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Thank you for your kind words. I thought you might like to read about the English Wikipedia community. QuackGuru ( talk) 07:09, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
The English Wikipedia community is the group of people who edit and volunteer their time to build Wikipedia [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and to select what content in Wikipedia is best representative of the project's work. [6] Prominent Wikipedians, as they are known, have commented on the importance of the communal aspects of the project and emphasized it as a major reason to help the project. [7]
Members of the community have a variety of incentives to participate. One study attempts to prove that a major incentive to contribute is the resulting prestige and respect within the community; [8] although many Wikipedians contribute through pseudonyms, this prestige may not translate into a person's actual identity. [8]
The community has certain guidelines and taboos that have evolved since its conception. For example, notable members of the community editing their own articles, [9] is generally frowned upon and is considered "poor taste." [10] [11]
Wikipedia co-founder [12] [13] Jimmy Wales said, in an interview with Slashdot: "The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well." [14] Wales has described the Wikipedia editors as "The Community," and expanded by saying, "Everywhere I go it's about more or less the same: about 80 percent male, geeky. The geeky smart people." [15] Though, a recent study by Hitwise states that 60 percent of edits are made by male editors. [16] Larry Sanger, who is the founder [17] of Citizendium [18] and a co-founder [19] of Wikipedia [20] but left the project in 2002, [21] wrote in part in regard to Wikipedia's oft-cited problems, [22] that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to … academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism." [23] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labelled as "anti-elitism." [24] The Wikipedia community has always had a tradition of an open-arm acceptance for anyone who has internet access to this ever expanding encyclopedia. [1] [25] Wales, the de-facto leader of Wikipedia, [26] stated in part: "We need to maintain and improve our quality standards, while at the same time remaining open, friendly, and welcoming as a community. This is a challenge." [27]
The community works as a group to keep the encyclopedia's articles neutral in tone. [28] The Wikipedia community also polices itself and the articles in the encyclopedia, [29] while identifying problems and factual errors. [30] According to Wales, the community of the encyclopedia is built on trust, and regular members of the community would not insert disinformation, such as the falsely reported death of actor Sinbad in March 2007. [31] [32] Wikipedians can be assinged the "administrator" status after a community review by their peers, via a "Requests for adminship" process. [33] The New York Times stated that the community has a power structure, where the volunteer administrators have the authority to practice editorial control, delete articles that fail suitability requirements, and protect others against vandalism. [33]
Wikipedia relies on the efforts of its community members to remove vandalism to articles. According to Theresa Knott, a Wikipedian, "Vandalism would be difficult to police if there were more vandals, but the ratio of vandal editors to non-vandals is too low." [34] Every year, on or around April Fools' Day, the Wikipedia community prepares itself for the massive vandalism that is expected to take place because of the day's celebrations, which lasts for 48 hours instead of 24 due to its worldwide audience. [35]
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where anyone can and is built on consensus of the community. [8] The Wikipedia community has adopted a policy, ' don't bite the newcomers' and editors, for the most part, remain anonymous. [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] Newbies are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Wikipedia. [27] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship. [41] [42] The beginning level is administrator. [42] Administrators can fully protect articles when silly disputes arise among editors. [43] Administrators have the authority to block disruptive editors. [44] One of the tools used to keep Wikipedia on the right path is viewing the easily accessible history version of articles. [43] The New York Times was also quoted as saying, "[Wikipedia] is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs...it's an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicised problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate." [33] The community has certain policies and guidelines for Wikipedians to read and adhere to when publishing and editing content. [45] [46]
Wikipedia began as an English language project, and now has expanded its development into multilingual content and translations. This includes the German, Japanese, Chinese and French editions of Wikipedia in which international members of the community are contributing their knowledge wherein. [47] For example, an informal group of Chinese volunteers are collaborating to establish an internet encyclopedia named Chinese Wikipedia to create a free source of information for Chinese surfers on the web. [48] [49] [50] [51] The Wikipedia community of the German Wikipedia, second largest only to the English Wikipedia, have plans on a new experimental approach that could help protect pages from trolling and improve the quality of articles. The idea is for edits to be delayed for a period of time before they become visible in the live page articles. In the past, Wales proposed a "Wikipedia 1.0" which the central article versions would be static and free from vandalism, similar to the direction of the German community experiments. [52]
The communal aspect of Wikipedia was recognized in 2004 by the Webby Award for the "community" category, [53] and recognized along with YouTube, MySpace and other user generated content sites by Time Magazine in declaring their 2006 Time Person of the Year to be " You." [54]
Since its birth in 2001, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia from the Wikimedia Foundation, has grown to include more than 1.1 million entries. The English-language version alone has nearly 444,000 entries, all written for no compensation by members of the Wikipedia community.— Daniel Terdiman.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)
Wales was an advocate of what is generically termed "openness" online. An "open" online community is one with few restrictions on membership or posting—everyone is welcome, and anyone can say anything as long as it's generally on point and doesn't include gratuitous ad hominem attacks.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Marshall Poe.
People shouldn't do it, including me," he said. "I wish I hadn't done it. It's in poor taste....
Few websites can claim to have changed the way that people find information like Wikipedia.— Kenneth Musante.
Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male. With age comes experience, as well as the desire to disseminate knowledge. There is a clear age difference between visitors to Wikipedia and editors of its content. Over 45% of visitors to the site are under the age of 35, while 82% of those making edits to the site are 35 years old or older.— Bill Tancer.
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.— Brian Bergstein.
The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it.— Brian Bergstein.
Wikipedia is suffering from a credibility crisis. Some - such as the Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left the organisation in 2002 - say the malaise goes even deeper. He describes the organisation as "completely dysfunctional" and is heading for a reckoning.
The encyclopedia is designed to be self-policing, allowing the public to weigh in and correct inaccuracies.— Burt Helm.
We may take Wikipedia as an early prototype of the application of open source hacker principles to content rather than code. I want to argue that it is just that, an early prototype, rather than a mature model of how such principles should be applied to reference, scholarly, and educational content.— Larry Sanger.
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, stood by the site's format.— Holden Frith.
It is not easy for newbies to come to terms with the rules and processes that accumulated in the course of the last four years. More senior Wikipedians have adapted a policy of sending welcoming messages to new users to make them feel at home.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Torsten Kleinz.
The key is to look at the quality of articles. The quality of Wikipedia today compared with three years ago is a dramatic improvement. But people do need to be aware of how it is created and edited so they can treat it with the appropriate caution.— Jimmy Wales.
Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes.
{{
cite news}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors=
(
help) — Jenny Kleeman.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)
Anyone can register as a user on Wikipedia -- even make changes without registering. But active users who gain a reputation for responsible contributions can run for one of several levels of volunteer management. Each level has a greater degree of power and responsibility on the Wikipedia site. The basic level is administrator, which includes the power to lock articles that are being vandalized. Above that, in order, are bureaucrats, stewards, developers, and Wikimedia Foundation trustees. Voting for the candidates is open to all registered users.— David Mehegan.
Administrators help keep Wikipedia on the right track. They can freeze controversial articles for a certain time and try to prevent petty disputes. But with over 400 new articles a day, and 300,000 entries being edited every month, it is not always easy to keep track. This means normal users have to make a genuine effort to keep Wikipedia usable. Version history provides a useful way of keeping track. Just a few mouse clicks away allow anyone to find out who changed what and when. This means that every user can become a moderator.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Torsten Kleinz.
The Wikipedia post for Juneau lays bare the town's culture and community, but can Anonymous be trusted?
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is free and immensely "searchable". The most amazing fact about Wikipedia is that it is "open". Anyone on the Internet can contribute articles to this on any subject. And any one can "edit" existing articles! What is more, the changes you make become immediately visible to the rest of the world!— Anand Nair.
As always, anyone will be able to make article edits. But it would take someone who has been around Wikipedia for some yet-to-be-determined period of time--and who, therefore, has passed a threshold of trustworthiness--to make the edits live on the public site. If someone vandalizes an article, the edits would not be approved.— Daniel Terdiman.
The only award show for Internet sites that matter.— The Los Angeles Times.
It's described as a free encyclopedia logging over 140,000 articles sent in by people from all over the world.— Kristie Lu Stout.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia [sic] that is created entirely by its readers, with entries which can in the main be edited by anyone who feels they have something useful to contribute, has had an interesting few weeks.— Bill Thompson.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)The phenomenal but unreliable online encyclopedia is best used with a healthy dose of scepticism.— Ben Macintyre.
The heart of any wiki is its community. Literally millions of people visit Wikipedia every month, and together they form Wikipedia's community. Each person who arrives is able to play one or more roles on the site. The best way to understand how the community works is to add something to Wikipedia and see what happens. The only reason that a wiki works is because the community of people who work on it make it work. The community adds all of the content, edits everything and polices the content to root out problems. When the community is functioning well, it can produce a tremendous amount of content that gets better and better over time.— Marshall Brain.
Four years ago, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia ambitious in purpose and unique in design. This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone. And it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute. With software called Wiki - which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what's there - Wales and his volunteer crew would construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Daniel H. Pink.The Wikipedia community does a great job of policing things but they need better tools to be able to do that more effectively.— Jimmy Wales.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Wikipedia - both its genius and its Achilles heel - is that anyone can create or modify an entry. Anyone means your 10-year-old neighbor or a Nobel Prize winner - or an editor like me, who is itching to correct a grammar error in that Wikipedia entry that I just quoted. Entries can be edited by numerous people and be in constant flux. What you read now might change in five minutes. Five seconds, even.— Susan Youngwood.
![]() | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Thank you for your kind words. I thought you might like to read about the English Wikipedia community. QuackGuru ( talk) 07:09, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
The English Wikipedia community is the group of people who edit and volunteer their time to build Wikipedia [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and to select what content in Wikipedia is best representative of the project's work. [6] Prominent Wikipedians, as they are known, have commented on the importance of the communal aspects of the project and emphasized it as a major reason to help the project. [7]
Members of the community have a variety of incentives to participate. One study attempts to prove that a major incentive to contribute is the resulting prestige and respect within the community; [8] although many Wikipedians contribute through pseudonyms, this prestige may not translate into a person's actual identity. [8]
The community has certain guidelines and taboos that have evolved since its conception. For example, notable members of the community editing their own articles, [9] is generally frowned upon and is considered "poor taste." [10] [11]
Wikipedia co-founder [12] [13] Jimmy Wales said, in an interview with Slashdot: "The key is that we're doing exciting and interesting things, showing what is possible to a community project running free software and working under a free license. Nowadays everyone knows that excellent software can be written using the principles of free licensing, and we're proving that the idea of sharing knowledge is powerful in other areas as well." [14] Wales has described the Wikipedia editors as "The Community," and expanded by saying, "Everywhere I go it's about more or less the same: about 80 percent male, geeky. The geeky smart people." [15] Though, a recent study by Hitwise states that 60 percent of edits are made by male editors. [16] Larry Sanger, who is the founder [17] of Citizendium [18] and a co-founder [19] of Wikipedia [20] but left the project in 2002, [21] wrote in part in regard to Wikipedia's oft-cited problems, [22] that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to … academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism." [23] The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labelled as "anti-elitism." [24] The Wikipedia community has always had a tradition of an open-arm acceptance for anyone who has internet access to this ever expanding encyclopedia. [1] [25] Wales, the de-facto leader of Wikipedia, [26] stated in part: "We need to maintain and improve our quality standards, while at the same time remaining open, friendly, and welcoming as a community. This is a challenge." [27]
The community works as a group to keep the encyclopedia's articles neutral in tone. [28] The Wikipedia community also polices itself and the articles in the encyclopedia, [29] while identifying problems and factual errors. [30] According to Wales, the community of the encyclopedia is built on trust, and regular members of the community would not insert disinformation, such as the falsely reported death of actor Sinbad in March 2007. [31] [32] Wikipedians can be assinged the "administrator" status after a community review by their peers, via a "Requests for adminship" process. [33] The New York Times stated that the community has a power structure, where the volunteer administrators have the authority to practice editorial control, delete articles that fail suitability requirements, and protect others against vandalism. [33]
Wikipedia relies on the efforts of its community members to remove vandalism to articles. According to Theresa Knott, a Wikipedian, "Vandalism would be difficult to police if there were more vandals, but the ratio of vandal editors to non-vandals is too low." [34] Every year, on or around April Fools' Day, the Wikipedia community prepares itself for the massive vandalism that is expected to take place because of the day's celebrations, which lasts for 48 hours instead of 24 due to its worldwide audience. [35]
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where anyone can and is built on consensus of the community. [8] The Wikipedia community has adopted a policy, ' don't bite the newcomers' and editors, for the most part, remain anonymous. [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] Newbies are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Wikipedia. [27] Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship. [41] [42] The beginning level is administrator. [42] Administrators can fully protect articles when silly disputes arise among editors. [43] Administrators have the authority to block disruptive editors. [44] One of the tools used to keep Wikipedia on the right path is viewing the easily accessible history version of articles. [43] The New York Times was also quoted as saying, "[Wikipedia] is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs...it's an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicised problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate." [33] The community has certain policies and guidelines for Wikipedians to read and adhere to when publishing and editing content. [45] [46]
Wikipedia began as an English language project, and now has expanded its development into multilingual content and translations. This includes the German, Japanese, Chinese and French editions of Wikipedia in which international members of the community are contributing their knowledge wherein. [47] For example, an informal group of Chinese volunteers are collaborating to establish an internet encyclopedia named Chinese Wikipedia to create a free source of information for Chinese surfers on the web. [48] [49] [50] [51] The Wikipedia community of the German Wikipedia, second largest only to the English Wikipedia, have plans on a new experimental approach that could help protect pages from trolling and improve the quality of articles. The idea is for edits to be delayed for a period of time before they become visible in the live page articles. In the past, Wales proposed a "Wikipedia 1.0" which the central article versions would be static and free from vandalism, similar to the direction of the German community experiments. [52]
The communal aspect of Wikipedia was recognized in 2004 by the Webby Award for the "community" category, [53] and recognized along with YouTube, MySpace and other user generated content sites by Time Magazine in declaring their 2006 Time Person of the Year to be " You." [54]
Since its birth in 2001, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia from the Wikimedia Foundation, has grown to include more than 1.1 million entries. The English-language version alone has nearly 444,000 entries, all written for no compensation by members of the Wikipedia community.— Daniel Terdiman.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)
Wales was an advocate of what is generically termed "openness" online. An "open" online community is one with few restrictions on membership or posting—everyone is welcome, and anyone can say anything as long as it's generally on point and doesn't include gratuitous ad hominem attacks.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Marshall Poe.
People shouldn't do it, including me," he said. "I wish I hadn't done it. It's in poor taste....
Few websites can claim to have changed the way that people find information like Wikipedia.— Kenneth Musante.
Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male. With age comes experience, as well as the desire to disseminate knowledge. There is a clear age difference between visitors to Wikipedia and editors of its content. Over 45% of visitors to the site are under the age of 35, while 82% of those making edits to the site are 35 years old or older.— Bill Tancer.
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.— Brian Bergstein.
The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it.— Brian Bergstein.
Wikipedia is suffering from a credibility crisis. Some - such as the Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left the organisation in 2002 - say the malaise goes even deeper. He describes the organisation as "completely dysfunctional" and is heading for a reckoning.
The encyclopedia is designed to be self-policing, allowing the public to weigh in and correct inaccuracies.— Burt Helm.
We may take Wikipedia as an early prototype of the application of open source hacker principles to content rather than code. I want to argue that it is just that, an early prototype, rather than a mature model of how such principles should be applied to reference, scholarly, and educational content.— Larry Sanger.
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, stood by the site's format.— Holden Frith.
It is not easy for newbies to come to terms with the rules and processes that accumulated in the course of the last four years. More senior Wikipedians have adapted a policy of sending welcoming messages to new users to make them feel at home.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Torsten Kleinz.
The key is to look at the quality of articles. The quality of Wikipedia today compared with three years ago is a dramatic improvement. But people do need to be aware of how it is created and edited so they can treat it with the appropriate caution.— Jimmy Wales.
Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes.
{{
cite news}}
: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors=
(
help) — Jenny Kleeman.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)
Anyone can register as a user on Wikipedia -- even make changes without registering. But active users who gain a reputation for responsible contributions can run for one of several levels of volunteer management. Each level has a greater degree of power and responsibility on the Wikipedia site. The basic level is administrator, which includes the power to lock articles that are being vandalized. Above that, in order, are bureaucrats, stewards, developers, and Wikimedia Foundation trustees. Voting for the candidates is open to all registered users.— David Mehegan.
Administrators help keep Wikipedia on the right track. They can freeze controversial articles for a certain time and try to prevent petty disputes. But with over 400 new articles a day, and 300,000 entries being edited every month, it is not always easy to keep track. This means normal users have to make a genuine effort to keep Wikipedia usable. Version history provides a useful way of keeping track. Just a few mouse clicks away allow anyone to find out who changed what and when. This means that every user can become a moderator.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Torsten Kleinz.
The Wikipedia post for Juneau lays bare the town's culture and community, but can Anonymous be trusted?
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is free and immensely "searchable". The most amazing fact about Wikipedia is that it is "open". Anyone on the Internet can contribute articles to this on any subject. And any one can "edit" existing articles! What is more, the changes you make become immediately visible to the rest of the world!— Anand Nair.
As always, anyone will be able to make article edits. But it would take someone who has been around Wikipedia for some yet-to-be-determined period of time--and who, therefore, has passed a threshold of trustworthiness--to make the edits live on the public site. If someone vandalizes an article, the edits would not be approved.— Daniel Terdiman.
The only award show for Internet sites that matter.— The Los Angeles Times.
It's described as a free encyclopedia logging over 140,000 articles sent in by people from all over the world.— Kristie Lu Stout.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia [sic] that is created entirely by its readers, with entries which can in the main be edited by anyone who feels they have something useful to contribute, has had an interesting few weeks.— Bill Thompson.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)The phenomenal but unreliable online encyclopedia is best used with a healthy dose of scepticism.— Ben Macintyre.
The heart of any wiki is its community. Literally millions of people visit Wikipedia every month, and together they form Wikipedia's community. Each person who arrives is able to play one or more roles on the site. The best way to understand how the community works is to add something to Wikipedia and see what happens. The only reason that a wiki works is because the community of people who work on it make it work. The community adds all of the content, edits everything and polices the content to root out problems. When the community is functioning well, it can produce a tremendous amount of content that gets better and better over time.— Marshall Brain.
Four years ago, a wealthy options trader named Jimmy Wales set out to build a massive online encyclopedia ambitious in purpose and unique in design. This encyclopedia would be freely available to anyone. And it would be created not by paid experts and editors, but by whoever wanted to contribute. With software called Wiki - which allows anybody with Web access to go to a site and edit, delete, or add to what's there - Wales and his volunteer crew would construct a repository of knowledge to rival the ancient library of Alexandria.
{{
cite news}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help) — Daniel H. Pink.The Wikipedia community does a great job of policing things but they need better tools to be able to do that more effectively.— Jimmy Wales.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Wikipedia - both its genius and its Achilles heel - is that anyone can create or modify an entry. Anyone means your 10-year-old neighbor or a Nobel Prize winner - or an editor like me, who is itching to correct a grammar error in that Wikipedia entry that I just quoted. Entries can be edited by numerous people and be in constant flux. What you read now might change in five minutes. Five seconds, even.— Susan Youngwood.