliebs, Mark (2008-09-09). "Wikipedia users divided over sexual material", news.com.au. 
  36. ^ "Wikipedia is not censored". Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-04-30.
  37. ^ Taylor, Sophie (2008-04-05). "China allows access to English Wikipedia". Reuters. Retrieved on 2008-07-29.
  38. ^ "Wikipedia:Notability". Retrieved on 2008-02-13. "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject."
  39. ^ "Wikipedia:No original research". Retrieved on 2008-02-13. "Wikipedia does not publish original thought"
  40. ^ "Wikipedia:Verifiability". Retrieved on 2008-02-13. "Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source."
  41. ^ "Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view". Retrieved on 2008-02-13. "All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias."
  42. ^ Eric Haas (2007-10-26). "Will Unethical Editing Destroy Wikipedia's Credibility?". AlterNet.org.
  43. ^ "Who's behind Wikipedia?". PC World (2008-02-06). Retrieved on 2008-02-07.
  44. ^ "The battle for Wikipedia's soul", The Economist (2008-03-06). Retrieved on 7 March 2008. 
  45. ^ "Wikipedia: an online encyclopedia torn apart", Daily Telegraph (2007-11-10). Retrieved on 11 March 2008. 
  46. ^ a b Kleinz, Torsten (February, 2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF), The Wikipedia Project, Linux Magazine. Retrieved on 13 July 2007. "The Wikipedia's open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles, get other people tied up in endless discussions, and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves."