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All the best

Thank you for your kind words. I thought you might like to read about the English Wikipedia community. QuackGuru (talk) 07:09, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia community is the group of people who edit and volunteer their time to build Wikipedia[1][2][3][4][5] and to select what content in Wikipedia is best representative of the project's work.[6] Prominent Wikipedians, as they are known, have commented on the importance of the communal aspects of the project and emphasized it as a major reason to help the project.[7]

Background

Members of the community have a variety of incentives to participate. One study attempts to prove that a major incentive to contribute is the resulting prestige and respect within the community;[8] although many Wikipedians contribute through pseudonyms, this prestige may not translate into a person's actual identity.[8]

The community has certain guidelines and taboos that have evolved since its conception. For example, notable members of the community editing their own articles,[9] is generally frowned upon and is considered "poor taste."[10][11]

Wikipedia co-founder[12][13] Jimmy Wales said, in an interview with Slashdot: "The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well."[14] Wales has described the Wikipedia editors as "The Community," and expanded by saying, "Everywhere I go it's about more or less the same: about 80 percent male, geeky. The geeky smart people."[15] Though, a recent study by Hitwise states that 60 percent of edits are made by male editors.[16] Larry Sanger, who is the founder[17] of Citizendium[18] and a co-founder[19] of Wikipedia[20] but left the project in 2002,[21] wrote in part in regard to Wikipedia's oft-cited problems,[22] that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to … academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism."[23] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labelled as "anti-elitism."[24] The Wikipedia community has always had a tradition of an open-arm acceptance for anyone who has internet access to edit this ever expanding encyclopedia.[1][25] Wales, the de-facto leader of Wikipedia,[26] stated in part: "We need to maintain and improve our quality standards, while at the same time remaining open, friendly, and welcoming as a community. This is a challenge."[27]

Open source publishing

The community works as a group to keep the encyclopedia's articles neutral in tone.[28] The Wikipedia community also polices itself and the articles in the encyclopedia,[29] while identifying problems and factual errors.[30] According to Wales, the community of the encyclopedia is built on trust, and regular members of the community would not insert disinformation, such as the falsely reported death of actor Sinbad in March 2007.[31][32] Wikipedians can be assinged the "administrator" status after a community review by their peers, via a "Requests for adminship" process.[33] The New York Times stated that the community has a power structure, where the volunteer administrators have the authority to practice editorial control, delete articles that fail suitability requirements, and protect others against vandalism.[33]

Wikipedia relies on the efforts of its community members to remove vandalism to articles. According to Theresa Knott, a Wikipedian, "Vandalism would be difficult to police if there were more vandals, but the ratio of vandal editors to non-vandals is too low."[34] Every year, on or around April Fools' Day, the Wikipedia community prepares itself for the massive vandalism that is expected to take place because of the day's celebrations, which lasts for 48 hours instead of 24 due to its worldwide audience.[35]

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where anyone can edit and is built on consensus of the community.[8] The Wikipedia community has adopted a policy, 'don't bite the newcomers' and editors, for the most part, remain anonymous.[36][37][38][39][40] Newbies are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Wikipedia.[27] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship.[41][42] The beginning level is administrator.[42] Administrators can fully protect articles when silly disputes arise among editors.[43] Administrators have the authority to block disruptive editors.[44] One of the tools used to keep Wikipedia on the right path is viewing the easily accessible history version of articles.[43] The New York Times was also quoted as saying, "[Wikipedia] is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs...it's an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicised problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate."[33] The community has certain policies and guidelines for Wikipedians to read and adhere to when publishing and editing content.[45][46]

International

Wikipedia began as an English language project, and now has expanded its development into multilingual content and translations. This includes the German, Japanese, Chinese and French editions of Wikipedia in which international members of the community are contributing their knowledge wherein.[47] For example, an informal group of Chinese volunteers are collaborating to establish an internet encyclopedia named Chinese Wikipedia to create a free source of information for Chinese surfers on the web.[48][49][50][51] The Wikipedia community of the German Wikipedia, second largest only to the English Wikipedia, have plans on a new experimental approach that could help protect pages from trolling and improve the quality of articles. The idea is for edits to be delayed for a period of time before they become visible in the live page articles. In the past, Wales proposed a "Wikipedia 1.0" which the central article versions would be static and free from vandalism, similar to the direction of the German community experiments.[52]

Recognition

The communal aspect of Wikipedia was recognized in 2004 by the Webby Award for the "community" category,[53] and recognized along with YouTube, MySpace and other user generated content sites by Time Magazine in declaring their 2006 Time Person of the Year to be "You."[54]

References

  1. ^ a b Terdiman, Daniel (January 1, 2005). "Wikipedia Faces Growing Painsdate". Wired News. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Since its birth in 2001, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia from the Wikimedia Foundation, has grown to include more than 1.1 million entries. The English-language version alone has nearly 444,000 entries, all written for no compensation by members of the Wikipedia community. — Daniel Terdiman.
  2. ^ Marks, Paul (January 31, 2007). "Interview: Knowledge to the people". New Scientist. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  3. ^ Anderson, Chris (April. 30, 2006). "Jimmy Wales". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2009-04-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ Giles, Jim (March 28, 2006). "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head". Nature.com. Retrieved 2009-04-25.Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.
  5. ^ Poe, Marshall (September, 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Wales was an advocate of what is generically termed "openness" online. An "open" online community is one with few restrictions on membership or posting—everyone is welcome, and anyone can say anything as long as it's generally on point and doesn't include gratuitous ad hominem attacks. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) — Marshall Poe.
  6. ^ Pincock, Stephen (March 7, 2007). "Best Wikipedia pages edited over and over". News in Science. ABC Science Online. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  7. ^ Kleeman, Jenny (March 2, 2007). "You couldn't make it up". The Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  8. ^ a b c Forte, Andrea; Bruckman, Amy. "Why Do People Write For Wikipedia? Incentives To Contribute To Open Source Publishing" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  9. ^ Wales, Jimbo (December 1, 2005). "Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Wikipedia, Revision as of 22:38. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  10. ^ Hansen, Evan (December 19, 2005). "Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio". Wired News. Retrieved 2009-04-25. People shouldn't do it, including me," he said. "I wish I hadn't done it. It's in poor taste....
  11. ^ Musante, Kenneth (February 21, 2007). "The Outlaw Jimmy Wales: Discovering the Man Behind the Monolith That is Wikipedia". Adotas. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Few websites can claim to have changed the way that people find information like Wikipedia. — Kenneth Musante.
  12. ^ Mitchell, Dan (December 24, 2005). "Insider Editing at Wikipedia". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  13. ^ Meyers, Peter (September 20, 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25."It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project. "There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things." Instead, he said, "there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like."
  14. ^ Wales, Jimmy (July 28, 2004). "Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Replies". Slashdot. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  15. ^ "Wikipedia: Getting to Truth by 'Community'". ABC News. September 12, 2006. Retrieved 2009-04-25.Jimbo said it is "the Community" who decides whether something is right or not.
  16. ^ Tancer, Bill (April 25, 2007). "Who's Really Participating in Web 2.0". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male. With age comes experience, as well as the desire to disseminate knowledge. There is a clear age difference between visitors to Wikipedia and editors of its content. Over 45% of visitors to the site are under the age of 35, while 82% of those making edits to the site are 35 years old or older. — Bill Tancer.
  17. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia". USA Today. Retrieved 2009-04-25. This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls. — Brian Bergstein.
  18. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia". MSNBC. Associated Press. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it. — Brian Bergstein.
  19. ^ Mehegan, David (February 12, 2006). "Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world". Business. The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  20. ^ Lyman, Jay (September 20, 2006). "Wikipedia Co-Founder Planning New Expert-Authored Site". Linux Insider. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  21. ^ "More than just a war of words". The Sydney Morning Herald. April 21, 2007. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Wikipedia is suffering from a credibility crisis. Some - such as the Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left the organisation in 2002 - say the malaise goes even deeper. He describes the organisation as "completely dysfunctional" and is heading for a reckoning.
  22. ^ Helm, Burt (March 14, 2005). "Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress"". BusinessWeek. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The encyclopedia is designed to be self-policing, allowing the public to weigh in and correct inaccuracies. — Burt Helm.
  23. ^ Sanger, Larry. "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version)". Citizendium. Retrieved 2009-04-25. We may take Wikipedia as an early prototype of the application of open source hacker principles to content rather than code. I want to argue that it is just that, an early prototype, rather than a mature model of how such principles should be applied to reference, scholarly, and educational content. — Larry Sanger.
  24. ^ Sanger, Larry (December 31, 2004). "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism". Kuro5hin. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  25. ^ "Students assessed with Wikipedia". BBC News. March 6, 2007. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  26. ^ Frith, Holden (March 26, 2007). "Wikipedia founder launches rival online encyclopaedia". The Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, stood by the site's format. — Holden Frith.
  27. ^ a b Kleinz, Torsten (February, 2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF). The Wikipedia Project. Linux Magazine. Retrieved 2009-04-25. It is not easy for newbies to come to terms with the rules and processes that accumulated in the course of the last four years. More senior Wikipedians have adapted a policy of sending welcoming messages to new users to make them feel at home. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) — Torsten Kleinz.
  28. ^ Claburn, Thomas. "Wikipedia Becomes Intelligence Tool And Target For Jihadists". Information Week. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  29. ^ Ochman, B.L. (March 22, 2007). "Wikipedia's Not the Net Police". BusinessWeek. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  30. ^ "Wikipedia Falsely Reports Sinbad's Death". Associated Press. March 16, 2007. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  31. ^ "10 Questions: Jimmy Wales". Time Magazine. March 21, 2007. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The key is to look at the quality of articles. The quality of Wikipedia today compared with three years ago is a dramatic improvement. But people do need to be aware of how it is created and edited so they can treat it with the appropriate caution. — Jimmy Wales.
  32. ^ "10 More Questions with Jimmy Wales". Time Magazine. March 23, 2007. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  33. ^ a b c Corner, Stuart (June 18, 2006). "What's all the fuss about Wikipedia?". iT Wire. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  34. ^ Kleeman, Jenny (March 25, 2007). "Wiki wars". The Observer. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  35. ^ Kleeman, Jenny (March 28, 2007). "Wikipedia braces itself for April Fools' Day". The Guardian newspaper. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) — Jenny Kleeman.
  36. ^ Schiff, Stacy (July 24, 2006). "Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?". Know It All. The New Yorker. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  37. ^ Bergstein, Brian (January 24, 2007). "Idea of paid entries roils Wikipedia". Associated Press. MSNBC. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  38. ^ Vaknin, Sam (April 07, 2006). "The Six Sins of the Wikipedia". YoursDaily.com. Retrieved 2009-04-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  39. ^ Read, Brock (October 27, 2006). "Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  40. ^ "Can Wikipedia Survive Its Own Success?". Wharton School. January 25, 2006. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  41. ^ Dee, Jonathan (July 1, 2007). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  42. ^ a b Mehegan, David (February 13, 2006). "Many contributors, common cause". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Anyone can register as a user on Wikipedia -- even make changes without registering. But active users who gain a reputation for responsible contributions can run for one of several levels of volunteer management. Each level has a greater degree of power and responsibility on the Wikipedia site. The basic level is administrator, which includes the power to lock articles that are being vandalized. Above that, in order, are bureaucrats, stewards, developers, and Wikimedia Foundation trustees. Voting for the candidates is open to all registered users. — David Mehegan.
  43. ^ a b Kleinz, Torsten (February, 2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF). The Wikipedia Project. Linux Magazine. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Administrators help keep Wikipedia on the right track. They can freeze controversial articles for a certain time and try to prevent petty disputes. But with over 400 new articles a day, and 300,000 entries being edited every month, it is not always easy to keep track. This means normal users have to make a genuine effort to keep Wikipedia usable. Version history provides a useful way of keeping track. Just a few mouse clicks away allow anyone to find out who changed what and when. This means that every user can become a moderator. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) — Torsten Kleinz.
  44. ^ Keeker, Korry (2007-06-07). "Our own slice of the World Wide Web". Juneau Empire. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The Wikipedia post for Juneau lays bare the town's culture and community, but can Anonymous be trusted?
  45. ^ Nair, Anand. "The success of Wikipedia". Chilli Breeze. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is free and immensely "searchable". The most amazing fact about Wikipedia is that it is "open". Anyone on the Internet can contribute articles to this on any subject. And any one can "edit" existing articles! What is more, the changes you make become immediately visible to the rest of the world! — Anand Nair.
  46. ^ "How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko". Dirk Riehle. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  47. ^ Lih, Andrew (October 20, 2006). "Wikipedia and the rise of participatory journalism". Reuters. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  48. ^ Lemon, Sumner (May 31, 2004). "Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia". PC World. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  49. ^ Cohen, Noam (October 16, 2006). "Beijing lifts ban on English-language version of Wikipedia". International Herald Tribune. The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  50. ^ Cohen, Noam (November 16, 2006). "China Lifts Wikipedia Ban, but Some Topics Remain Blocked". Technology. The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  51. ^ "China loosens grip on Wikipedia". Australian IT. Reuters. October 20, 2006. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  52. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (August 23, 2006). "Can German engineering fix Wikipedia?". CNET News. ZDNet. Retrieved 2009-04-25. As always, anyone will be able to make article edits. But it would take someone who has been around Wikipedia for some yet-to-be-determined period of time--and who, therefore, has passed a threshold of trustworthiness--to make the edits live on the public site. If someone vandalizes an article, the edits would not be approved. — Daniel Terdiman.
  53. ^ "Winner of Community Category: And the winners are... The best of 2004". The Webby Awards. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The only award show for Internet sites that matter. — The Los Angeles Times.
  54. ^ "'You' named Time's person of 2006". BBC News Online. December 17, 2006. Retrieved 2009-04-25."You" have been named as Time magazine's Person of the Year for the growth and influence of user-generated content on the internet.

Additional sources

  1. Lu Stout, Kristie (August 4, 2003). "Wikipedia: The know-it-all Web site". CNN. Retrieved 2009-04-25. It's described as a free encyclopedia logging over 140,000 articles sent in by people from all over the world. — Kristie Lu Stout.
  2. M. Reagle Jr., Joseph. "A Case of Mutual Aid: Wikipedia, Politeness, and Perspective Taking". Reagle. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  3. "Studing cooperation and conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" (PDF). University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  4. Berinstein, Paula (March, 2006). "Wikipedia and Britannica: The Kid's All Right (And So's the Old Man)". Information Today, Inc. Retrieved 2009-04-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. Bogatin, Donna (January 24, 2007). "Can Wikipedia handle the truth?". ZDNet. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  6. Orlowski, Andrew (December 6, 2005). "Who owns your Wikipedia bio?". The Register. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  7. George, Johnson (January 3, 2006). "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  8. Poe, Marshall (August 1, 2006). "Common Knowledge". The Atlantic Online. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  9. Thompson, Bill (December 16, 2005). "What is it with Wikipedia?". BBC News Online. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia [sic] that is created entirely by its readers, with entries which can in the main be edited by anyone who feels they have something useful to contribute, has had an interesting few weeks. — Bill Thompson.
  10. Arthur, Charles (December 15, 2005). "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  11. Cohen, Noam (March 5, 2007). "A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  12. Albanes, John (March 15, 2007). "Wikipedia Stays Popular Despite False Sources". The Cornell Daily Sun. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  13. Williams, Martyn (March 09, 2007). "The Wikipedian founder addresses user credentials". PC World. Retrieved 2009-04-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. "Fact or fiction?". Economist.com. March 10, 2007. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  15. Ball, Philip (February 27, 2007). "The more, the Wikier". Nature.com. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
  16. Macintyre, Ben (July 21, 2006). "How wiki-wiki can get sticky". The Times. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The phenomenal but unreliable online encyclopedia is best used with a healthy dose of scepticism. — Ben Macintyre.
  17. Brain, Marshall. "How Wikis Work". HowStuffWorks. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The heart of any wiki is its community. Literally millions of people visit Wikipedia every month, and together they form Wikipedia's community. Each person who arrives is able to play one or more roles on the site. The best way to understand how the community works is to add something to Wikipedia and see what happens. The only reason that a wiki works is because the community of people who work on it make it work. The community adds all of the content, edits everything and polices the content to root out problems. When the community is functioning well, it can produce a tremendous amount of content that gets better and better over time. — Marshall Brain.
  18. H. Pink, Daniel (March, 2005). "The Book Stops Here". Wired News. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Four years ago, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia ambitious in purpose and unique in design. This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone. And it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute. With software called Wiki - which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what's there - Wales and his volunteer crew would construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) — Daniel H. Pink.
  19. Moses, Asher (March 27, 2007). "Founder defends evolving Wikipedia". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2009-04-25. The Wikipedia community does a great job of policing things but they need better tools to be able to do that more effectively. — Jimmy Wales.
  20. Youngwood, Susan (April 1, 2007). "Wikipedia: What do they know; when do they know it, and when can we trust it?". Vermont Sunday Magazine. Rutland Herald. Retrieved 2009-04-25. Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Wikipedia - both its genius and its Achilles heel - is that anyone can create or modify an entry. Anyone means your 10-year-old neighbor or a Nobel Prize winner - or an editor like me, who is itching to correct a grammar error in that Wikipedia entry that I just quoted. Entries can be edited by numerous people and be in constant flux. What you read now might change in five minutes. Five seconds, even. — Susan Youngwood.

Further reading

  • The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Paperback). Authors: Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham. Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; Pap/Cdr edition (April 3, 2001). ISBN 020171499X
  • Wiki: Web Collaboration (Hardcover). Authors: Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, Richard Heigl, and G. Dueck. Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (October 6, 2005). ISBN 3540259953
  • Wikis For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) (Paperback). Author: Dan Woods. Publisher: For Dummies (July 10, 2007). ISBN 0470043997
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