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English Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
English Wikipedia
Contents
1 Pioneering edition
2 Users and editors
2.1 Arbitration Committee
3 Controversies
3.1 Varieties of English
4 Wikiprojects, and assessments of articles'
importance and quality
5 Graphics
6 Internal news publications
7 See also
8 Footnotes
9 References
10 External links
Pioneering edition
The English Wikipedia was the first Wikipedia edition and has
remained the largest. It has pioneered many ideas as
conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by
Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. These ideas
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Web address
en.wikipedia.org
(https://en.wikipedia.org/)
Slogan
Commercial
No
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia
Registration
Users
29,277,387
Content
license
Owner
Wikimedia Foundation
Created by
Launched
15 January 2001
5,261,566
854,016
1,280
The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[15] just a little over a year since
it had crossed a threshold of 1,000,000 registered user accounts in late February 2006.[16]
Over 800,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[17] 300,000 editors edit Wikipedia every month; of
these, over 30,000 perform more than 5 edits per month, and a little over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per
month.[18] By 24 November 2011, a total of 500 million edits had been performed on the English Wikipedia.
As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because English is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws
many users and editors whose native language is not English. Such users may seek information from the English
Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language because the English Wikipedia tends to contain more
information about general subjects. Successful collaborations have developed between non-native English speakers
who add content to the English Wikipedia and native English speakers who act as copyeditors for them.
Arbitration Committee
The English Wikipedia has an 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.[19] The
Committee was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had
formerly held as owner of the site.[20][21]
When initially founded, the Committee consisted of 12 arbitrators divided into three groups of four members
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each.[20][22] Since then, the Committee has gradually expanded its membership to 18 arbitrators.[23]
Like other aspects of the English Wikipedia, Wikipedia's sister projects have emulated the Arbitration Committee
with their own similar versions.[24] For instance, in 2007, an Arbitration Committee was founded on the German
Wikipedia called the Schiedsgericht.[25]
Controversies
Incidents of cyberbullying on Wikipedia have been reported in the mainstream press.[26][27][28] The Glen A. Wilson
High School was the subject of such a threat in 2008,[26][27][28] and a 14-year-old boy was arrested for making a
threat against Niles West High School on Wikipedia in 2006.[29]
A 2013 study from Oxford University concluded that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tended to
be broader issues, while on other language Wikipedias the most disputed articles tended to be regional issues; this is
due to the English language's status as a global lingua franca, which means that many who edit the English
Wikipedia do not speak English as a native language. The study stated that the most disputed entries on the English
Wikipedia were: George W. Bush, anarchism, Muhammad, list of WWE personnel, global warming, circumcision,
United States, Jesus, race and intelligence, and Christianity.[30]
Varieties of English
One controversy in the English Wikipedia concerns which national variety of the English language is to be
preferred, with the most commonly advocated candidates being American English and British English.[31] Perennial
suggestions range from standardizing upon a single form of English to forking the English Wikipedia project. A
style guideline states, "the English Wikipedia has no general preference for a major national variety of the
language" and "an article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation uses the appropriate
variety of English for that nation".[32] An article should use spelling and grammar variants consistently; for
example, color and colour are not to be used in the same article, since they represent American and British English,
respectively. The guide also states that an article must remain in its original national variant.
There has been a similar issue in the Chinese language Wikipedia concerning regional differences in writing.
Efforts at a language fork for Portuguese Wikipedia have failed, and succeeded for Norwegian Wikipedia.
Andrew Lih wrote that the English Wikipedia "didn't have the chance to go through a debate over whether there
should be a British English Wikipedia or an American English Wikipedia" because the English Wikipedia was the
original edition.[33] Editors agreed to use U.S. spellings for primarily American topics and British spellings for
primarily British topics. In 2009 Lih wrote, "No doubt, American spellings tend to dominate by default just because
of sheer numbers."[34]
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article to enter one of the highest quality classes: either "A", "good article" or the highest, "featured article". Of the
about 4.4 million articles and lists assessed as of March 2015, a little more than 5000 (0.12%) are featured articles,
and fewer than 2000 (0.04%) are featured lists. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the
main page of Wikipedia.[37][38]
The articles can also be rated as per "importance" as judged by a WikiProject. Currently, there are 5 importance
categories: "low", "mid", "high", "top", and "???" for unclassified/uncertain level. For a particular article, different
WikiProjects may assign different importance levels.
The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated
articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two
or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table, pie-charts, and bar-chart. The software
regularly auto-updates the data.
Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few
editors.[39] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community
process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.[40]
Importance-wise distribution of
over 4.8 million articles and lists
on the English Wikipedia, as of
5 April 2015[41]
Quality-wise distribution of
over 4.8 million articles and lists
on the English Wikipedia, as of
3 April 2015[41]
Top (0.91%)
High (3.21%)
Medium (12.29%)
A class (0.03%)
Low (49.37%)
??? (34.22%)
B class (2.05%)
C class (3.99%)
Start class (25.73%)
Stub class (54.08%)
Lists (3.50%)
Unassessed (9.99%)
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Top
High
Mid
Low
???
Total
FA
1,164
1,781
1,685
1,029
186
5,845
FL
142
562
648
599
116
2,067
213
417
570
365
74
1,639
2,044
4,655
9,091
9,742
1,678
27,210
27,045
13,531
109,382
87,018
42,175
232,015
Start
759,062
285,935 1,436,725
Stub
837,449 2,905,949
List
GA
88,502
61,008
196,773
141
420
1,829
16,328
519,430
538,148
3,000,000
2,500,000
2,000,000
1,500,000
1,000,000
500,000
Top
Featured articles
Featured lists
High
Medium
A-class articles
Good articles
Low
???
B-class articles
C-class articles
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Start-class articles
Stub articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia
Lists
Unassessed articles and
lists
[Note: The table above (prepared by the Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team) is automatically updated daily by
User:WP 1.0 bot, but the bar-chart and the two pie-charts are not auto-updated. In them, new data has to be
entered by a Wikipedia editor (i.e. user).]
Graphics
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38.3%
13.2%
6.9%
5.4%
3.6%
2.9%
2.6%
1.5%
1.1%
1.0%
1.0%
0.9%
0.8%
0.8%
0.8%
0.8%
0.7%
0.7%
0.7%
0.7%
0.5%
0.5%
0.5%
0.5%
0.5%
13.1%
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Community-produced news publications include The Signpost.[8] The Signpost (previously known as The
Wikipedia Signpost[46]) is the English Wikipedia's newspaper.[8][47][48] It is managed by the Wikipedia
community and is published online weekly.[8][49] Each edition contains stories and articles related to the
Wikipedia community.[50][51] A wide range of editors contribute articles and other pieces.[8]
The publication was founded in January 2005 by Wikipedia administrator and later Chair of the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees, Michael Snow.[8][46][52] Originally titled The Wikipedia Signpost, it was later
shortened to simply The Signpost.[46][53] The newspaper reports on Wikipedia events including Arbitration
Committee rulings,[54] Wikimedia Foundation issues,[55] and other Wikipedia-related projects.[56] Snow continued
to contribute as a writer to The Signpost until his appointment to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia
Foundation in February 2008.[57]
Investigative journalism by The Signpost in 2015 on changes to freedom of panorama copyright restrictions in
Europe was covered by publications in multiple languages including German,[58] Italian,[59] Polish,[60] and
Russian.[61] Wikipedia users Gamaliel and Go Phightins! became editors-in-chief of The Signpost in January 2015;
prior editor-in-chief The ed17 noted that during his tenure the publication expanded its scope by including more
reporting on the wider Wikimedia movement and English Wikipedia itself.[62] In a letter to readers upon the
newspaper's tenth anniversary, the new co-editors-in-chief stressed the importance of maintaining independence
from the Wikimedia Foundation in their reporting.[63]
The Signpost has been the subject of academic analysis in publications including Sociological Forum,[64] the social
movements journal Interface,[65] and New Review of Academic Librarianship;[66] and was consulted for data on
Wikipedia by researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Dartmouth College.[67] It has garnered
generally positive reception from media publications including The New York Times,[68] The Register,[69] Nonprofit
Quarterly,[70] and Heise Online.[71] The book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual called The Signpost essential
reading for ambitious new Wikipedia editors.[72]
Other past and present community news publications include the "WikiWorld" web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly
podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly
newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. There are also a number of publications from the Wikimedia
Foundation and multilingual publications such as the Wikimedia Blog (https://blog.wikimedia.org) and This Month
in Education.
See also
English Wikipedia blackout
History of Wikipedia
Reliability of Wikipedia
Simple English Wikipedia
Wikipedia for Schools
Wikipedia community
Wikipedia:Milestones
Wikipedia:Milestone statistics
Footnotes
1. There is some controversy over who founded Wikipedia. Wales considers himself to be the sole founder of Wikipedia and
has told the Boston Globe that "it's preposterous" to call Sanger the co-founder. However, Sanger strongly contests that
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description. He was identified as a co-founder of Wikipedia as early as September 2001 and referred to himself as being
founder as early as January 2002.
Sidener, Jonathan (6 December 2004). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved
15 October 2006.
Meyers, Peter (20 September 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times. Retrieved
15 October 2006.
Sanger, Larry. "What Wikipedia is and why it matters". Retrieved 12 April 2006.
2. about 50 percent more than the next in rank, the Swedish Wikipedia. See m:List of Wikipedias.
3. Wikimedia Meta-Wiki (21 September 2008). "List of Wikipedias". Retrieved 21 September 2008.
4. The number of articles on the English Wikipedia is shown by the MediaWiki variable {{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}},
with all Wikipedias as total {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|total}} = 41,856,995.
5. See size of downloads at Wikipedia:Database download and a list of historical sizes here (https://commons.wikimedia.org
/wiki/File:Wikipedia_article_size_in_gigabytes.png#Summary)
6. "Wikipedia:Five million articles". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
7. "File:Wikipedia-logo-v2-en 5m articles.png". Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
8. Phoebe Ayers; Charles Matthews; Ben Yates (2008). How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it. No Starch
Press. pp. 345. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.
9. English Wikipedia (30 January 2007). "Featured articles". Retrieved 30 January 2007.
10. English Wikipedia (25 January 2007). "Neutral point of view". Retrieved 30 January 2007.
11. Wikimedia Meta-Wiki (29 January 2007). "Help:Template". Retrieved 30 January 2007.
12. English Wikipedia (19 January 2007). "WikiProject Stub sorting". Retrieved 30 January 2007.
13. English Wikipedia (27 January 2007). "Resolving disputes". Retrieved 30 January 2007.
14. English Wikipedia (30 January 2007). "Article Creation and Improvement Drive". Retrieved 30 January 2007.
15. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-04-02/News and notes. Retrieved 20 April 2007
16. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-02-27/News and notes. Retrieved 20 April 2007
17. "Wikipedia Statistics Tables English". Stats.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 8 August 2013.
18. "Wikipedia Statistics Tables English". Stats.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 8 August 2013.
19. Schiff, Stacy (2 December 2006). "Know-alls". The Age. Australia: Fairfax Digital Network. Retrieved 15 June 2009.
20. Wales, Jimmy (4 December 2003). "WikiEN-l Wikiquette committee appointments". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation.
Retrieved 9 June 2009.
21. Hoffman, David A.; Salil Mehra (2010). "Wikitruth Through Wikiorder". Emory Law Journal. 59 (2010).
SSRN 1354424.
22. Hyatt, Josh (1 June 2006). "Secrets of Greatness: Great Teams". Fortune. Time Warner. Retrieved 15 June 2009.
23. Wales, Jimmy (20 December 2008). "ArbCom Appointments". Wikipedia. Retrieved 14 June 2009.
24. Wikidata (1 April 2015). "Wikipedia sitelinks for Arbitration Committee". Retrieved 1 April 2015.
25. Kleinz, Torsten (30 April 2007). "Wikipedia sucht Schiedsrichter" (in German). heise online. Retrieved 9 June 2009.
26. Hennessy-Fiske, Molly (29 April 2008). "Wikipedia threats went unchecked Los Angeles Times". Los Angeles Times.
27. "Hacienda Heights school receives possible threat | abc7.com". Abclocal.go.com. 18 April 2008. Retrieved 8 August
2013.
28. "Student arrested for violent threats on Wikipedia". Los Angeles Times. 29 April 2008. Retrieved 19 January 2012.
29. "Teen charged after threat to school on Wikipedia". Bloomington, IL: Pantagraph.com. Associated Press. 31 October
2006. Retrieved 26 January 2011.
30. Gross, Doug. "Wiki wars: The 10 most controversial Wikipedia pages (http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/tech
/web/controversial-wikipedia-pages/index.html?hpt=hp_t5)." CNN. 24 July 2013. Retrieved on 26 July 2013. Archived
(https://web.archive.org/web/20160412001130/http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/24/tech/web/controversial-wikipediapages/index.html?hpt=hp_t5) 12 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
31. English Wikipedia. "Wikipedia:Manual of Style (spelling)". Retrieved 25 February 2006.
32. English Wikipedia. "Wikipedia:Manual of Style". Retrieved 10 October 2007.
33. Lih, p. 135.
34. Lih, p. 136.
35. "Wikipedia: Wikiprojects". Retrieved 16 March 2015.
36. "Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment". Retrieved 28 October 2007.
37. "Comparing featured article groups and revision patterns correlations in Wikipedia". First Monday. Retrieved 13 July
2010.
38. Fernanda B. Vigas; Martin Wattenberg; Matthew M. McKeon (22 July 2007). "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" (PDF).
Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved 30 October 2007.
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39. Poderi, Giacomo, Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles,
Master thesis, University of Maastricht, October 2008.
40. Lindsey, David. "Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's featured articles". First Monday.
41. Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
42. Zachte, Erik (14 November 2011). "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report Wikipedia Page Views Per Country Trends".
Wikimedia Statistics. Retrieved 19 January 2011.
43. Zachte, Erik (14 November 2011). "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report Page Edits Per Wikipedia Language
Breakdown". Wikimedia Statistics. Retrieved 19 January 2011.
44. "Usability and Experience Study". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 19 January 2012.
45. "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report Page Edits Per Wikipedia Language Breakdown". Stats.wikimedia.org. Retrieved
28 July 2014.
46. Cohen, Noam (5 March 2007). "A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side". The New York Times. p. C5.
Retrieved 29 February 2016.
47. Koebler, Jason (16 February 2016). "The Secret Search Engine Tearing Wikipedia Apart". Vice.
48. Geoffroy, Romain (16 January 2014). "Une employe de Wikipdia dbarque pour avoir monnay ses articles". Les
Inrockuptibles.
49. Dobusch, Leonhard (12 January 2014). "Interview mit Dirk Franke ber "Grenzen der Bezahlung" in der Wikipedia".
Netzpolitik.org.
50. Rosen, Rebecca (6 February 2013). "If You Want Your Wikipedia Page to Get a TON of Traffic, Die While Performing at
the Super Bowl Half-Time Show". The Atlantic. Retrieved 21 February 2016.
51. Dariusz Jemielniak (2014). Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press. pp. 231.
ISBN 978-0804797238.
52. McCarthy, Caroline (18 July 2008). "Wikimedia Foundation edits its board of trustees". CNET.
53. Okoli, Chitu; Mehdi, Mohamad; Mesgari, Mostafa; Nielsen, Finn rup; Lanamki, Arto (24 October 2012). "The
people's encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia".
doi:10.2139/ssrn.2021326. SSRN 2021326.
54. Oz, Ayelet (1 September 2014). "The Legal Consciousness of Wikipedia". Harvard Law School.
doi:10.2139/ssrn.2572381. SSRN 2572381.
55. Sotirios Paroutis; Loizos Heracleous; Duncan Angwin (1 February 2013). Practicing Strategy: Text and Cases. SAGE
Publications. pp. 237. ISBN 978-1-4462-9047-7.
56. Waters, John K. (2010). The Everything Guide to Social Media. Adams Media. pp. 180, 270. ISBN 978-1440506314.
57. Ral315 (18 February 2008). "From the editor: This week, I'd like to congratulate and thank Michael Snow". The
Wikipedia Signpost. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
58. Diener, Andrea (27 June 2015). "Geben Sie Panoramafreiheit, Sire!". FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German).
Archived from the original on 29 June 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
59. "Libert di Panorama: a rischio in Europa con una riforma del copyright". Blogo: Informazione libera e indipendente (in
Italian). 22 June 2015. Archived from the original on 23 June 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
60. "Chcesz robi zdjcia znanych budowli Europy? Spiesz si. To mog by ostatnie tygodnie". Gazeta Wyborcza (in
Polish). 24 June 2015. ISSN 0860-908X. Archived from the original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
61. "! " (in Russian). 23 June 2015. Archived from the
original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
62. The ed17 (21 January 2015). "From the editor: Introducing your new editors-in-chief". The Signpost. Retrieved 1 March
2016.
63. Go Phightins! and Gamaliel (28 January 2015). "From the editor: An editorial board that includes you". The Signpost.
Retrieved 1 March 2016.
64. Konieczny, Piotr (March 2009). "Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the
Evolution of Wikipedia". Sociological Forum. Wiley. 24 (1): 167. Retrieved 29 February 2016 via JSTOR. (subscription
required (help)).
65. Konieczny, Piotr. "Wikipedia: community or social movement?" (PDF). Interface: A Journal for and about Social
Movements. 1 (2): 212232. ISSN 2009-2431. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 June 2012. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
66. Bayliss, Gemma (January 2013). "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education:
Implications for Higher Education Institutions". New Review of Academic Librarianship. 19 (1): 39.
doi:10.1080/13614533.2012.740439. ISSN 1361-4533. Retrieved 1 March 2016 via EBSCO Host.
67. Yan, Guanhua; Arackaparambil, Chrisil. "Wiki-watchdog: Anomaly detection in Wikipedia through a distributional lens".
Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent
Technology Volume 01. IEEE Computer Society Washington. pp. 257264. doi:10.1109/WI-IAT.2011.86.
ISBN 978-0-7695-4513-4. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
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68. Dee, Jonathan (1 July 2007). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
69. Orlowski, Andrew (12 January 2016). "Wikimedia Foundation bins community-elected trustee". The Register.
70. McCambridge, Ruth (16 February 2016). "Knight Foundation Grant Request Tears at Wikipedia's Community". Nonprofit
Quarterly.
71. Kleinz, Torsten (27 February 2016). "Kommentar: Wie geht es weiter mit der Wikimedia Foundation?". Heise Online.
72. John Broughton (25 January 2008). Wikipedia: The Missing Manual: The Missing Manual. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.".
pp. 454. ISBN 978-0-596-55377-7.
References
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest
Encyclopedia. Hyperion, New York City. 2009. First Edition. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6 (alkaline paper).
External links
English Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org)
English Wikipedia mobile (https://en.m.wikipedia.org)
English Wikipedia on Meta-Wiki
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