Fans

Nov 2007

Wikipedia - Your Online Encyclopedia

http://profiles.friendster.com/wikipedia

Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikispecies, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Commons, Meta-Wiki

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, encyclopedia project operated by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Many language versions of Wikipedia are free content, while others, such as the English version, include non-free material.

As of September 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 8.29 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of November 3, 2007 it had over 2,075,000 articles consisting of over 902,000,000 words. Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Steadily rising in popularity since its inception, it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.

Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers located in Amsterdam and Seoul. Effective February 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation will move its headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco.

Due to Wikipedia's open nature, critics have questioned its reliability and accuracy. The site has been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of false or unverified information, uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies, and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Wikipedia's content policies and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns. Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived and that Wikipedia is generally as accurate as other encyclopedias. In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has also received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated, having some 6.8 million registered users worldwide, although only a small part is consistently active. When "You" was awarded Time Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedi