Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 07:07, 10 May 2006

Misplaced Pages

Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

Misplaced Pages (IPA: or ) is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, a type of website that allows visitors to edit its content; the word Misplaced Pages itself is a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Misplaced Pages is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a computer, web browser and Internet connection

The project began on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert written (and now defunct) Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Misplaced Pages has more than 3,800,000 articles in many languages, including more than 1,100,000 in the English-language version. Since its inception, Misplaced Pages has steadily risen in popularity and has spawned several sister projects.

Misplaced Pages's most notable style policy is that editors are required to uphold a "neutral point of view", under which notable perspectives are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth.

Misplaced Pages's co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has called Misplaced Pages "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." However, there has been controversy over Misplaced Pages's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference of consensus or popularity over credentials. Nevertheless, its free distribution, constant updates, diverse and detailed coverage, and numerous multilingual versions have made it one of the most-used reference resources available on the Internet.

There are over 200 language editions of Misplaced Pages, around 130 of which are active. Fourteen editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English (the original), German, French, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Norwegian and Finnish. Its German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there are also proposals for an English DVD or paper edition. Many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by other websites.

Characteristics

Misplaced Pages's slogan is "the 💕 that anyone can edit," regardless of qualifications. It is developed using a type of software called a "wiki", a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb and derived from the Hawaiian wiki wiki, which means "quick". Jimmy Wales intends for Misplaced Pages to ultimately achieve a "Britannica or better" level of quality and be published in print.

Although several other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet, none have achieved Misplaced Pages's size or popularity. Traditional multilingual editorial policies and article ownership are sometimes used, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the now-defunct Nupedia, and the more casual h2g2 and Everything2. Projects such as Misplaced Pages, Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre and WikiZnanie are other wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal process of review. Misplaced Pages has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word count. Unlike many encyclopedias, it has licensed its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Misplaced Pages has a set of policies identifying types of information appropriate for inclusion. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, revised, transferred to a sister project, or removed.

Free content

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license through which Misplaced Pages's articles are made available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content, provided that its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When an author contributes original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained by them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Misplaced Pages may thus be distributed multilingually to, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license.

Misplaced Pages's content has been mirrored and forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Misplaced Pages's images and sounds are not free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. Misplaced Pages content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases, albeit much more rarely. For example, the Parliament of Canada website refers to Misplaced Pages's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Civil Marriage Act. Some Misplaced Pages users, or Wikipedians, maintain (noncomprehensive) lists of such uses.

Language editions

Misplaced Pages encompasses 132 "active" language editions (ones with 100+ articles) as of April 2006. Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, German, French, Polish and Japanese. In total, Misplaced Pages contains 229 language editions of varying states, with a combined 3.5 million articles.

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions or direct translations of each other, nor are articles on the same subject required to be translations of each other. Automated translation of articles is explicitly disallowed, though multi-lingual editors of sufficient fluency are encouraged to translate articles by hand. The various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", though they may diverge on subtler points of policy and practice. Articles and images are shared between Misplaced Pages editions, the former through "InterWiki" links and pages to request translations, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in any edition.

The following is a list of the large editions (100,000+ articles), sorted by number of articles as of May 5, 2006. (The article count, however, is a limited metric for comparing the editions. For instance, in some Misplaced Pages versions nearly half of the articles are short articles created automatically by robots.)

1. English (6,938,833)
2. German (395,809)
3. French (280,090)
4. Polish (232,750)
5. Japanese (208,862)
6. Dutch (186,161)
7. Swedish (156,909)
8. Italian (155,140)
9. Portuguese (131,818)
10. Spanish (114,484)

Editing

Almost all visitors may edit Misplaced Pages's content, and registered users can create new articles and have their changes instantly displayed. Misplaced Pages is built on the expectation that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Some of Misplaced Pages's editors have explained its editing process as a "socially Darwinian evolutionary process", but this description is not accepted by most Wikipedians.

Although many users take advantage of Misplaced Pages's openness to add nonsense to the encyclopedia, most deliberately disruptive edits and comments are quickly found and deleted by other editors. This real-time, collaborative model allows editors to rapidly update existing topics as they develop and to introduce new ones as they arise. However, this collaboration also sometimes leads to "edit wars" and prolonged disputes when editors do not agree.

Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time due to the aforementioned vandalism or revert wars; Misplaced Pages does not declare any of its articles to be "complete" or "finished". The authors of articles need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects that they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who wishes to do so. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group; decisions on the content and editorial policies of Misplaced Pages are instead made largely through consensus decision-making and, occasionally, by vote. Jimmy Wales retains final judgement on Misplaced Pages policies and user guidelines.

Regular users often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles, including new updates, discussions, and vandalism. Most past edits to Misplaced Pages articles also remain viewable after the fact, and are stored on "edit history" pages sorted chronologically, making it possible to see former versions of any page at any time. The only exceptions are the entire histories of articles which have been deleted, and many individual edits which contain libelous statements, copyright violations, and other content which could incur legal liability or be otherwise detrimental to Misplaced Pages; these edits may only be viewed by Misplaced Pages administrators.

History

Misplaced Pages began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Misplaced Pages. Nupedia was described by Sanger as differing from existing encyclopedias in being open content, in not having size limitations, as it was on the Internet, and in being free of bias, due to its public nature and potentially broad base of contributors. Nupedia had a seven-step review process by appointed subject-area experts, but later came to be viewed as too slow for producing a limited number of articles. Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by the use of advertisements. It was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License prior to Misplaced Pages's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can see.

Misplaced Pages was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at http://www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. It had been, from January 10, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model. Misplaced Pages thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbias" policy. There were otherwise few rules initially. Misplaced Pages gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of its first year. It had 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Misplaced Pages coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Misplaced Pages.

Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository. Wales mentioned that he heard the concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld, an employee of Bomis who showed him the same wiki, in December 2000, but it was after Sanger heard of its existence in January 2001 from Ben Kovitz, a regular at the wiki, that he proposed the creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales and Misplaced Pages's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki-based production, the GNUpedia project existed alongside Nupedia early in its history. It subsequently became inactive, and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Misplaced Pages.

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Misplaced Pages, users of the Spanish Misplaced Pages forked from Misplaced Pages to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Misplaced Pages would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Misplaced Pages for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo, which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view".

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Misplaced Pages and Nupedia on June 20, 2003. Misplaced Pages and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Misplaced Pages's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", had been created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below.

Misplaced Pages a has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or fewer new articles per day; by 2004, this had accelerated to a total of 1,000 to 3,000 per day (counting all editions). The English Misplaced Pages reached its 100,000-article milestone on January 22, 2003. Misplaced Pages reached its one millionth article, among the 105 language editions that existed at the time, on September 20, 2004, while the English edition alone reached its 500,000th on March 18, 2005. This figure had doubled less than a year later, with the millionth article in the English edition being created on March 1, 2006; meanwhile, the millionth user registration had been made just 2 days before.

The Wikimedia Foundation applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Misplaced Pages® on September 17, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004 and in the European Union on January 20, 2005. Technically a service mark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet".

There are currently plans to license the usage of the Misplaced Pages trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs. The German Misplaced Pages will be printed in its entirety by Directmedia, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each, beginning in October 2006, and publishing will finish in 2010.

Software and hardware

Misplaced Pages is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida and four other locations around the world. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required CamelCase for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Misplaced Pages began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Misplaced Pages project by Magnus Manske. Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki. It was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects.

Misplaced Pages was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world.

Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to two load-balancing servers running the Perlbal software, which then pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page-rendering from the database. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France. A new Dutch cluster is also online now. In spite of all this, Misplaced Pages page load times remain quite variable. The ongoing status of Misplaced Pages's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.

Funding

Misplaced Pages is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation. Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget.

Bomis, an online advertising company that hosts mostly adult-oriented web-rings, played a significant part in the early development of Misplaced Pages and the network itself.

Evaluations

Misplaced Pages has become increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence and popularity, with many critics alleging that Misplaced Pages's open nature makes it unauthoritative and unreliable, that it exhibits severe systemic bias and inconsistency, and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals. Misplaced Pages has also been criticized for its use of dubious sources, its disregard for credentials, and its vulnerability to vandalism and special interest groups. Critics of Misplaced Pages include Misplaced Pages editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of articles.

Reliability

Misplaced Pages has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time, while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality.

Misplaced Pages has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. Many university lecturers discourage their students from using any encyclopedia as a reference in academic work, preferring primary sources instead. A website called Misplaced Pages Watch has been created to denounce Misplaced Pages as having "…a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."

Some argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Misplaced Pages an unreliable work. Misplaced Pages contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Misplaced Pages and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window" (Waldman, 2004). Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Misplaced Pages is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Misplaced Pages?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Discussing Misplaced Pages as an academic source, Danah Boyd said in 2005 that "t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes".

Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Misplaced Pages as a reference. Misplaced Pages articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Misplaced Pages was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

Some critics have suggested that Misplaced Pages cannot justifiably be called an "encyclopedia", a term which (it is claimed) implies a high degree of reliability and authority that Misplaced Pages, due to its open editorial policies, may not be able to maintain. However, Misplaced Pages does meet all the criteria for the basic definition of the word encyclopedia.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,

owever closely a Misplaced Pages article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler… The user who visits Misplaced Pages to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Misplaced Pages articles. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security". However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial. Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Misplaced Pages in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.

The English-language website also suffers from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative impact on Misplaced Pages's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information.

At the end of 2005, controversy erupted after journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. found that his biography had been written largely as a hoax about Seigenthaler. This led to the decision to restrict the ability to start articles to registered users.

Coverage

Misplaced Pages's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus' law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow." Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Misplaced Pages's authority, "lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived." Conversely, in an informal test of Misplaced Pages's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.

Misplaced Pages has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances was five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." (As of December 2005, this is no longer the case.) Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."

Misplaced Pages has been praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Misplaced Pages is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.

Microsoft Encarta has started to solicit comments from readers in attempt to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its encyclopedia. Encarta Feedback allows any user to propose revisions for review by their staff.

The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Multimedial, Microsoft Encarta, and Misplaced Pages in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Misplaced Pages was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-"), Brockhaus Premium 3.3, and Microsoft Encarta 3.1. In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Misplaced Pages improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events.". The journal Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Misplaced Pages were comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica. Misplaced Pages had an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contained three. Of eight "serious errors" found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source.. On March 24, 2006, Britannica provided a rebuttal labeling the study "fatally flawed". .

In January 2005 New Republic ran an article on the reliability of the the Misplaced Pages. Several experiments were conducted, amongst them inserting difficult to verify pieces of information into articles, reverting them and then reinstering other unverifiable pieces of information. The error -> revert -> error approach caused errors that were still present in March 2006. A follow up article is planned for mid 2006.

Community

The Misplaced Pages community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Misplaced Pages, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Misplaced Pages are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing. Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article.

In a page on researching with Misplaced Pages, its authors argue that Misplaced Pages is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen. Misplaced Pages editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions.

Awards

Misplaced Pages won two major awards in May 2004: The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 euro grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby award for the "community" category. Misplaced Pages was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Misplaced Pages was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project. Misplaced Pages has received plaudits from sources including BBC News, Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Science, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Irish Times, Reader's Digest and The Daily Telegraph.

Authors

During December 2005, Misplaced Pages had about 27,000 users who made at least five edits that month; 17,000 of these active users worked on the English edition. A more active group of about 4,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the English edition. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Misplaced Pages's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Misplaced Pages. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee.

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a 💕." In a study of Misplaced Pages as a community, economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Misplaced Pages has been viewed as a social experiment in anarchy, democracy, or communism. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence. Critics of Misplaced Pages have also viewed it as an oligarchy which is controlled primarily by its administrators, stewards, and bureaucrats, or simply by a small number of its contributors. Daniel Brandt of Misplaced Pages Watch has referred to Jimbo Wales as the "dictator" of Misplaced Pages; however, most Misplaced Pages users either do not consider Wales to be a dictator, or consider him to be one who rarely gives non-negotiable orders.

In popular culture

Misplaced Pages is parodied at several websites, including Encyclopedia Dramatica and Uncyclopedia. Webster's Dictionary has been parodied as Webster's Misplaced Pages on the flash clip Masters of Doom: The Animated Series.

The May 7, 2005 FoxTrot comic strip showed one character appending his older sister to unflattering Misplaced Pages articles. In a similar joke, the web comic Penny Arcade also satirized Misplaced Pages with a comic strip depicting Skeletor vandalizing the He-Man article.

On the May 9, 2006 episode of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert refered to Misplaced Pages as his source of information for research on Sigmund Freud. In his normal, deadpan, sarcastic delivery, Colbert's segment "The Wørd", mocked Misplaced Pages's sometimes questionable information.

See also

• Internet encyclopedia project
• List of encyclopedias
• Open Site

References

1. See plots at "Visits per day", Misplaced Pages Statistics, January 1, 2005
2. Jimmy Wales, "Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia", March 8, 2005, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>
3. "Misplaced Pages as a press source 2005", Misplaced Pages (March 28, 2005)
4. "C-38", LEGISINFO (March 28, 2005)
5. Misplaced Pages as a source
6. ^ "Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta-Wiki (April 15, 2006)
7. "Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta-Wiki, April 15, 2006
8. For example, "Translation into English," Misplaced Pages. (March 9, 2005)
9. "Misplaced Pages sociology", Meta-Wiki, 23:30 March 24, 2005
10. "Edit war", Misplaced Pages (March 26, 2005)
11. "Power structure", Meta-Wiki, 10:55 April 4, 2005
12. ^ Larry Sanger, "Q & A about Nupedia", Nupedia, March 2000
13. Sanger, Larry (January 10, 2001). "Let's make a wiki". Internet Archive. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
14. Sanger, Larry (January 17, 2001). "Misplaced Pages is up!". Internet Archive. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
15. ^ Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". Slashdot.
16. "Multilingual statistics", Misplaced Pages, March 30, 2005
17. Jimmy Wales, "Re: Sanger's memoirs", April 20, 2005,<wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org>
18. Stallman, Richard (1999). "The 💕 Project". Free Software Foundation.
19. Jimmy Wales: "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", June 20, 2003, <wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org>
20. "Misplaced Pages, the 💕, reaches its 100,000th article", Wikimedia Foundation, January 21, 2003
21. "Misplaced Pages Reaches One Million Articles", Wikimedia Foundation, September 20, 2004
22. "Misplaced Pages Publishes 500,000th English Article", Wikimedia Foundation, March 18, 2005
23. "English Misplaced Pages Publishes Millionth Article", Wikimedia Foundation, March 1, 2006
24. Nair, Vipin (December 5, 2005). "Growing on volunteer power". Business Line.
25. "Budget/2005". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2006-03-11.
26. Wide World of WIKIPEDIA
27. Brandt, Daniel/PIR. Misplaced Pages Watch http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/, accessed April 2006.
28. ^ Simon Waldman, "Who knows?", The Guardian, October 26, 2004.
29. Danah Boyd, "Academia and Misplaced Pages", Many-to-Many, January 4, 2005.
30. Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, November 15, 2004.
31. "Misplaced Pages:Provenance", Misplaced Pages (May 9, 2006).
32. Aaron Krowne, "The FUD-based Encyclopedia", Free Software Magazine, March 1, 2005.
33. ^ Larry Sanger, "Why Misplaced Pages Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism", Kuro5hin, December 31, 2004.
34. Larry Sanger, "Misplaced Pages is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn't it full of nonsense?", Kuro5hin, September 24, 2001.
35. Joi Ito, "Misplaced Pages attacked by ignorant reporter", Joi Ito's Web, August 29, 2004.
36. Anonymous blogger, "How Authoritative is Misplaced Pages", Dispatches from the Frozen North, September 4, 2004.
37. "Misplaced Pages:Replies to common objections", Misplaced Pages, 22:53 April 13, 2005.
38. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2005-04-11/Encarta editing", Misplaced Pages, April 11, 2005.
39. Michael Kurzidim: Wissenswettstreit. Die kostenlose Misplaced Pages tritt gegen die Marktführer Encarta und Brockhaus an, in: c't 21/2004, October 4, 2004, S. 132-139.
40. William Emigh and Susan C. Herring, "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias", paper presented at the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004.
41. "Misplaced Pages survives research test". BBC News. BBC. December 15, 2005.
42. "Journal Nature study "fatally flawed" says Britannica". WikiNews. Misplaced Pages Foundation. March 24, 2006.
43. Emigh, ibid.
44. "Critical views of Misplaced Pages", Wikinfo, 07:28 March 30, 2005.
45. Andrew Orlowski, "Wiki-fiddlers defend Clever Big Book", The Register, July 23, 2004.
46. "Misplaced Pages:Researching with Misplaced Pages", Misplaced Pages (March 28, 2005).
47. "Trophy Box", Meta-Wiki (March 28, 2005).
48. Paragraph's statistics taken from "Active wikipedians" (Misplaced Pages Statistics, April 13, 2006).
49. "Misplaced Pages", Meta-Wiki, 08:02 March 30, 2005.
50. Larry Sanger, "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of 💕s", Kuro5hin, July 25, 2001.
51. Andrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Misplaced Pages", First Monday December 2003.
52. Jimmy Wales, "Re: Illegitimate block", January 26, 2005, <wikien-l@wikimedia.org>.

Further reading

• Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations", CHI 2004 April 24–April 29, 2004. Preliminary report "History Flow" available on the IBM website.
• Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages in academic studies
• Misplaced Pages:Introduction
• Misplaced Pages:FAQ
• Misplaced Pages:Press releases
• Misplaced Pages:Press coverage
• Misplaced Pages:Why Misplaced Pages is not so great
• Misplaced Pages:Replies to common objections
• Statistics
• Open Directory Project: Misplaced Pages
• OpenFacts: Copies of Misplaced Pages content
• SourceWatch: Misplaced Pages

External links

2. Part 2

• wikipedia.org, multi-lingual portal
• en.wikipedia.org, English language edition
• Meta-Wiki, policy-related and technical discussions regarding Wikimedia
• Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Misplaced Pages
• Larry Sanger on the origins of Misplaced Pages from Slashdot and Open Sources 2.0
• Larry Sanger about the origins of Misplaced Pages
• BBC article regarding Misplaced Pages flaws
• Guardian UK article
• Interview with Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales," nPost, November 1, 2005.
• Misplaced Pages Signpost, newspaper about the English Misplaced Pages
• Misplaced Pages in the news. Aggregated news and rss-feed. (Multilingual)
• Why Misplaced Pages will survive the storm, from News.com
• Nature comparison between Misplaced Pages and Britannica
• Britannica's response to Nature's study on Misplaced Pages
• Critical Review Of Misplaced Pages
• Can Misplaced Pages Survive Its Own Success?, Wharton School
• Who Owns Your Misplaced Pages Biography?, The Register
• The Wiki Watch
• Uncyclopedia and Wickerpedia, Misplaced Pages parodies
• The Misplaced Pages FAQK, Q&A by Lore Sjöberg in Wired.

Template:Link FA

• 2000s fads
• 2001 establishments
• Encyclopedias
• Websites
• Misplaced Pages