Wikipedia Serving Millions For Free

Wikipedia a Reliable Source ?




Wikipedia a Reliable Source ?

Wiki: A Global Community of Millions

Marc Robinson


Wikipedia is one of the most misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and most visited web communities in the entire history of the Internet. They are doing something right. Wiki was developed in 1994 by Ward Cunningham, whose intent was to create, “the simplest online database that could possibly work.” A Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’, thus the original simplistic database, WikiWikiWeb, March 25 of 1995. Typically Wiki are used to create collaborative websites, community websites, personal note taking, corporate intranet, and knowledge management systems.
Collaborative topic associations are self-monitored (no formal peer review process) in this Open Source Software environment, interestingly enough, the accuracy is very similar to 100 year old Encyclopedia Britannica . Until 2009, the collaborators were largely free-style and unmonitored. Now, there are numerous information safeguards that users have at their disposal. First, there are indeed registered users and registered contributors, thus sourcing can be verified. Second, there is a source tab with bibliographic data and biographical data on the author of each entry. Third, there is a formal effort to hire many academics and researchers as Wiki Foundation staffers.
The community has grown rapidly and numerous growing pains are to be expected. The community has weeded out a number of malicious contributors including dozens of members of the U.S. Congress, whose IP addresses are now blocked from contributing via the Congressional office. Other malicious contributors that have their IP addresses blocked are the Christian Scientist movement, who on numerous occasions were found to blatantly modify academic scientific data to match their own agenda. Finally, there have been several Research Academics that have been embroiled in bitter battle with each other like Gladiators utilizing Wikipedia as their Sword and Shield, many IP addresses have been banned by the WIKI police!!
As an open source platform, the WIKIs of which these are the primary projects:
http://www.wikiversity.org/
Wikiversity is a community devoted to collaborative learning. We build learning resources from the ground up and also link to existing internet resources. Wikiversity uses wiki software, which makes collaboration easy. Wikiversity participants are continually improving the educational content of Wikiversity's pages.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/
he Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fourth most visited website in the world.

http://www.wikipedia.org/
a free, web-based, collaborative, 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, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 15 million articles (3.2 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.
http://www.wiktionary.org/
A collaborative project run by the Wikimedia Foundation to produce a free and complete dictionary (lexicon and thesaurus therein) in every language.

http://www.wikiquote.org/
Wikiquote aims to be an accurate and comprehensive collection of notable quotations. They can inspire us to seek to understand the people that uttered them, to consider the course of our own lives, to laugh, or merely to admire their mastery of language. However we use them, they will exist forever as a summary of the collective insights of society, communal knowledge passed on from one generation to the next.

http://www.wikibooks.org/
Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks that anyone, including you, can edit right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears near the top of each Wikibooks module. Contributors maintain the property rights to their contributions,

http://www.wikisource.org/
Wikisource is a Free Library of source texts which are in the public domain or legally available for free redistribution. Wikisource is an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation and a sister project of Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

http://www.wikinews.org/
To present up-to-date, relevant, newsworthy and entertaining content without bias.
Wikinews promotes the idea of participatory journalism because of the belief that citizens know what is news like no others. You are invited to join in this effort, and share news that is of interest to you. All Wikinews articles are created by everyday people just like you, from around the globe.

The Wikinews project is a free content news source of the Wikimedia Foundation that seeks to provide content, free of charge, where everyone is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea to build a unique news environment to enrich the media landscape.


http://species.wikimedia.org/
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive free contentcatalogue of all species and is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wales, chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated that editors are not required to fax in their degrees, but that submissions will have to pass muster with a technical audience.

http://mediawiki.org/
MediaWiki is a free software wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and bymany other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/
the global community site for the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, and coordination and documentation of related projects. For further discussion of the cross-project policies and events,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/
A database of 6,269,580 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. The Commons is an online repository of images, sound and other media files.
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/
is where potential Wikimedia Foundation wikis of existing Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote and Wikinews – Wikisource and Wikiversity have their own wikis) in additional languages should be arranged, written, tested, and proven worthy of Wikimedia hosting. Before its creation on 2 June 2006, the test projects were here at Meta.
There are no software licensing fees to pay to the Wikipedia or Wikimedia Foundation. It is not unusual to have many sources, comments, and edits under the Wikipedia entry, so it is very important to check the source bibliography for each and every wiki topic.
When we are listening to the naysayers of the Wiki Open Source Software and Platform it is important to note: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiversity/en/b/bc/Wiki.png
1) The Sources of information are principally from Academia and Research backgrounds. All primary edits and contributions must include registered users and bibliographic supporting data.
2) Accuracy is comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica which is a very old, paid-subscription based service. Several studies have measured accuracy on a head- to-head basis, the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; the average science entry in Britannica, about three. Test sample size was 42 entries. Note : Wiki network contains 42 million entries.
3) Most Importantly, 1911 was the original release of Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia was released by Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation in June of 2003. It is amazing that their accuracy ratings are so similar considering the difference in age and prestige in their respective communities.
4) Notable movements in 2010, Google donated $ 2million on 02.17.2010
Other donation collected, $ 8million on 01.05.2010
Craigslist, Craig Newmark joins Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.
Wikimedia Foundation, St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
International non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth and development of free content, multilingual, wiki-based projects,…
Focused on Empowering and Engaging people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free content license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
www.wikimediafoundation.org
blog.wikimedia.org
info@wikimedia.org
Phone: 415.839.6885
Post Office Box 78350
San Francisco, California 94107-8350


WIKIPEDIA, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, WIKTIONARY, WIKISOURCE, WIKIQUOTE, WIKIBOOKS, WIKINEWS, WIKIPOCK, WIKIVERSITY: to name just a few, many more to come




Bibliography
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Capocci, A. (2008). Collaberative systems: The case of on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Europhysics Letters, 01-01-2008, pp 28006
Dondio, P.S. Extracting Trust From Domain Analysis. A Case Study on Wikipedia. (2006) ATC, pp. 362-373.
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Fallis, D. (2008). Toward an epistemology of Wikipedia. Journal of Am Soc for Info Science and Tech. 08-08-08, pp. 1662-1674.
Giles, J. (2005, December 15). Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head. Nature 438, pp. 900-901.
Josand, A. (2007). A survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Services. Decision Support Systems, pp. 68-644.
Korsgaard, T. R. (2009). Re-engineering the Wikipedia for Reputation. Science Direct, pp. 81-94.
Lim, S. (2009, November). How and Why do College Students Use Wikipedia? Journal of the Am. Soc. for Info. Science and Tech., pp. 2189-2002.
Orlowwski, A. (2006). Avoid Wikipedia: Warns Wikipedia Chief. The Register.
Pascale, C. (2009, June 7). BBC Reports that Wikipedia is Reliable. Educational Issues.
Rector, Lucy Holman (2008). Comp. of Wikipedia for accuracy. Reference Services Review. Issue 1, 2008, Vol. 36, pp.7-22.
Santana, Adele. (2009). Transparency and Social Responsibility issues for Wikipedia. Ehtics and Inform. Tech., Vol. 11, Issue 2, June 2009, pp.133-144.
Seigneur, J.-M. (2003) End-to-End Trust in Pervasive Computing. Boppard, Germany, 2003.
Utter, D.A. (May 2007). Wikipedia Bans Congress. Webpronews, May 28, 2007.
Zaihrayeu, I., (2005). Iwtrust: Improving user trust in answers from the web. Rocquencourt, France, pp 384-392.


Not a Source at all ! Marc Robinson Page 9