It is a wiki that uses the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia Foundation projects). Other projects may also use different strings in place of “/w/” and “/wiki/” in URLs. A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. This pattern is attributed to the status of English as a global lingua franca, leading to contributions from many editors for whom English is a second language. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias.

URLs in external links

• The important people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the person in charge of Bomis, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief of Nupedia.
• As of September 2011, Wikipedia had about 18 million pages in about 300 languages and more than 3.50 billion words across all Wikipedias.
• Wikipedia’s community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations.
• As consumers become more ingredient-conscious, fluoride-free toothpaste options are gaining traction.
• In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
• The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia.

Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.W 31 When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. If the result of a discussion is not obvious, a closer—an uninvolved editor usually in good standing—may render a verdict from the strength of the arguments presented and then the numbers of arguers on each side. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate’s anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.

Sale : Toothpaste

Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih states that the number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years, and Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. In 2009, a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices.W 109 Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since.

In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Spanish, Russian, Italian, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Waray, and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Catalan, Indonesian, Korean, Serbian, Chechen, and Norwegian), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.W 36W 35 The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 7.1 million articles. As of January 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, German, French, Swedish, and Dutch Wikipedias.W 35 The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013update had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. The results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. According to a 2009 study, there is “evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content”. Experienced editors are encouraged to not “bite” the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 33 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions.

Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them. Jimmy Wales once argued that only “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore “much like any traditional organization”. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia’s earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous. According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.W 27 A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in reliable sources that are independent of the article’s subject.

Wikipedia’s content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases.W 117 The Parliament of Canada’s website refers to Wikipedia’s article on same-sex marriage in the “related links” section of its “further reading” list for the Civil Marriage Act. There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.update Noam Cohen wrote in Wired that Wikipedia’s effort to combat misinformation related to the pandemic was different from other major websites, opining, “Unless Twitter, Facebook and the others can learn to address misinformation more effectively, Wikipedia will remain the last best place on the Internet.” In October 2020, the World Health Organization announced they were freely licensing its infographics and other materials on Wikimedia projects. In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles,W 114 Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia was ranked fifth globally among all websites, stating “With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, … Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors.” However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping.

Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia’s large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014.update Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). As of January 2021,update the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. There are currently 342 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. Wikipedia’s community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations.

Style & formats

The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a “feeder” project for Nupedia. Nupedia’s articles were written and owned by Bomis, Inc which was a web portal company. Wikipedia was started on January 9, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier online encyclopedia named Nupedia. Wikipedia’s name is a combination of two words, wiki and encyclopedia.

• Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name ,W 4 and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
• The top left panel display’s Today’s featured article.
• Research published in 2024 determined that several groups of connected accounts had coordinated to promote Russian propaganda narratives and state-controlled media sources in articles, related to Russian-Ukrainian relations and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
• People can choose to give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects.

URLs of Wikipedia pages

Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”. Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning “together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”. For Derakhshan, Wikipedia’s goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers “endangered” due to the “gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn means a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment”. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia’s participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide.

Accuracy of content

Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 61 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 62 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.W 57 The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.W 58 The foundation’s 2020 Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million, with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost $11 million.W 59 “Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men.”

Kinds of dead links

BOXThe prefix “en” in the url is the for English language. We begin WikipediaAcademy by acquainting you first as a user and later as an editor. However, if you have sensitive teeth, look for gentler options or alternate with a sensitivity toothpaste like Sensodyne. As consumers become more ingredient-conscious, fluoride-free toothpaste options are gaining traction. From well-known names like Colgate, Crest, and Sensodyne to newer trends like fluoride-free and nano hydroxyapatite toothpaste, today’s toothpaste market offers something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for teeth whitening, cavity protection, or relief from sensitivity, the right toothpaste can make a noticeable difference in your oral health and confidence.

Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia. This means anyone can copy or edit it and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing. It is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, vegas casino download known as Wikipedians.

In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called “wikification”, and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote in Nature that the “wisdom of crowds” approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes. Nicholas Carr’s 2005 essay “The amorality of Web 2.0” criticizes websites with user-generated content (like Wikipedia) for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers’ going out of business, because “free trumps quality all the time”.

Editors also can make only one revert per day across the entire field and can be banned from editing related articles. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. Under this system, new and unregistered users’ edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.

In other cases the URL may redirect to a valid one (for example, page titles are converted to their canonical form as they are when they appear in wikilinks). However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted.

In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views. According to the foundation, this growth is largely attributed to automated programs, or “scraper” bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use in training large language models and related applications. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.W 17 Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month.W 16 On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, “according to the ratings firm comScore”. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.

Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.W 73 One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship. Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva, and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children.W 51 The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles.

The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month. The encyclopedia is home to 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003). English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium.