Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 18:08, 11 April 2008

Misplaced Pages

Screenshot of Misplaced Pages's multilingual portal
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	236 active editions (253 in total)
Headquarters	Miami, Florida
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger
URL	http://www.wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

Misplaced Pages (pronunciation ) is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a blend of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.

As of April 2008, Misplaced Pages attracts 684 million visitors reading over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Misplaced Pages edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of April 11, 2008 it had over 2,328,000 articles consisting of over 1,012,000,000 words. Misplaced Pages's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception, it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.

Critics target its systematic bias and inconsistencies, and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. As a result, contemporary popular icons with relatively low overall significance (TV hosts, pop singers etc.) are often more prominently featured than historical figures with high global importance. Misplaced Pages's reliability and accuracy is also an issue. Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information. Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.

In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Misplaced Pages has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated. When Time Magazine recognized "You" as its Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of on-line collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Misplaced Pages was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.

History

Misplaced Pages began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Misplaced Pages. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Misplaced Pages's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Misplaced Pages. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the counter-intuitive strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Misplaced Pages was formally launched on January 15 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Misplaced Pages's policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Misplaced Pages operated independently of Nupedia.

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 2001. By late 2002 it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the closing stages 2004. Nupedia and Misplaced Pages coexisted until the former's servers went down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Misplaced Pages. As of December 2007, English Misplaced Pages had over 2 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for nearly 600 years.

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. Wikinfo does not require neutral point of view and allows original research. New Misplaced Pages-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Amapedia and Google's Knol — have been started to address perceived limitations of Misplaced Pages, such as its policies on peer review, original research and commercial advertising.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created from Misplaced Pages and Nupedia on June 20 2003. It 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 plans to license the use of the Misplaced Pages trademark for some products, such as books or DVDs.

Content and internal structure

Almost every article in Misplaced Pages may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. The "History" page attached to each article contains every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards. All text in Misplaced Pages is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. Misplaced Pages has been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are currently incompatible. Some language editions, such as the English Misplaced Pages, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while free media files are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Misplaced Pages is submitted to formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. To ensure its quality, the project relies on its community members, called Wikipedians, to remove vandalism or identify problems such as violation of neutrality or material that cannot be referenced to an external source. Since June 2006, vandalism-repair bots have also been in use.

Articles in Misplaced Pages are subject to the law in Florida, United States and several internal policies and guidelines; they need to be on "notable" topics, contain "no original research" and only "verifiable" material and must be written from a "neutral point of view." Articles that fail to meet these guidelines and policies may be modified or deleted. Deletionism and inclusionism are two editor philosophies on the extent of these modifications and deletions.

The community has a power structure. While they are welcomed by the community, authors new to Misplaced Pages are encouraged to read policies to help them learn the ways of Misplaced Pages. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many of levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator" and goes up with "steward" and "bureaucrat". Administrators, the largest group of privileged users (1,503 Wikipedians for the English edition on February 23, 2008), have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Much of the coordination of the editing of Misplaced Pages takes place on the "Talk" pages associated with each individual article.

As Misplaced Pages grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Misplaced Pages" has become one of questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Misplaced Pages, once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes up a bulk of contributions to Misplaced Pages and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". This was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portion of their content contributed by a user with low edit count.

Software and hardware

The operation of Misplaced Pages depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Misplaced Pages began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Misplaced Pages by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Misplaced Pages shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.

Misplaced Pages currently runs on dedicated clusters of GNU/Linux servers, 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul. Misplaced Pages employed a single server until 2004, 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 HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

Misplaced Pages receives between 20,000 and 45,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Misplaced Pages. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Misplaced Pages's traffic load.

Language editions

There are currently 253 language editions of Misplaced Pages; of these, 16 have over 100,000 articles and 145 have over 1,000 articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org) receives approximately 55% of Misplaced Pages's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Spanish: 17%, Japanese 4%, German: 4%, Polish: 3%, French: 3%, Portuguese: 2%). As of December 2007, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish and Japanese Wikipedias.

Since Misplaced Pages is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour) or points of view. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.

Jimmy Wales has described Misplaced Pages as "an effort to create and distribute a 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Misplaced Pages and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Misplaced Pages and maintain a list of articles every Misplaced Pages should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed. Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. Images and other non-verbal media are shared among the various language editions through the Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia foundation.

Several language versions have published a selection of Misplaced Pages articles on a DVD version. An English version developed by Linterweb contains "1988 + articles". The Polish version contains nearly 240000 articles. There are also a few German versions.

Reliability and bias

Misplaced Pages does not require that its contributors give their legal names or provide other information to establish their identity. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that anonymous and infrequent contributors to Misplaced Pages are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Misplaced Pages requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources.

Misplaced Pages tries to address the problem of systemic bias, and to deal with zealous editors who seek to influence the presentation of an article in a biased way, by insisting on a neutral point of view. The English-language Misplaced Pages has introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged; other editions have also adopted this. Roughly 1500 articles have passed a rigorous set of criteria to reach the highest rank, "featured article" status; such articles are intended to provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.

In a 2003 study of Misplaced Pages as a community, economics Ph.D. student 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.

Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Misplaced Pages or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Misplaced Pages." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. But he also cautions that errors are frequently found in Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Misplaced Pages in their syllabus, but that there is a split in their perception of using Misplaced Pages. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Misplaced Pages, along with Google, stating that academics who endorse the use of Misplaced Pages are “the intel­lectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything.” He also said that “a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet” was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on the academics who cite Misplaced Pages that: “You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research,” she said. “The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way.”

Speaking at a conference in Pennsylvania, Wales said he receives about ten e-mails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Misplaced Pages. According to the Sunday Times of London, Wales told the students they got what they deserved. "For God's sake, you’re in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," he said.

Criticism

Misplaced Pages has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; critics argue that Misplaced Pages's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Misplaced Pages is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism". Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Misplaced Pages citations. Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Technology writer Bill Thompson commented that the debate was possibly "symptomatic of much learning about information which is happening in society today."

In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing – but the community has been unable to form a consensus in favor of such changes, partly because they would require a major software overhaul. However a similar system is being tested on the German Misplaced Pages, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version at some future time. Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz is now being tested that will assign "trust ratings" to individual Misplaced Pages contributors, with the intention that eventually only edits made by those who have established themselves as "trusted editors" will be made immediately visible.

Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems. In one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of John Seigenthaler, Sr. and remained undetected for four months. Some critics claim that Misplaced Pages's open structure makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, advertisers, and those with an agenda to push. The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups has been noted, and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles. These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.

Misplaced Pages's community has been described as "cult-like," although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users. While praising many aspects of Misplaced Pages, historian Roy Rosenzweig notes: "Overall, writing is the Achilles’ heel of Misplaced Pages. Committees rarely write well, and Misplaced Pages entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."

In August 2007, a website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Misplaced Pages by editors who are not logged in, which reveals that many of these edits come from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and were attempts to remove criticism.

Wales called WikiScanner "a very clever idea," and said that he was considering some changes to Misplaced Pages to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them. "When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’" he said. "That might make them stop and think."

Cultural significance

In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles, Misplaced Pages has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. According to Alexa and comScore, Misplaced Pages is among the ten most visited websites world-wide. Of the top ten, Misplaced Pages is the only non-profit website. The growth of Misplaced Pages has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results; about 50% of search engine traffic to Misplaced Pages comes from Google, a good portion of which is related to academic research. In April 2007 the Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Misplaced Pages. In October 2006 the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran ads.

Misplaced Pages's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Misplaced Pages's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act. The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case.

Misplaced Pages has also been used as a source in journalism, sometimes without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Misplaced Pages. In July 2007, Misplaced Pages was the focus of a 30 minute documentary on BBC Radio 4 which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Misplaced Pages in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th century terms as Hoovering or Coke. Many parody Misplaced Pages's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Misplaced Pages on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".

Misplaced Pages has also created an impact upon forms of media. Some media sources satirize Misplaced Pages's susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, such as a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006 with the title "Misplaced Pages Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence", while others may draw upon Misplaced Pages's statement that anyone can edit, such as "The Negotiation", an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott said that "Misplaced Pages is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information", and a select few parody Misplaced Pages's policies, such as the xkcd strip named "Wikipedian Protester", that also included the joke "Semi-protect the Constitution!"

The first documentary film about Misplaced Pages, entitled Truth in Numbers: The Misplaced Pages Story, is scheduled for 2009 release. Shot on several continents, the film will cover the history of Misplaced Pages and feature interviews with Misplaced Pages editors around the world. Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen premiered his 45-minute documentary The Truth According to Misplaced Pages in April, 2008.

On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Misplaced Pages, "the seventh most consulted website" to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.

On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Misplaced Pages had become a focal point in the 2008 election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Misplaced Pages page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day." An October 2007 Reuters article, entitled "Misplaced Pages page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Misplaced Pages article vindicates one's notability.

Misplaced Pages won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) 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.

In a 2006 Multiscope research study, the Dutch Misplaced Pages was rated the third best Dutch language site, after Google and Gmail, with a score of 8.1. On January 26 2007, Misplaced Pages was also awarded the fifth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?" Jimmy Wales was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine in 2006. In 2006 and 2007, the Russian Misplaced Pages won the "Science and education" category of the "Runet Prize" (Russian: Премия Рунета) award, supervised by the Russian government agency FAPMC.

In November 2006, the Turkish Misplaced Pages was nominated under the Science category for the Altın Örümcek Web Ödülleri (Golden Spider Web Awards), which are commonly known as the "Web Oscars" for Turkey. In January 2007, Turkish Misplaced Pages was given the award for "Best Content" in this competition. The award was given in a ceremony on January 25 2007 at Istanbul Technical University.

In The New York Times in March 2008, Jimbo Wales discussed a possible trivia game based on Misplaced Pages.

In episode twenty of the English Adaptation of the anime Hell Girl, Gil de L'Enfer states that by the time he has defeated Hell Girl she will be nothing more then "a wikipedia footnote".

Wikia and Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation shares hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia. The Wikimedia Foundation received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006."

Related projects

A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Misplaced Pages was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project have now been emulated on a website. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was also created by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Misplaced Pages, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users.

Misplaced Pages has also spawned several sister projects. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", created in October 2002, detailed the September 11, 2001 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. 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. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects.

A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Misplaced Pages.

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Misplaced Pages. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2 and Everything2.

Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Misplaced Pages, said in an interview in regard to the online encyclopedia Citizendium which is overviewed by experts in their respective fields: "We welcome a diversity of efforts. If Larry's project is able to produce good work, we will benefit from it by copying it back into Misplaced Pages."

See also

• USA Congressional staff edits to Misplaced Pages
• Googlepedia
• List of encyclopedias
• List of wikis
• Open content
• User-generated content
• Misplaced Pages:About
• Self-reference
• Misplaced Pages:Press coverage

Further reading

Press coverage

• Dee, Jonathan (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
• Giles, Jim (2007-09-20). "Misplaced Pages 2.0 - now with added trust". New Scientist. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
• "Misplaced Pages Rules". The Phoenix. 2007-12-02. Retrieved 2008-02-22. {{cite news}}: |first= missing |last= (help)
• Taylor, Chris (2005-05-29). "It's a Wiki, Wiki World". Time. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
• Poe, Marshall (2006-09). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2008-03-22. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Balke, Jeff. For Music Fans: Misplaced Pages > MySpace Houston Chronicle

Academic studies

• Ulrike Pfeil, Panayiotis Zaphiris, and Chee Siang Ang (2006). "Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Misplaced Pages". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 12 (1).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Joseph M. Reagle Jr. (2005). "Do as I do: leadership in the Misplaced Pages". Misplaced Pages Drafts.
• Wilkinson, Dennis M. (April 2007). "Assessing the value of cooperation in Misplaced Pages". First Monday. 12 (4). Retrieved 2008-02-22. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |co-author= ignored (help)
• Nielsen, Finn Årup (August 2007). "Scientific citations in Misplaced Pages". First Monday. 12 (8). Retrieved 2008-02-22.

References

1. ^ "List of Wikipedias". Meta-Wiki. 2007-07-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |accessdate= ignored (help)
2. ^ Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia". San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved 2006-10-15.
3. ^ "Five-year traffic statistics for wikipedia.org". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2007-01-29.
4. Some language versions such as English one contains non-free images.
5. Miliard, Mike (2008-03-01). "Wikipediots: Who are these devoted, even obsessive contributors to Misplaced Pages?". Salt Lake City Weekly. Retrieved 2008-02-21.
6. Tancer, Bill (2007-05-01). "Look Who's Using Misplaced Pages". Time. Retrieved 2007-12-01. The sheer volume of content is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Misplaced Pages is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) (the author's blog post on the article)
7. Woodson, Alex (2007-07-08). "Misplaced Pages remains go-to site for online news". Reuters. Retrieved 2007-12-16. Online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
8. ^ "Top 500". Alexa. Retrieved 2007-12-04.
9. ^ Larry Sanger, Why Misplaced Pages Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, Kuro5hin, December 31 2004.
10. ^ Danah Boyd (2005-01-04). "Academia and Misplaced Pages". Many-to-Many. Retrieved 2007-02-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
11. ^ Simon Waldman (2004-10-26). "Who knows?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-02-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) Cite error: The named reference "Who" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
12. ^ Ahrens, Frank (2006-07-09). "Death by Misplaced Pages: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2006-11-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
13. "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-01-24. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
14. ^ Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl (2007-11-04). "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Association for Computing Machinery GROUP '07 conference proceedings. Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. Retrieved 2007-10-13.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
15. Jonathan Dee (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2007-12-01.
16. Andrew Lih (04-16-2004). "Misplaced Pages as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource" (PDF). 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 2007-10-13. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
17. "Time's Person of the Year: You". Time. 2006-12-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
18. ^ Stallman, Richard M. (2007-06-20). "The 💕 Project". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2008-01-04.
19. Meyers, Peter (September 20, 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-11-22. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)"I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph," said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Misplaced Pages with Mr. Wales.
20. ^ Larry Sanger (April 18 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". Slashdot. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
21. "Misplaced Pages-l: LinkBacks?". Retrieved 2007-02-20.
22. Larry Sanger (January 10 2001). "Let's make a wiki". Internet Archive. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
23. "Misplaced Pages: HomePage". Retrieved 2001-03-31.
24. Larry Sanger (January 17 2001). "Misplaced Pages is up!". Internet Archive. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
25. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view, Misplaced Pages (21 January 2007)
26. "Multilingual statistics", Misplaced Pages, March 30 2005
27. "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. Vol. 18. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. pp. 257–286.
28. Shirky, Clay (February 28, 2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The Penguin Press via Amazon Online Reader. p. 273. ISBN 1-594201-53-6. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
29. Jimmy Wales: "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", June 20 2003, <wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org>
30. Nair, Vipin (December 5 2005). "Growing on volunteer power". Business Line. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
31. ^ Kleinz, Torsten (February, 2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF). The Misplaced Pages Project. Linux Magazine. Retrieved 2007-03-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) Cite error: The named reference "Torsten_Kleinz" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
32. The Japanese Misplaced Pages, for example, is known for deleting every mention of real names of victims of certain high-profile crimes, even though they may still be noted in other language editions.
33. Walter Vermeir (2007). "Resolution:License update". Wikizine. Retrieved 2007-12-04.
34. "Misplaced Pages:Wikipedians". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2007-12-08.
35. Claburn, Thomas (March 22, 2007). "Misplaced Pages Becomes Intelligence Tool And Target For Jihadists". Information Week. Retrieved 2007-03-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
36. "Misplaced Pages Falsely Reports Sinbad's Death". Associated Press. March 16, 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
37. "Who's behind Misplaced Pages?". PC World. 2008-02-06. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
38. "Misplaced Pages:Notability". Retrieved 2008-02-13. A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.
39. "Misplaced Pages:No original research". Retrieved 2008-02-13. Misplaced Pages does not publish original thought
40. "Misplaced Pages:Verifiability". Retrieved 2008-02-13. Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source.
41. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral_point_of_view". Retrieved 2008-02-13. All Misplaced Pages articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias.
42. "The battle for Misplaced Pages's soul". The Economist. 2008-03-06. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
43. "Misplaced Pages: an online encyclopedia torn apart". The Daily Telegraph. 2007-11-10. Retrieved 2008-03-11.
44. Corner, Stuart (June 18, 2006). "What's all the fuss about Misplaced Pages?". iT Wire. Retrieved 2007-03-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
45. Wilson, Chris (2008-02-22). "The Wisdom of the Chaperones". Slate. Retrieved 2008-03-04.
46. Schiff, Stacy (July 24, 2006). "Can Misplaced Pages conquer expertise?". Know It All. The New Yorker. Retrieved 2007-03-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
47. Mehegan, David (February 13, 2006). "Many contributors, common cause". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2007-03-25. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
48. Misplaced Pages:User access levels," Misplaced Pages (January 12 2007)
49. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jesse Kriss, Frank van Ham (2007-01-03). "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved 2007-10-30. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
50. Kittur, Aniket. "Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Misplaced Pages and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie" (pdf). Retrieved 2008-02-23.
51. Swartz, Aaron (2006-09-04). "Raw Thought: Who Writes Misplaced Pages?". Retrieved 2008-02-23.
52. "Wikimedia servers at wikimedia.org". Retrieved 2008-02-16.
53. "Monthly request statistics", Wikimedia. Retrieved on 2008-02-26.
54. "Edits by project and country of origin". 2006-09-04. Retrieved 2007-10-25.
55. "Misplaced Pages:Multilingual statistics". English Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2007-12-23.
56. "spelling". Manual of Style. Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2007-05-19.
57. "Countering systemic bias". Retrieved 2007-05-19.
58. "Fair use". Meta wiki. Retrieved 2007-07-14.
59. "Images on Misplaced Pages". Retrieved 2007-07-14.
60. Fernanda B. Viégas (2007-01-03). "The Visual Side of Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved 2007-10-30. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
61. Jimmy Wales, "Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia", March 8 2005, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>
62. For example, "Translation into English", Misplaced Pages. (March 9, 2005)
63. Misplaced Pages: Translation. English Misplaced Pages, accessed on 2007-02-03
64. "List of Mirrors Hosting the CD Iso." Misplaced Pages on DVD. Linterweb. Accessed 1 June 2007
65. "Misplaced Pages on DVD". Linterweb. Accessed 1 June 2007. "Linterweb is authorized to make a commercial use of the Misplaced Pages trademark restricted to the selling of the Encyclopedia CDs and DVDs."
66. "Misplaced Pages 0.5 Available on a CD-ROM". Misplaced Pages on DVD. Linterweb. Accessed 1 June 2007. "The DVD or CD-ROM version 0.5 was commercially available for purchase."
67. "Polish Misplaced Pages on DVD".
68. "Misplaced Pages:DVD".
69. "Misplaced Pages "Good Samaritans Are on the Money". Scientific American. 2007-10-19. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
70. Eric Haas (2007-10-26). "Will Unethical Editing Destroy Misplaced Pages's Credibility?". AlterNet.org. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
71. "Misplaced Pages:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment". Retrieved 2007-10-28.
72. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon (2007-07-22). "The Hidden Order of Misplaced Pages" (pdf). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved 2007-10-30. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
73. Andrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Misplaced Pages", First Monday December 2003.
74. Tyler Cowen (2008-03-14). "Cooked Books". The New Republic. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
75. Child, Maxwell L.,"Professors Split on Wiki Debate", The Harvard Crimson, Monday, February 26, 2007.
76. ^ Chloe Stothart, Web threatens learning ethos, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 2007, 1799 (22 June), page 2
77. "Jimmy Wales," Biography Resource Center Online. (Gale, 2006)
78. Stacy Schiff (2006-07-31). "Know It All". The New Yorker. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
79. Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, November 15 2004.
80. "Wide World of WIKIPEDIA". The Emory Wheel. April 21 2006. Retrieved 2007-10-17. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
81. Jaschik, Scott (2007-01-26). "A Stand Against Misplaced Pages". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 2007-01-27. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
82. Helm, Burt (2005-12-14). "Misplaced Pages: "A Work in Progress"". BusinessWeek. Retrieved 2007-01-29. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
83. Thompson, Bill (2005-12-16). "What is it with Misplaced Pages?". BBC. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
84. "meta.wikimedia.org/Reviewed_article_version".
85. "en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Stable_versions".
86. "en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions".
87. Giles, Jim (2007-09-20). "Misplaced Pages 2.0 - now with added trust". NewScientist.com news service.
88. ^ Seigenthaler, John (2005-11-29). "A False Misplaced Pages 'biography'". USA Today.
89. Public Information Research – Misplaced Pages Watch. Retrieved on 2007-01-28.
90. "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version)". Citizendium.org. Retrieved 2006-10-10.
91. Kane, Margaret (2006-01-30). "Politicians notice Misplaced Pages". CNET. Retrieved 2007-01-28. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
92. Bergstein, Brian (2007-01-23). "Microsoft offers cash for Misplaced Pages edit". MSNBC. Retrieved 2007-02-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
93. ^ Stephen Colbert (2006-07-30). "Wikiality". Comedycentral.com. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
94. Arthur, Charles (2005-12-15). "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults". The Guardian. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
95. Lu Stout, Kristie (2003-08-04). "Misplaced Pages: The know-it-all Web site". CNN. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
96. "Wikinfo (2005-03-30). "Critical views of Misplaced Pages". Retrieved 2007-01-29. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
97. Rosenzweig, Roy. "Can History be Open Source? Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past". The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46. Retrieved 2007-10-29.
98. ^ Hafner, Katie (2007-08-19). "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints From the Editing of Misplaced Pages". The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
99. "Misplaced Pages:Modelling Misplaced Pages's growth". Retrieved 2007-12-22.
100. "694 Million People Currently Use the Internet Worldwide According To comScore Networks". comScore. Retrieved 2007-12-16. Misplaced Pages has emerged as a site that continues to increase in popularity, both globally and in the U.S. {{cite web}}: Text "date-2006-05-04" ignored (help)
101. "comScore Data Center". October 2007. Retrieved 2008-01-19.
102. Petrilli, Michael J. "Misplaced Pages or Wickedpedia?". Hoover Institution. 8 (2). Retrieved 2008-03-21.
103. "Google Traffic To Misplaced Pages up 166% Year over Year". Hitwise. 2007-02-16. Retrieved 2007-12-22.
104. "Misplaced Pages and Academic Research". Hitwise. 2006-10-17. Retrieved 2008-02-06.
105. Rainie, Lee (2007-12-15). "Misplaced Pages users" (PDF). Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew Research Center. Retrieved 2007-12-15. 36% of online American adults consult Misplaced Pages. It is particularly popular with the well-educated and current college-age students. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
106. Karbasfrooshan, Ashkan (2006-10-26). "What is Misplaced Pages.org's Valuation?". Retrieved 2007-12-01.
107. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages in the media", Misplaced Pages
108. "Bourgeois et al v. Peters et al." (PDF). Retrieved 2007-02-06.
109. C-38, LEGISINFO (March 28 2005)
110. Arias, Martha L. (2007-01-29). "Misplaced Pages: The Free Online Encyclopedia and its Use as Court Source". Internet Business Law Services. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); External link in |title= (help) (the name "World Intellectual Property Office" should however read "World Intellectual Property Organization" in this source)
111. Cohen, Noam (2007-01-29). "Courts Turn to Misplaced Pages, but Selectively". New York Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
112. Shaw, Donna (February/March 2008). "Misplaced Pages in the Newsroom". American Journalism Review. Retrieved 2008-02-11. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
113. Shizuoka newspaper plagiarized Misplaced Pages article, Japan News Review, July 5 2007
114. "Express-News staffer resigns after plagiarism in column is discovered", San Antonio Express-News, January 9 2007.
115. "Inquiry prompts reporter's dismissal", Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 13 2007.
116. "Radio 4 Documentary".
117. "Misplaced Pages Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence". The Onion. 2006. {{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help); Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
118. "wikidocumentary.wikia.com/Main_Page".
119. Hart, Hugh (March 11, 2007). "Industry Buzz". SFGate.com. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
120. Schonfeld, Erick (April 8, 2008). "The Truth According to Misplaced Pages". TechCruch.com. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
121. "Comunicato stampa. On. Franco Grillini. Misplaced Pages. Interrogazione a Rutelli. Con "diritto di panorama" promuovere arte e architettura contemporanea italiana. Rivedere con urgenza legge copyright". 12 October 2007.
122. Jose Antonio Vargas (2007-09-17). "On Misplaced Pages, Debating 2008 Hopefuls' Every Facet". The Washington Post.
123. Jennifer Ablan (2007-10-22). "Misplaced Pages page the latest status symbol". Reuters. Retrieved 2007-10-24.
124. "Trophy Box", Meta-Wiki (March 28 2005).
125. "Webby Awards 2004". The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. 2004. Retrieved 2007-06-19.
126. Nederlandse Misplaced Pages groeit als kool (Website in Dutch Language), Recovered December 27 2006
127. Zumpano, Anthony (2007-01-29). "Similar Search Results: Google Wins". Interbrand. Retrieved 2007-01-28. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
128. Anderson, Chris (2006-04-30). "Jimmy Wales". TIME. Retrieved 2006-12-18. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
129. Template:Ru iconMajor award of Russian Internet became a state one – Lenta.Ru, August 29 2005
130. Noam Cohen (2008-03-17). "Open-Source Troubles in Wiki World". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-04-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
131. Wikimedia Foundation 2006-2007 Audit page 9 says "The Organization shares hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded by the same founder as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Included in accounts receivable at June 30, 2007 is $6,000 due from Wikia, Inc. for these costs. The Organization received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the year ended June 30, 2006 valued at $6,000. No donation of the office space occurred in 2007. Through June 30, 2007, two members of the Organization’s board of directors also serve as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc."
132. Web-based emulator of the Domesday Project User Interface and data from the Community Disc (contributions from the general public) -- most articles can be accessed using the interactive map
133. "sep11memories.org/". Retrieved 2007-02-06.
134. First edit to the wiki In Memoriam: September 11 wiki (October 28 2002),
135. "Announcement of Wiktionary's creation", December 12 2002. Retrieved on 2007-02-02.
136. "Our projects", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-01-24
137. Frith, Holden (March 26, 2007,). "Misplaced Pages founder launches rival online encyclopedia". The Times. Retrieved 2007-06-27. Misplaced Pages's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, stood by the site's format. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) – Holden Frith.
138. Orlowski, Andrew (September 18, 2006). "Misplaced Pages founder forks Misplaced Pages, More experts, less fiddling?". The Register. Retrieved 2007-06-27. Larry Sanger describes the Citizendium project as a "progressive or gradual fork", with the major difference that experts have the final say over edits. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) – Andrew Orlowski.
139. Lyman, Jay (September 20, 2006). "Misplaced Pages Co-Founder Planning New Expert-Authored Site". LinuxInsider. Retrieved 2007-06-27.

External links

2. Part 2

• Misplaced Pages – multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
• Misplaced Pages at the Open Directory Project
• CBC News: I, editor
• Help Edit Misplaced Pages A wikiHow article.
• Class assignment: Write an original Misplaced Pages article
• Essay about wikipedia
• The Charms of Misplaced Pages Nicholas Baker article on Misplaced Pages from The New York Review of Books
• #wikipedia on freenode

Template:Link FA

• Internet history
• Web 2.0
• Misplaced Pages
• 💕s
• Online encyclopedias
• General encyclopedias
• Wikis
• Internet properties established in 2001
• Wikimedia projects