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What is Wikipedia?

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

Wikipedia is a free global information resource. It is an encyclopedia created and managed by a global community of volunteers who work on what interests them. There are about 20 million registered editors; 80,000 active users; 1,400 "administrators"; and only about 200 employees. It is the sixth or seventh biggest website in the world containing 30 million articles, in 286 languages, with 2 billion edits, 8000 views per second and over 500 million monthly visitors.

Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:

• 
  Commons
  Free media repository
• 
  MediaWiki
  Wiki software development
• 
  Meta-Wiki
  Wikimedia project coordination
• 
  Wikibooks
  Free textbooks and manuals
• 
  Wikidata
  Free knowledge base
• 
  Wikinews
  Free-content news
• 
  Wikiquote
  Collection of quotations
• 
  Wikisource
  Free-content library
• 
  Wikispecies
  Directory of species
• 
  Wikiversity
  Free learning tools
• 
  Wikivoyage
  Free travel guide
• 
  Wiktionary
  Dictionary and thesaurus

Wikipedia is free to read and all content in Wikipedia is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA). This means that it is free to use as well. As long as you attribute it (that is, acknowledge the item's creator), all material from Wikipedia can be used by anyone, for any purpose, including commercial purposes.

The genre

Time lapse video of experts from the British Museum editing the article Hoxne Hoard (2010)

Wikipedia is a publication whose genre is "Encyclopaedia". It is not journalism, it is not a series of essays, blogs or research papers. Wikipedia articles are not commentary. Neither do they make a case for any editor's point of view. Wikipedia strives to provide a fact-based, neutral, balanced account of what is known about a notable topic. "Notability" is the encyclopedia's idea of an accession policy and the first paragraph of every article is supposed to set out what makes the topic or individual notable enough for inclusion.

The encyclopaedia has become part of the educational process at all levels - primary, secondary and tertiary, either as a first port of call for information and sources or as a means of learning to check sources and be discriminating about them. Writing the encyclopedia is a useful means of learning about the topic; learning about providing good references; collaborating with others; abiding by editorial policies; page layout as well as translating.

Truth

Wikipedia is part of the Free Culture Movement - one of many endeavours dedicated to producing and sharing knowledge rather than consuming it or locking it away. As "the world’s largest repository of human knowledge", it defends the "right to speak, share and create freely". Transparency is a core value. It makes knowledge available about and through a range of media - words and images; music and sounds. The content of the encyclopaedia is free to use and re-use. That is, it is both gratis and libre.

Free and open software

Large scale integrated circuit chip (CSIRO)

There is an ambiguity about the word "free" in the English language. Free in English means either liberty and/or cost. There is a difference between open source and free with regard to software. Free software can be referred to as F/OSS, FOSS or FLOSS. OSS = open source software (anyone can read it); L = libre (anyone can edit and use it). The transparency and openness (truth) is the best guard against bugs (software and political), which is why security agencies won’t use it. Everything in FLOSS and WP is open and traceable – the editors, the dates, the changes.

Sharing

Property destroyed by fire at Kinglake after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires (CSIRO Science Image)

• Donations of image collections for free use, for example from the CSIRO, the Bundesarchive (German Federal Archives), and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).
• Europeana The internet portal for digitised European cultural heritage, which, among other things, is helping institutions "make their digital content visible in Wikipedia articles"

Copyright (it's important but complicated!)

Text Plagiarising is a copyright violation. Plagiarised text will be deleted.

Images must be either in the public domain or have a Creative Commons licence.

• Uploading your own photos onto Commons is fine because you are giving them a Creative Commons licence. (If you don't want to given them this licence, do not upload them.)

• Photographs from prior to 1955 are in the public domain, after that they are still in copyright for 70 years after the death of their creator and cannot be used.

• "Freedom of Panorama" is a legal aspect of Copyright Law. The EU is currently making an effort to harmonise laws. Australia has Freedom of Panorama but it does not cover temporary works such as Sculpture-by-the-Sea or Vivid.
• Digital legal deposit is a recent Australian development.

Creative remix

• Print Wikipedia - an artwork using custom software to envision Wikipedia as a print reference.

• Graphics created by editors such as User: 99of9 using freely released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

• Creative remix of Archibald Prize Winners. (Not freely licenced.)
• Google Translate provides an unexpected and surprising re-use of data. From Wikipedia's freely licensed natural language corpus Google Translate creates an average word length histogram for automatic language detection in order to “guess” what language is required by the user. It uses Wikipedia as its “natural language” reference.

Cultural partnerships

Shot tower Tasmania 1870 (CSIRO donated image)

Examples of relationship between Australian libraries and Wikipedia.

• Sample Trove entry with Wikipedia link

• List of newspapers in New South Wales

• List of newspaper titles in Trove and new titles coming

Education

Templeborough Roman Fort visualised 3D flythrough - Rotherham

Free access for the developing world and children

Wikipedia helping to break down the digital divide.

• Wikipedia Zero
• Open letter for free access from South Africa
• Writing Wikipedia by phone from Nepal
• USB key for Project Afripedia
  

Secondary education

"...it is more important than ever for higher education to teach students to apply metacognitive skills — searching, retrieving, authenticating, critically evaluating and attributing material ..."

University education

It is no longer about simply consuming knowledge. For students as much as for teachers, it is about producing knowledge and sharing it.

• KLF2 (student work)
• Constitutional Law Project in Singapore
  

Research

Wikidata: Video introduction for beginners

Beauty

Holy Mountains Monastery (Complex of the architecture monuments of national significance in Sviatohirsk, Ukraine)
Winner of the 2014 WLM contest.

Sydney skyline at dusk

A musical visualisation of Wikipedia editing activity

Wikimedia Commons is the central media repository for the encyclopaedia. It is not to be confused with Creative Commons, which is an organisation that "provides copyright licences to facilitate sharing and reuse of creative content". Architecture is just one of the categories that attract photographers who contribute freely-licensed images.

• Main page of Commons
• Picture of the Year
• Media of the Day

Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is a global photography competition through which Wikimedians contribute clear photographs to record and make available good images of the world’s built heritage.

Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) A global photographic contest for natural heritage.

Goodness

The work is done by volunteers who are committed to sharing knowledge, education and freedom of access to information. Free-licence documentary video about Aaron Swartz: The Internet's Own Boy (Run time: 120 minutes)

How does Wikipedia work?

Cleaning up is continuous on WP (Chau Chak Wing Building)

Editors work collaboratively on articles. There are no deadlines. No one "owns" any article. Each article improves by virtue of the oversight and contributions of others. Considerations of balance, facts, structure, indeed everything, are carried out on "Talk" pages. Disagreements are resolved by discussion and consensus is reached, sometimes after a long time, with reference to policies.

Essentials

Wikipedia:The answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Columns of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece

The Five Pillars of Wikipedia set out its principles. In brief, articles must:

• be about something that is Notable;
  
• contain information that is Verifiable;
  
• be written with a Neutral Point of View;
  
• present No Original Research. That is, article contents and claims must be attributable.

Quality

Virtuous Circle

Quality improvement

As the encyclopedia is a work in progress, the quality of an article varies according to the effort and time given to it. Quality is determined in particular by the referencing (about which the policy is strict), and also by the writing (conciseness, clarity, tone, accuracy) as well as the layout (images, structure). There are policies to support all these aspects. There is also a quality matrix which accords a quality status to an article ranging from a "Stub" to "Featured Article".

• Overall summary table of article quality
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Help
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Featured and good content

Quality control

People use Wikipedia and want it to be accurate. Vandalism is controlled by:

• Every edit is recorded - the history and origin of edits is always available;
• Automatic abuse filter for common patterns of vandalism;
• Recent change patrollers monitor recent edits;
• Watchers oversee articles in topics of interest;
• Projects such as Wikiproject Medicine have a specific focus on quality;
• Quality of images is assessed against a range of criteria, which include technical merit and encyclopaedic value.

Navigating the encyclopaedia

Hobo–Dyer projection

Computer model image of a rogue wave smashing into a semi-submersible platform weighing around 32000 tonnes (CSIRO)

Tacking Point Lighthouse, Port Macquarie

Jamison Valley, Blue Mountains

Editors are called "users" and they each have a "User name" and a "User page" through which they introduce themselves to you and often give their motivation, particular interests and reveal their skills. The Username sticks with every edit you make and is best if it is "real-world anonymous". It becomes your Wikipedia identity and your wiki reputation is built on it.

You can watch some of the activity happening on Wikipedia live around the globe through this feed of Wikipedia Vision.

Tabs

• Read
• Edit
• History

Functionalities

• Links are the blue words in every article that connect you with that topic in another article.
• Disambiguation pages give you the chance to choose what article you want to read from among those with the same name.
  Example: Seidler is a disambiguation page.

• Redirects Common errors in searching will be redirected.
  Example: If you type Railway or Railroad into the search bar, you will be redirected to Rail transport.

• Categories, lists and tags are created by Wikipedians to make it easy for readers to find what they want and contain links to articles on each topic as well as references.
  Examples: List of Sydney suburbs or List of cities and towns in Germany.

• References in every article give its sources under the heading "References". (See below) Readers (and students) are encouraged to verify the accuracy of claims in Wikipedia's articles by going to the source documents. The article List of Australian diarists of World War I has 1197 references.

Useful

The menu bar at the left contains a number of links to useful information, including:

• Languages (Each language version is independently created, not usually simply translated)
  Example: Sydney Opera House has many language versions, including Ópera de Sídney (in Spanish), 悉尼歌剧院 (in Chinese).
• What links here
• Cite this page
• Print/export

WikiProjects

People interested in particular topics join groups to work together

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Architecture
• Wikipedia: WikiProject Sydney
• Wikipedia:Wikiproject Women Wikipedia Design