A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms “followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)”. The article contained Talk page topics found on Wikipedia, like discussions of changes in the articles priority level. “My Number One Doctor”, a 2007 episode of the television show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.

• Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.
• In contrast, the trend analysis for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) shows success in retaining active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000.
• In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia was ranked fifth globally among all websites, stating “With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, … Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors.” However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping.

An editorial in The Guardian in 2014 claimed that more effort went into providing references for a list of female porn actors than a list of women writers. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, “the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created”. Articles for traditional vegas casino encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.

English Wikipedia editor numbers

Prior to winning the award, Strickland’s only mention on Wikipedia was in the article about her collaborator and co-winner of the award Gérard Mourou. This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project.W 55 He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing-list that this action was “in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted”.

Carwil Bjork-James proposes that Wikipedia could follow the diversification pattern of contemporary scholarship and Dangzhi Zhao calls for a “decolonization” of Wikipedia to reduce bias from opinionated White male editors. In contrast, the trend analysis for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) shows success in retaining active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles. Editors who do not log in are in some sense “second-class citizens” on Wikipedia, as “participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation”, but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.

Nicholas Carr’s 2005 essay “The amorality of Web 2.0” criticizes websites with user-generated content (like Wikipedia) for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers’ going out of business, because “free trumps quality all the time”. The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially printed versions like Encyclopædia Britannica, which were unable to compete with a free alternative. The Talk page concerned a fictional article describing the unintended consequences of the release of a plastic-eating fungus to clean up an oil spill. In an April 2007 episode of the American television comedy The Office, office manager (Michael Scott) is shown relying on a hypothetical Wikipedia article for information on negotiation tactics to assist him in negotiating lesser pay for an employee. Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”.

Accuracy of content

Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia’s participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide. In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.

Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project’s utility and status as an encyclopedia. As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia “makes no guarantee of validity” of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.W 47 Concerns have been raised by PC World in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that results from users’ anonymity, the insertion of false information, vandalism, and similar problems. Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black alleged (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) that articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an “ax to grind” on the topic. No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively improving substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the Simple English Wikipedia.

Images

• Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.W 73 One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days.
• Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.
• For example, the project namespace uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-governance related discussions.
• BOXThe prefix “en” in the url is the for English language.

There are two broad types of bias, which are implicit (when a topic is omitted) and explicit (when a certain POV is over-represented in an article or by references). This systemic bias in editor demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia. A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage topics. Through its “Wikipedia Loves Libraries” program, Wikipedia has partnered with major public libraries such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to expand its coverage of underrepresented subjects and articles.

Old versions of pages

Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva, and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children.W 51 The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles. The October 22, 2013, essay by Tom Simonite in MIT’s Technology Review titled “The Decline of Wikipedia” discussed the effect of systemic bias and policy creep on the downward trend in the number of editors. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.W 49 The exact degree and manner of coverage on Wikipedia is under constant review by its editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see deletionism and inclusionism). Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article. In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of “fake news” because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles.

Chinese access

It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool.W 18 The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.W 9 A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to “increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits”. After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors appears to have peaked around early 2007. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.

Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia’s inception. In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The English Wikipedia’s three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad.

A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. This pattern is attributed to the status of English as a global lingua franca, leading to contributions from many editors for whom English is a second language. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias.

Wikipedia’s community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations. Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.W 31 When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. If the result of a discussion is not obvious, a closer—an uninvolved editor usually in good standing—may render a verdict from the strength of the arguments presented and then the numbers of arguers on each side. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate’s anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.

English Wikipedia

The edition’s one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format.

Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a “western cultural bias” (or “pro-western bias”) or “Eurocentric bias”, reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, “similar biases that are found in the ‘ivory tower’ of academic historiography”. In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appeared to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much “leftist bias”. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.

Wikimedia Foundation and affiliate movements

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes.W 20 A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia’s page-protection policies as “perhaps the most important” means at its disposal to “regulate its market of ideas”. Due to Wikipedia’s increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA. Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page.

For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.W 45 In January 2025, the Arbitration Committee introduced the “balanced editing restriction”, which requires sanctioned users to devote only a third of their edits to articles related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict even when no misconduct rules have been violated. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only users with 10 edits that have an account that is four days old may create a new article.W 19 On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. Wikipedia editors also have the ability to create hyperlinks to chosen URLs, pointing to pages either within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, or elsewhere on the Web. Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors. The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia.

The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009.W 115 The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia. In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,W 114 Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia was ranked fifth globally among all websites, stating “With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, … Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors.” However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping. Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih states that the number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years, and Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. Wikipedia’s original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection.