Resource:Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, online, open-content, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project.

SLOGANS: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Use Wikipedia

Start Wikipedia

Wikipedia is online, or Internet-based. It can be accessed using a web browser and an Internet connection.

Main website: http://www.wikipedia.org

Some major language websites:

A complete list of language Wikipedias is available at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

Search Wikipedia

http://www.wikipedia.org allows search in any of the language Wikipedias
In any of the language Wikipedias, there is a search box in the left column that allows any search
http://en.wikipedia.org/Special:Search is the English Wikipedia's internal site search
If using Mozilla Firefox as the browser, you can add Wikipedia (English) to the list of Search Engines using https://addons.mozilla.org/

Article names and reaching a given article

Wikipedia content is organized into articles. A Wikipedia article on a topic is named exactly by that topic. The URL for a given Wikipedia article in the English Wikipedia is given by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name

where Name denotes the name of the article. Thus, for instance, the English Wikipedia article on India is titled India, and the full URL is given by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India

To go to an article with a particular title, do any of the following:

Type the full URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name
Use the Wikipedia Search Engine for Firefox and type the name of the topic in the search bar
Open Wikipedia and type the name of the article in the search bar, and press Go (or enter)

More about Wikipedia for users

Criteria for Wikipedia content

Some important Wikipedia policies for content (nutshells as stated on the Wikipedia guideline pages):

Neutral Point of View policy: All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias.
No original research:
- Wikipedia does not publish original thought: all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source.
- Articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position not clearly advanced by the sources.
Notability: If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be notable.
What Wikipedia is not: Gives a list of things Wikipedia is not suitable for.
Verifiability policy: Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source.

These criteria are taken as guidelines, and not every page on Wikipedia may conform to the criteria at any given time.

Using Wikipedia

Some pieces of information put up by Wikipedia for Wikipedia users:

Ten things about Wikipedia: Important information about Wikipedia
Researching with Wikipedia: Information and suggestions about how to use Wikipedia for research
Navigating and finding information on Wikipedia

Wikipedia as a free resource

Free access

All content on Wikipedia can be accessed for free (i.e., without any access or subscription fees).

Copyright and reuse

Any contributions made to Wikipedia are automatically considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), version 1.2. The GFDL is a copyleft, open-content license, whose key feature is that it allows reuse without permission from the original author, as long as such reuse is also licensed under a similar license.

Main reference pages:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Copyrights explains Wikipedia's copyright policy
Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License is the full text of the license used by Wikipedia

Management and organization

General information in this direction is available at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

Parent organization

Wikipedia is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. The Wikimedia Foundation is responsible both for the servers that host Wikipedia content, and for maintaining and improving MediaWiki, the underlying software for Wikipedia.

Main reference pages:

http://www.wikimedia.org is the Wikimedia Foundation's central landing page (listing Wikipedia and other sister projects)
http://www.wikimediafoundation.org is the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki
http://meta.wikimedia.org is a wiki run by the Wikimedia Foundation to coordinate the Wikimedia Foundation's projects

Software tools

Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki, a software designed for web-base collaborative authoring of articles. MediaWiki is free software, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.0.

MediaWiki was originally written by Magnus Manske, specifically for Wikipedia. Its development is handled by software professionals working for the Wikimedia Foundation. However, MediaWiki is free software and can be both used and modified by anybody. A number of extensions to MediaWiki have been developed by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation.

MediaWiki is also used as a software in a number of other collaborative software-based tools, such as the Subject Wikis Reference Guide.

http://www.mediawiki.org is the MediaWiki website. It has the MediaWiki manual, links for downloading the software, as well as a listing of extensions developed for MediaWiki
http://www.wikiindex.org gives a list of wikis (not comprehensive)

Financial model

The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia's parent organization) is a non-profit organization (registered under Section 501 (c)(3)) founded in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States in 2002 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.

The financial model of the Wikimedia Foundation primarily rests on voluntary donation.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate The donate page

Production model

Collaborative content creation

Wikipedia uses a strongly collaborative model of content creation, powered by a wiki software called MediaWiki. Some of the key features of the model used on Wikipedia:

Anybody can register an account on Wikipedia, without necessarily revealing his/her real name and identity
Anybody can start an article on a topic (as of now, only logged-in users can start new articles) if no article on the topic exists
Once an article is created, anybody (and not just the original author of the article) can edit the article
Every revision of the article is stored on the wiki, and different revisions can be viewed and compared using the "history" tab of the article
People seeking to collaborate on a given article can discuss material related to the article on its "discussion page" or "talk page", which can be accessed using the "discussion" tab of the article
A person can nominate an article for deletion on grounds that it violates Wikipedia policy. The issue is then discussed on a separate page, till a consensus is reached either way

Relevant links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup is the page for account creation on English Wikipedia
Wikipedia Editing help

Compensation model

Wikipedia does not, as a rule, compensate people for writing articles. In particular:

There is no monetary compensation or reimbursement for writing articles on Wikipedia
No credits for an article are given on the article page itself. The authorship of a given article may be seen using the "history" tab or the "credits" option. However, the information revealed by the history may be incomplete because anonymous users may have made certain edits, and even the registered users may not have used their real names and identities

Security model

Wikipedia relies on soft security to combat problems such as vandalism and bias in articles. Dedicated volunteers patrol the wiki to locate acts of vandalism, or content that otherwise violates Wikipedia policy. User accounts or IP addresses associated with such editing may be banned from editing Wikipedia.

Related resources

Competitors

Resource:Encyclopædia Britannica: Managed by Britannica Corporation, this has been one of the world's leading encyclopedia resources for many centuries.
Resource:Citizendium