Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license.
Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat.
We can research this topic together.
Misplaced Pages is a Web-based, multi-language, free-contentencyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profitWikimedia Foundation. It has editions in about 200 different languages (about 100 of which are active) and contains entries both on traditional encyclopedic topics and on almanac, gazetteer, and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. Misplaced Pages is one of the most popular reference sites on the internet, receiving around 60 million hits per day.
Misplaced Pages contains approximately 1.6 million articles. More than 600,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on January 15, 2001. Having steadily risen in popularity, it has spawned several sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. It is edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are subject to change by nearly anyone. Misplaced Pages's volunteers enforce a policy of "neutral point of view" whereby views presented by notable persons or literature are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth. Because of its open nature, vandalism and inaccuracy are problems in Misplaced Pages.
The status of Misplaced Pages as a reference work has been controversial, and it is both praised for its free distribution, free editing and wide range of topics and criticized for alleged systemic biases, preference of consensus to credentials, deficiencies in some topics, and lack of accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias. Its articles have been cited by the mass media and academia and are available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Its German language edition has been distributed on compact discs, and many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by websites.
Characteristics
Detail of Misplaced Pages's multilingual portal at http://wikipedia.org. Here, the project's largest language editions are shown.
Misplaced Pages's goal is to create a free, reliable encyclopedia—indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth. Misplaced Pages is described by its founder 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 called a "wiki," from the Hawaiianwiki wiki ("quick"). Wales intends that Misplaced Pages should achieve a "Britannica or better" quality and be published in print.
Several other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet. Traditional editorial policies and article ownership are used in some, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the now-defunct Nupedia. More casual 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 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 under 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 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 with them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Misplaced Pages may thus be distributed to, 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. However, some editions only accept free media.
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 approximately exponential in several of the major language editions.
Misplaced Pages encompasses 92 "active" language editions as of March 2005. Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, German, French, Japanese, and Swedish. In total, Misplaced Pages contains 205 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 portion of articles in any edition.
The following is a list of the largest editions, sorted by number of articles as of July 2005.
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.
Almost all visitors may edit Misplaced Pages's articles and have their changes instantly displayed. Misplaced Pages is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Its authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" 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 and occasionally vote, though Jimmy Wales retains final judgment.
By the nature of its openness, "edit wars" and prolonged disputes often occur when editors do not agree. A few members of its community have explained its editing process as a collaborative work, a "socially Darwinianevolutionary process", but this is not generally considered by the community to be an accurate self-description. 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.
Policies
Misplaced Pages requires that 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 would fairly present all views on an issue, attributed to their adherents in a neutral way. The policy states that views should be given weight equal to their popularity. 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 that are felt to be inappropriate to an encyclopedia, such as dictionary definitions ("dicdefs") or original source texts. Often, Misplaced Pages editions establish style conventions.
Authors
There are no formal distinctions between different editors on Misplaced Pages, and decisions are ideally made by reaching consensus among those involved. During January 2005, Misplaced Pages had approximately 13,000 users who 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 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 Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee.
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
Misplaced Pages's claim to be or status as an encyclopedia has been controversial, more so as it has gained prominence. 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. Misplaced Pages is considered to be of sufficient quality in at least some areas by others, notably winning a comparative test by c't. Much of its praise is for being both free-content and open to editing by anyone. Misplaced Pages editors themselves have been quite active in evaluating, both positively and negatively, the encyclopedia.
Quality
Critics 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 is 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." 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." Misplaced Pages articles have been referenced by academics in peer-reviewed articles, including those appearing in the journal Science.
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 the journal 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.
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." 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 editor-in-chief Kishore criticized Misplaced Pages in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.
Misplaced Pages's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus's 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 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."
It has been praised for, as a wiki, allowing 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 as a website, Misplaced Pages is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.
The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Premium, 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."
People supporting the idea of Misplaced Pages counter these arguments by saying that Misplaced Pages is a more independent source than most traditional encyclopedias. They argue that the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately, and point out that the formal processes used by academic sources (peer review, etc.) are also prone to human error. In addition, supporters contend that any criticism originating from Encyclopædia Britannica and other encyclopedias is colored by their competition with Misplaced Pages.
Community
Misplaced Pages has a community 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 criticised 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.
When speaking ibn front of an audience of thousands of software developersworking forand with him, Steve Jobs proclaimed that wikipedia is one of his favourite websites, in 2005.
Misplaced Pages began as a complementary project of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on 9 March2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO and final authority , 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; not having size limitations, as it was on the Internet; and 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 was later widely 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 licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License initially, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License prior to Misplaced Pages's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.
Misplaced Pages's English edition on 20 March, 2001, two and one-half months after its founding.
Misplaced Pages was formally launched on 15 January2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com. It had been, from 10 January, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles which 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 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 among 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 from Ben Kovitz, a regular at this wiki, in January 2001, and proposed a creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales that Misplaced Pages's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki 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 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. Projects have since forked from Misplaced Pages's content 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."
From Misplaced Pages and Nupedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was created 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; Wikiquotes, a collection of quotes, 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 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 January 22, 2003. In 2004, its article growth rate was approximately 1,000 to 3,000 per day. In all editions, it reached 500,000 articles on February 25, 2004. Misplaced Pages reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on September 20, 2004.
Software and hardware
Misplaced Pages is run by MediaWiki open source software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida. 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 PHPwiki engine with a MySQLdatabase 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 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 seven Squid cache servers. By July 2005, its server cluster had grown to more than 80 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 Misplaced Pagess. 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.
The ongoing status of Misplaced Pages's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.
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.
These audio files were created from a revision of this article dated Error: no date provided, and do not reflect subsequent edits.(Audio help · More spoken articles)
These audio files were created from a revision of this article dated Error: no date provided, and do not reflect subsequent edits.(Audio help · More spoken articles)