Misplaced Pages

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Misplaced Pages is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia that is written collaboratively by volunteers. It consists of 195 independent language editions sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Entries on traditional encyclopedic topics exist alongside those on almanac, gazetteer and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute, worldwide, a 💕 in as many languages as possible. Misplaced Pages is one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving around 50 million hits per day.

Misplaced Pages contains approximately 1.5 million articles, over 500,000 of which are in its English language edition, over 200,000 in the German language and over 100,000 in the Japanese language. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on 15 January 2001. Having steadily gained in popularity, it has spawned numerous conceptually related sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikinews. Its articles are edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are constantly subject to change by anyone. Misplaced Pages's volunteers enforce a policy of "neutral point of view". Under this, the views presented by notable persons or literature are summarized without attempting to determine an objective truth. By its open nature, vandalism and inaccuracy are problems in Misplaced Pages.

Misplaced Pages's status as a reference work has been controversial. It has received praise for being free, editable, and covering a wide range of topics. It has been criticized for lack of authority versus a traditional encyclopedia, systemic bias, and for deficiencies in traditional encyclopedic topics. Its articles have been cited by the mass media and academia. Misplaced Pages's articles are available under the GNU Free Documentation License, and, while having been mirrored and forked by websites, have not been distributed on physical media on a large scale.

Wiki

Detail of Misplaced Pages's multilingual portal. Here, the project's largest language editions are shown.

Misplaced Pages is described by Wikimedia President Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distribute a 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." It is created on the wikipedia.org website using a type of software and philosophy known as Wiki or WikiWikiWeb. Wales intends that Misplaced Pages should achieve a "Britannica or better" quality and be published on physical media.

Numerous other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet. Traditional editorial policies and article ownership is used in some, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and defunct Nupedia. More casually, websites such as h2g2 or Everything2 serve as general guides whose articles are written and controlled by individuals. Projects such as Misplaced Pages, Susning.nu, and the Enciclopedia Libre, are wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors and there is no formal review process. Misplaced Pages has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word count. It is distinguished from many projects in licensing its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Free content

The GNU Free Documentation License, the license under which Misplaced Pages's articles available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses which permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content provided its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When an author contributes to original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained with them, however they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Misplaced Pages may thus be shared with, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license. Misplaced Pages's content has been mirrored or 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 non-free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. Material has also been given to Misplaced Pages under no-derivative or for-Misplaced Pages-only conditions.

Misplaced Pages has been used by the media, academics, and others as a reference or supplement. News organizations have referred to Misplaced Pages articles as sources or in sidebars containing related information on the Web, some regularly. According to lists maintained by Misplaced Pages's editors, its articles have been cited most frequently in the news media. Less frequently, it has been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. For instance, the Parliament of Canada website refers to Misplaced Pages's article on Same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Bill C-38. Noncomprehensive lists are maintained by Wikipedians of Misplaced Pages as a source.

Language editions

Misplaced Pages's growth has been exponential in the major language editions.

Misplaced Pages encompassed 92 "active" language editions in March 2005. Its five largest editions were, in descending order, English, German, Japanese, French and Swedish. In total, Misplaced Pages contained 195 language editions of varying states with a combined 1.5 million articles.

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, and are only held to global policies such as "neutral point of view". Articles and images are nonetheless shared between Misplaced Pages editions, the former through pages to request translations organized on many of the larger language editions, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small fraction of the articles in any edition.

The following is the list of major editions in the order of the article number in March 2005.

  1. English (516,000)
  2. German (215,000)
  3. Japanese (106,000)
  4. French (90,000)
  5. Swedish (65,000)
  6. Dutch (60,851)
  7. Polish (60,527)
  8. Spanish (45,000)
  9. Italian (36,000)
  10. Portuguese (33,000)
  11. Danish (27,000)
  12. Chinese (22,000)

Editing

File:WikipediaMainPage.png
Main Page of the English Misplaced Pages on 4 March 2005.

Any visitor may edit Misplaced Pages's articles and have their changes be instantly displayed. It is built on the belief that collaboration between users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Its authors need not have, nor receive any distinction for having, expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly" by anyone who so wishes. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group, and decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Misplaced Pages is instead done by consensus, though Jimmy Wales retains final judgement.

By the nature of its openness, "edit wars" and prolonged disputes often occur when editors do not agree. Members of its community have explained its editing process as a collaborative work of art, a Darwinian-like evolutionary process, or an adversarial "battlefield of ideas." Articles are always subject to editing, such that Misplaced Pages does not declare any article finished. Vandalism has been a constant problem for Misplaced Pages. In a study of the page histories of Misplaced Pages's English language edition, MIT and IBM researchers Viegas, Wattenberg, and Dave found the mean time to correct "mass delete" and "mass delete obscene" vandalism to be 7.7 days and 1.8 days, and the median times 2.8 minutes and 1.7 minutes respectively. In contrast, the average persistency of a revision marked "all content" was found to be 22.3 days, the median time 90.4 minutes.

Policies

Misplaced Pages requires that its contributors observe a "neutral point of view" when writing and not include original research. Neutral point of view, itself a "non-negotiable" policy, articulates the encyclopedia's goal as "representing disputes, characterizing them, rather than engaging in them." If achieved, Misplaced Pages would not be written from a single "objective" point of view, but rather fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a neutral way. It states that views should be given weight equal to their standing. This policy has been criticized as having an unattainable goal, being unnecessary with widely discredited material, and allowing the representation of "morally offensive" views. Opinions or theories that have not been previously published are considered "original research", which is not allowed. The "No original research" policy states that such material cannot be properly attributed under neutral point of view, and that editors' own novel ideas or perspectives are not to be introduced.

Misplaced Pages's contributors additionally maintain a variety of lesser policies and guidelines. In contrast to other wikis of its time, such as Ward Cunningham's Portland Pattern Repository, Wikipedians use "talk" pages to discuss changes to articles, rather than discussing changes within the article itself. Misplaced Pages contributors often modify, move, or delete articles which are felt to be inappropriate to an encyclopedia, such as dictionary definitions or original source texts. Often, Misplaced Pages editions establish style conventions.

Authors

Every user is intended to be of equal status when editing articles, and edit articles to reach consensus among editors. Many maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators which number in the hundreds. Admistrators 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. During January 2005, Misplaced Pages had approximately 13,000 users which made at least five edits that month; 9,000 of these active users worked on its three largest language editions. A more active group of approximately 3,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the three largest editions. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of its traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.

Former Misplaced Pages 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 or democracy. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though it is a consequence. 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.

Evaluations

See also: Criticism of Misplaced Pages

Misplaced Pages's claim to be or status as an encyclopedia has been controversial. 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.

Critics argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Misplaced Pages an unreliable work. 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 is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor Ted Pappas said to the Guardian: "The premise of Misplaced Pages is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." Discussing Misplaced Pages as an academic source, Dana Boyd said in 2005 that "t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes."

In an oft-cited 2004 piece The Faith-Based Encyclopedia, former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticised 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." Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticised McHenry's methods, and labelled it FUD, the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." In another rebuttal, Jean-Baptiste Soufron attributed to Misplaced Pages a political importance similar to the Encyclopédie in The Age of Enlightenment "because it is not only aimed at making some knowledge available to the public but it is also aimed at being free."

German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of three encyclopedias in October 2004: Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Misplaced Pages. 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."

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 is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." 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."

Its style is described by Emigh and Herring as being "largely indistinguishable" from Columbia Encyclopedia. They further 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 homo-genizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Misplaced Pages, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Misplaced Pages are often unjustly labelled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing.

History

Main article: History of Misplaced Pages

File:NupediaLogo.jpg
Misplaced Pages originated from Nupedia.

Misplaced Pages was initially intended by its editors as a space for articles to be developed in wiki fashion prior to formal peer review for inclusion in Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on 9 March 2000 by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger hired as editor-in-chief and the project underwritten by Wales' Bomis Internet company. Misplaced Pages was begun under the same management as a single English edition on 15 January, 2001 at wikipedia.com. The projects existed side-by-side until 2003, in which time the latter's output fell and its text was incorporated into Misplaced Pages. Under a similar concept, GNUPedia existed alongside Misplaced Pages in its early years. It subsequently became inactive and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Misplaced Pages. While it came to be the largest encyclopedia on the Internet, neither Nupedia nor Misplaced Pages were the first Internet encyclopedia projects. Nupedia and Misplaced Pages were initially unique in making their articles free content.

Misplaced Pages's English edition on 30 March 2001, two and one-half months after starting.

Misplaced Pages's principle of "neutral point of view" was developed in its early months. By the end of its first year, it consisted of 18 language editions. It had 26 by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Citing fear 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 moved its website to wikipedia.org.

From Misplaced Pages and Nupedia the Wikimedia Foundation was created on 20 June 2003. Misplaced Pages and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Misplaced Pages's first sister project, "In Memoriam", had been created in October 2004 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; it gained Wikiquotes, a collection of quotes, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below.

Misplaced Pages has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years it grew at a few hundred or less new articles per day. The English Misplaced Pages reached a 100,000 article milestone on 22 January 2003. During 2004 its article growth rate was approximately 1,000 to 3,000 per day. In all editions, it reached 500,000 articles on 25 February 2004. Misplaced Pages reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on 20 September, 2004.

Software and hardware

Misplaced Pages is run by MediaWiki open source software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida. Increasing demand has been a recurring problem for Misplaced Pages's servers, with slow-downs or outages resulting.

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 2004, when the server setup was expanded into an n-tier distributed 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 7 Squid cache servers.

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.

Misplaced Pages's ongoing status is listed at an off-site status page on OpenFacts.

Awards

Misplaced Pages won two major awards in May of 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 "Community". 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, USA Today, The Economist, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Wired Magazine. All awards to the Misplaced Pages project and selected press clippings are listed on Meta.

Sister projects

Misplaced Pages has the following sister projects as part of the Wikimedia family:

There are many other conceptually related projects, including Wikitravel.

See also

References

  1. According to Alexa Internet, "Browse:Reference" (28 March 2005).
  2. See plots at "Visits per day", Misplaced Pages Statistics, 1 January 2005.
  3. Jimmy Wales, "Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia", 8 March 2005, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>.
  4. For example, see statistics and licenses on the English edition at "Misplaced Pages:Image copyright tags", Misplaced Pages (9 March 2005).
  5. Andrew Lih, "Misplaced Pages as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource" (PDF), 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, April 2004.
  6. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages as a press source 2005", Misplaced Pages (28 March 2005).
  7. "C-38", LEGISINFO (28 March 2005).
  8. "Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta-Wiki (28 March 2005).
  9. "All languages", Misplaced Pages statistics, 21 March 2005.
  10. For example, "Misplaced Pages:Translation into English", Misplaced Pages (9 March 2005).
  11. "Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta Wikimedia (28 March 2005).
  12. "Power structure", Meta-Wiki, 10:55 4 Apr 2005.
  13. "Misplaced Pages:Edit war", Misplaced Pages (26 March 2005).
  14. "Misplaced Pages sociology", Meta-Wiki, 23:30 24 Mar 2005.
  15. Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations", CHI 2004 April 24-29 2004. Preliminary report "History Flow" available on IBM website.
  16. Jimmy Wales, "Articles about ourselves", 5 November 2003, <wikien-l@wikimedia.org>.
  17. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view", Misplaced Pages, accessed 4 March 2005. Italics original.
  18. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view".
  19. "Misplaced Pages:No original research", Misplaced Pages, (4 March 2005).
  20. "Misplaced Pages:What Misplaced Pages is not", Misplaced Pages (4 March 2005).
  21. Paragraph's statistics taken from "Active wikipedians" (Misplaced Pages Statistics, 21 March 2005).
  22. "Misplaced Pages", Meta-Wiki, 08:02 30 Mar 2005.
  23. Larry Sanger, "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of 💕s", Kuro5hin, 25 July 2001.
  24. Andrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Misplaced Pages", First Monday December 2003.
  25. Jimmy Wales, "Re: Illegitimate block", 26 January 2005, <wikien-l@wikimedia.org>.
  26. "Misplaced Pages:Researching with Misplaced Pages" (Misplaced Pages, accessed 28 March 2005).
  27. "Who knows?", The Guardian, 26 October 2004.
  28. Dana Boyd, "Academia and Misplaced Pages", Many-to-Many, 4 January 2005.
  29. Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, 15 November 2004.
  30. Aaron Krowne, "The FUD-based Encyclopedia", Free Software Magazine, 1 March 2005.
  31. Jean-Baptiste Soufron, "The political importance of the Misplaced Pages Project : the only true Encyclopedia of our days" (16 November 2004).
  32. Michael Kurzidim: Wissenswettstreit. Die kostenlose Misplaced Pages tritt gegen die Marktführer Encarta und Brockhaus an, in: c't 21/2004, 4 October 2004, S. 132-139.
  33. 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.
  34. "Who knows?"
  35. Larry Sanger, "Why Misplaced Pages Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism ", Kuro5hin, 31 December 2004.
  36. "Critical views of Misplaced Pages" Wikinfo, 07:28 30 Mar 2005.
  37. Richard Stallman, "The 💕 Project", Free Software Foundation, 1999.
  38. "Misplaced Pages:Multilingual statistics", Misplaced Pages, 30 March 2005.
  39. Jimmy Wales, "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", 20 June 2003, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>.
  40. "500,000 Misplaced Pages articles", Wikimedia Foundation, 25 February 2004.
  41. See "Misplaced Pages Reaches One Million Articles", Wikimedia Foundation, 20 September 2004.
  42. "Trophy Box", Meta-Wiki (28 March 2005).

Further reading

External links

minnan:Misplaced Pages

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