Wikipedia

From Palaeos

Wkipedia is a vast open source collaborative project; the most successful of its kind on the Internet. While crituics have rightly pointed out to incorrect information and poorly written pages, Wikipedia's massive multi-authorship means that its material tends to be self-correcting, with errors and misleading material gradually corrected.

Wikipedia has served as an inspiration for many projects, including Palaeos org.

[edit] Introduction

(the following is from the introduction to Wikipedia's own page on itself):

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia's main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."[1]

Currently Wikipedia has more than 5 million articles in many languages, including 1,420,318 in the English-language version. There are 229 language editions of Wikipedia, sixteen of which have more than 50,000 articles each. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Since inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity [2], and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top 20 most visited sites, and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking proper sources that could legitimize articles. However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their articles on the natural sciences.

(For more, see the #Link Link below for the complete article)

[edit] Wikipedia and Palaeos org

Wikipedia's voluminous and comprehensive coverage of a vast range of subjects and its open source status (which allows anyone to use the material however they want provided the open spource license is acknowledged) means that can serve as as excellent means of kickstarting Palaeos org in many areas not already covered on Palaeos com. This does not mean that these pages should be permanently retained "as is". Rather, in these respects Palaeos org represnts a fork with Wikipedia, in that the two sets of pages will progressively diverge with time.

[edit] Notes

[1] Jimmy Wales, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", March 8, 2005, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>

[2] See plots at "Visits per day", Wikipedia Statistics, January 1, 2005

[edit] Link

• Wikipedia

[edit] Credits