These are notes for a talk about Wikipedia I gave at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul on November 16, 2006. Updated April 2007 and March 2008.

Features of the Wikipedia website

• Main page: wikipedia.org, with links to the various languages. These are independent projects in various stages of completion. The English one is at en.wikipedia.org.
• This is a top 10 website, containing more than 1.3 million articles in English alone and serving about 2,000 articles every second.
• Anyone can edit (almost) any article. The complete history of all changes can be reviewed and all changes can be undone.
• Stated goal: every human should have free access to the sum total of human knowledge in their own language...
• Everything is published under the GFDL license, which essentially means: you are free to copy, modify, distribute and even sell Wikipedia content, as long as you acknowledge the authors and release your materials under the same license.

Locating articles

• Every page has a search box, but the following is usually faster and better: enter your search terms into google.com and add site:wikipedia.org (or site:en.wikipedia.org if you're only interested in English material)
• Every article belongs to several categories (shown at the bottom); the contents of those categories can be browsed, e.g. Category:French artists
• Follow the blue links. If a link is red, then that article hasn't been written yet.
• Every article has a "What links here" (in the toolbox to the left). Provides list of all articles that link to the current one.
• By date: 13th century, 1969.
• By magnitude: 1 E-6 m, 1 E7 kg
• Links to articles in other languages are given in the lower left.

History and discussion pages

• Every article has a History page (link at the top). Provides information about
  • all past versions of the article
  • when the article was last edited
  • how often it was edited
  • who contributed what, with edit summaries
  • clicking on a date gives the article version of that date
  • clicking on (last) gives difference between two consecutive article versions; clicking on (cur) gives difference between a past and the current version
  • clicking on a contributor's name gives their self-description; clicking on (contribs) gives a complete list of their edits in Wikipedia.
  • See also: How to read an article history
• Every article has a Discussion page (link at the top).
  • Contains discussion aimed at improving the article, questions or comments about the content, or attempts at resolving conflicts. Important background information!

Editing articles

• By clicking on "Edit this article" you can edit (almost) any article.
• Your IP address will be recorded with your edit. To create a permanent identity in Wikipedia, create a user account by clicking on "Log in" (upper right). Then, after logging in, your user name will be recorded with your edits.
• When editing pages, use this syntax:

Sign your contributions to Discussion pages (but not to articles) with ~~~~; this adds your user name and the current date.

When submitting your changes, provide a short summary in the "Edit summary" box.

For fancier things such as tables, images etc. see Help:Editing.

Further information

• See Why Wiki, a one-hour online video presentation explaining numerous additional features of Wikipedia, by a librarian at UW Milwaukee.

Organization behind Wikipedia and its history

• Founded in January 2001 by Jimbo Wales (Internet entrepreneur) and Larry Sanger (philosopher, employed by Wales) to supplement a slow-moving, free, peer-reviewed encyclopedia called Nupedia that has since all but died.
• Sanger left in 2002 after his employment ran out; he still supports the project but has criticized it for supposed anti-elitism and for scaring away experts. Atlantic Monthly on early history of Wikipedia
• Non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation was set up in the summer of 2003. Headed by Wales, who doesn't draw a salary. Three employees: a lawyer, a secretary, a programmer. Now also several chapters in other countries. The foundation owns the servers and the Wikipedia trademark, but not the copyrights to Wikipedia contents, which remain with the contributors. Wales resigned as chair in October 2006 but remains on the governing board.
• Early on, bandwidth and computers were paid for by Wales. Once the non-profit was set up, several fund drives were conducted (announced with a prominent link on every Wikipedia page). Nowadays, the foundation receives regular small donations adding up to about $30,000 per month and has $500,000 in the bank.
• It's estimated that adding ads to Wikipedia would generate about $1,000,000 per month, but most Wikipedia contributors are against it.
• All software employed is free and open source (Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP scripting language). The software running the site, "Mediawiki", was developed in-house, is freely available, and is nowadays used by many projects unrelated to Wikipedia.
• Numerous policies have been devised governing acceptable articles and editor behavior; discussion about article deletions takes place on Articles for deletion and an Arbitration Committee makes final decisions about banning disruptive users.
• Wikimedia also runs a multilingual dictionary (Wiktionary), a text book site (WikiBooks), a news site (WikiNews), and a depository of free photos (WikiCommons), all employing the "everyone can edit" philosophy.
• MIT's One Laptop per Child project will put Wikipedia excerpts on their laptops to be distributed to students in developing countries.

Problems and reliability

• Outright vandalism: removing content, adding nonsense or obscenities. This is usually reverted within minutes to hours; some automatic tools have been written to detect these vandalisms. Still, any article may be in a vandalized state when being viewed (check History!)
• Malicious changes: falsifying information or adding completely fictitious material; much rarer than outright vandalism. Best known case: the Seigenthaler affair. Prominent articles are on editors' "watchlists" allowing them to review every change; malicious changes to obscure articles however can and do survive for a long time.
• Agenda pushers: adding biased sentences; leaving out important information; using biased sources etc. In prominent articles this is not much of a problem since there will usually be an opposite group of agenda pushers; biased material in obscure articles can survive for a long time. Prominent case: Congress staffers edit Wikipedia.
• Obscure crackpot and pseudoscientific theories: "original research" is forbidden in Wikipedia; even a retired MIT professor was once banned from Wikipedia for repeatedly adding his obscure pet theory to numerous articles.
• Honest mistakes: Since most of the material is contributed by non-experts, articles may contain common misconceptions. Much rarer than one would expect: people who understand the falsehood of a common misconception are usually passionate about correcting it.
• Uneven coverage: From most to least extensive:
  • Current events (Hurricane Katrina, War in Iraq, etc.)
  • Popular culture (movies, celebrities, music bands, video games)
  • Computing, science, math
  • Literature, art, philosophy
  • Social sciences
• Bad writing, typos, poor organization of articles, etc.: this is common.
• Wikipedia articles neither represent "truth" nor "popular consensus"; they represent the consensus of those editors persistent and invested enough in an article's topic to return, review changes, and keep editing it.
• Many people are unaware of these problems, being misled by the term "encyclopedia"; even many peer reviewed articles cite Wikipedia!

Content reviews:

• Nature study (Jim Giles. Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 12/15/2005, Vol. 438 Issue 7070, p900-901): news staff of Nature had established researchers evaluate comparable scientific articles from Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Result: the average EB article has 3 mistakes, the average Wikipedia article has 4 mistakes. The study also noted the often poor writing in Wikipedia and found that 17% of Nature authors consult Wikipedia on a weekly basis. Rebuttal by EB, Rebuttal of the rebuttal by Nature.
• Journal of American History, June 2006: finds that Wikipedia's history coverage is uneven but comparable to Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia.
• Stern, December 2007: compares German Wikipedia to Brockhaus, the most prestigious German encyclopedia; Wikipedia comes out ahead.

General usefulness; use in academia

• Unreliable information sources can be quite useful. Consider your senses, your memory, or photographs.
• Wikipedia forces us to learn new techniques of information evaluation. Traditional techniques (evaluating process and authorship) do not apply to Wikipedia and have limited usefulness in many other contexts; instead, we have to
  • evaluate the internal consistency of the information,
  • compare new information to existing background knowledge,
  • consider the possible political/commercial/religious agendas at work,
  • check a variety of independent sources.
  • Wikipedia-internal investigations:
    • Check article in other languages
    • Check Discussion page for ongoing disputes
    • Check History page for signs of recent vandalism
    • Check contribution histories of main writers, to detect possible biases
• Articles on highly controversial topics such as abortion or scientology provide a comprehensive overview of the debate and the positions, arguments, biases and lies of the involved parties, especially if the article's history and discussion page are taken into account as well. This coverage is much superior to anything a traditional encyclopedia or news magazine can offer.
• It's appropriate to let students use Wikipedia in their research to get overviews, leads and pointers to other sources, but require them to cite only peer-reviewed references. Important to mention Wikipedia, and point out the above caveats, or they will use it uncritically. Treat copying of Wikipedia material as plagiarism.
• Because of its liberal copyright license, you are free to modify Wikipedia material and use it in your classes, as long as Wikipedia is acknowledged. Easiest approach: click on "Printable version" in toolbox on the left, save, then edit with an HTML editor and print or place on your website.
• The foreign language Wikipedias are very useful for language learners who can now read material that's interesting to them in a new language.
• Some professors have students write critical evaluations of Wikipedia articles relevant to topics covered in class.
• Some professors give assignments that have groups of students improve certain Wikipedia articles whose topics have been covered in class.

Contributing as an academic

• Educators take note: your contributions to Wikipedia will reach many more people than anything else you will ever write.
• A Nature editorial in December 2005 (Wiki's wild world. Nature, 12/15/2005, Vol. 438 Issue 7070, p890-890) encouraged all scientists to contribute.
• You need to be relaxed and have a thick skin; in Wikipedia nobody cares about your credentials. Back up your claims with reputable references.
• When correcting a common misconception, don't simply replace X with Y (it will eventually be changed back); instead write "X is a common misconception but in 1969 John Miller showed Y to be true." and give a reference.
• If you have composed and submitted a beautiful article and revisit it half a year later, expect that people will have reordered sections in an illogical manner, removed statements they didn't understand, added statements that were already covered elsewhere, introduced common misconceptions and typographical errors etc. Don't take it seriously -- it is to be expected. Take five minutes to fix it and move on.
• Larry Sanger's new Citizendium may be interesting to you: it is similar to Wikipedia but requires every contributor to provide their real name, and gives higher weight to the opinions of credentialed contributors in content disputes.
• Freely distributable and modifiable text books are coming; many are developed collaboratively in a Wiki environment (WikiBooks and Global Text). So get involved!

This entire document is in the public domain. You can copy, modify and distribute it in any way you like.