Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation - wikipedia

Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia.

Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices.

The English Wikipedia is now one of 291 Wikipedia editions and is the largest with 5,101,618 articles (having reached 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 38 million articles in over 250 different languages. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.

A peer review of 42 science articles found in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia was published in Nature in 2005, and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached Encyclopedia Britannica's. Criticisms of Wikipedia include claims that it exhibits systemic bias, presents a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods", and that in controversial topics it is subject to manipulation and spin.

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours (2012 Wikipedia blackout) - latimes.com

More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content - bbc.co.uk and SOPA/Blackoutpage wikimediafoundation.org

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid (Spain) found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008 - guardian.co.uk

''The Wall Street Journal'' cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.

Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study - telegraph.co.uk

Two years later, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011.

In the same interview, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable", a claim which was questioned by MIT's ''Technology Review'' in a 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia - technologyreview.com

In July 2012, ''the Atlantic'' reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.3theatlantic.com

In the November 25, 2013, issue of ''New York (New York (magazine))'' magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis. In 2013, MIT's ''Technology Review'' revealed that since 2007, the site has lost a third of the volunteer editors who update and correct the online encyclopedia's millions of pages and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae."

On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for ''The Economic Times'' indicated that not only had Wikipedia growth flattened but that it has "lost nearly 10 per cent of its page-views last year. That's a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by 12 per cent, those of German version slid by 17 per cent and the Japanese version lost 9 per cent."[ ] Varma added that, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."<ref name="economictimes.indiatimes.com" /> When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Security indicated that he suspected much of the page view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."<ref name="economictimes.indiatimes.com" />

One study found that the contributor base to Wikipedia "was barely 13% women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s".Where Are the Women in Wikipedia? - Room for Debate A 2011 study by researchers from the University of Minnesota found that females comprised 16.1% of the 38,497 editors who started editing Wikipedia during 2009.WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance In a January 2011 ''New York Times'' article, Noam Cohen observed that just 13% of Wikipedia's contributors are female according to a 2009 Wikimedia Foundation survey.Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List Sue Gardner, a former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, hoped to see female contributions increase to twenty-five percent by 2015.<ref name="NYT WP contributors gender 1"/> Linda Basch, president of the National Council for Research on Women, noted the contrast in these Wikipedia editor statistics with the percentage of women currently completing bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and PhD programs in the United States (all at rates of 50 percent or greater).Male-Dominated Web Site Seeking Female Experts

On March 5, 2014, Julie Beck writing for ''The Atlantic'' magazine in an article titled "Doctors' #1 Source for Healthcare Information: Wikipedia", stated that

"Fifty percent of physicians look up conditions on the (Wikipedia) site, and some are editing articles themselves to improve the quality of available information."<ref name="Julie Beck 2014">Julie Beck. "Doctors' #1 Source for Healthcare Information: Wikipedia". ''The Atlantic'', March 5, 2014.</ref> Beck continued to detail in this article new programs of Dr. Amin Azzam at the University of San Francisco to offer medical school courses to medical students for learning to edit and improve Wikipedia articles on health-related issues (Health information on Wikipedia), as well as internal quality control programs within Wikipedia organized by Dr. James Heilman to improve a group of 200 health-related articles of central medical importance up to Wikipedia's highest standard of peer review evaluated articles using its Featured Article and Good Article peer review evaluation standards.<ref name="Julie Beck 2014" /> In a May 7, 2014 follow-up article in ''The Atlantic'' titled "Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text?", Julie Beck quotes Wikiproject Medicine's Dr. James Heilman as stating: "Just because a reference is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's a high-quality reference."Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text? - Julie Beck Beck added that: "Wikipedia has its own peer review process before articles can be classified as 'good' or 'featured.' Heilman, who has participated in that process before, says 'less than 1 percent' of Wikipedia's medical articles have passed.<ref name="theatlantic.com" />