Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating websites collaboratively, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content has received ample attention in print media. In its 2006 Person of the Year article, Time magazine recognized the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world. It cited Wikipedia as an example, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.
Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture); and because it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes, its reliability and accuracy are also targeted. Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information; though some scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived. A 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".
The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:
The user who visits Wikipedia 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.
However, obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes, but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months. John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced. This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.
Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push. The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the US 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.
For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.
Wikipedia can be defended from attack by several systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits (e.g. 'watchlists' and 'recent changes'), computer programs ('bots') that are designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making "undesirable" edits,[76] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.
For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them, or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes. Such locking is allegedly applied sparingly and for only short periods of time while attacks may appear likely to continue.
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like. A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability", which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized. In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations. This can lead to the removal of information that is valid, thus hindering inclusion of knowledge and growth of the encyclopedia. Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side. All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article. This is known as neutral point of view (NPOV).
All text in Wikipedia was 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,[89] up until June 2009, when the site switched to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0. Wikipedia had been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, was not considered suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses were incompatible. In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009. Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch. The referendum took place from April 9 to 30. The results were 75.8% "Yes", 10.5% "No", and 13.7% "No opinion". In consequence of the referendum, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees voted to change to the Creative Commons license, effective June 15, 2009.
The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to, in part due to the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g., in Japanese copyright law). Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Wikimedia foundation is not a licensor of content, but merely a hosting service for the contributors (and licensors) of the Wikipedia. This position has been successfully defended in court.
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