Wikipedia:Overview FAQ

Overview FAQ

[edit] What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." Wikipedia exists to bring knowledge to everyone who seeks it.

[edit] Who owns Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is managed by a nonprofit parent organization, The Wikimedia Foundation, which also manages the operation of Wikipedia's sister projects, including Wiktionary (a wiki dictionary), Wikibooks (textbooks), and others, and owns all of their domain names. Previously, the site was hosted on the servers of Bomis, Inc., a company mostly owned by Jimmy Wales, who currently funds part of the site's operational costs. With the announcement of the Wikimedia Foundation on June 20, 2003, the ownership of all domain names as well as the technical equipment was transferred to the Foundation. The site is run by the community of Wikipedians guided by the principles articulated by Jimmy Wales, including, for example, an adherence to a neutral point of view.

The articles hosted on this site are released by their authors under the GNU Free Documentation License (or a free license), so the articles are free content and may be reproduced freely under the same license. See Wikipedia:Copyrights and Wikipedia:Readers' FAQ for information on how you can use Wikipedia content.

[edit] Who is responsible for the articles on Wikipedia?

You are! Actually, you can even edit this very FAQ, so long as the edits are helpful. This is a collaborative effort. Thousands of people have contributed information to different parts of this project, and anyone can do so, including you. All you need is to know how to edit a page, and have some encyclopedic knowledge you want to share. The encyclopedia provides users with a certain amount of freedom.

You can learn who is responsible for the most recent versions of any given page by clicking on the "Page history" link. Nevertheless, if you spot an error in the latest revision of an article, you are highly encouraged to be bold and correct it. This practice is one of the basic review mechanisms that maintains the reliability of the encyclopedia. As a result, Wikipedia has become one of the most extensive information libraries available on the Internet.

If you are uncertain or find the wording confusing, quote the material on the associated talk page and leave a question for the next person. This helps eliminate errors, inaccuracies, or misleading wording more quickly and is highly appreciated by the community.

[edit] How can I contact the project?

Given the massively collaborative nature of the project, there is no single point of contact. There are many mailing lists, which you can contact for project-specific questions. See the list at meta:mailing lists. There is also a Wikimedia Foundation mailing list and our Meta-Wiki for cross-project matters.

If you want to communicate with a specific user, leave a message on his or her personal talk page; you can find a list of personal pages (and link to your own) at the Wikipedian list. Many Wikipedians have also registered their email addresses, which you can use by clicking the "Email this user" link from the personal pages. In addition, each user and each article has a talk page. This gives you the opportunity to leave that user a message or to make comments about a particular article. Use the discussion link in any article to get to the talk page.

We also have a group of volunteers answering some requests, please see Wikipedia:Contact us.

Due to their many obligations, Jimmy Wales, Florence Devouard and other board members cannot deal with individual cases. E-mails sent to board members will be redirected towards the volunteer group, adding to delays. It is almost always an error to email them instead of the volunteers.

[edit] What is Nupedia?

Nupedia was a more formal encyclopedia project that spawned Wikipedia. It is now defunct; see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia.

[edit] Should I create an account? Can I not just edit articles anonymously?

See Wikipedia:Accountability. Editors with account names enjoy several benefits; among them is the positive reputation that goes with quality work. Wikipedians with an established history are respected especially with regard to neutralizing article disputes. In addition, Wikipedians sometimes find collaborating with anonymous users frustrating, because it is more difficult to contact them with questions, concerns, or suggestions. This is not to say there is a Wikipedia hierarchy per se - though there are editors with administrative abilities (see Wikipedia:Administrators), these are approved by the community.

Wikipedians with user names are, in a sense, more anonymous than contributors that do not log in: that is, while anyone can see the IP address of a user who did not log in when he/she edited, only server administrators can find the IP of a logged-in user. Therefore, if you are concerned about privacy and anonymity, you may prefer to create a username for yourself in order to hide your IP.

However, if you would like to stay in the dark, it is fine to edit without a login. Many valuable contributors have made this choice. That said, you will not be able to create or rename pages without a login.

[edit] How do you know if the information is correct?

As anyone can edit any article, it is of course possible for biased, out of date, or incorrect information to be posted. However, because there are so many other people reading the articles and monitoring contributions using the Recent Changes page, incorrect information is usually corrected quickly. Thus, the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia is improving all the time as it attracts more and more contributors. You are encouraged to help by correcting articles, validating content, and providing useful references.

See Wikipedia:Replies to common objections for a longer discussion of this point.

[edit] How do you prevent people from ruining articles? (Defacement or vandalism)

All changes to a page are registered in a 'page history', so any defacement can be replaced by an older version of the page, and all recent changes to Wikipedia in general are automatically listed on a special page for that purpose. There are software robots that automatically reverse obvious defacement immediately, and hundreds of people who spend a little time each day watching the list of recent changes on Wikipedia. Any user interested in a particular page can add it to a personal 'watchlist' which shows when a page is updated, whether that update is a joke or a substantial contribution. Furthermore, any of the many readers who pass by can correct vandalism or any other erroneous information. So, the popular pages that people might be most likely to deface are also the ones which have the most editors watching and the most readers, all of whom can 'revert' vandalism. If there is a recurrent problem, an article can be temporarily protected from editing, or user accounts and IP addresses can be blocked from editing.

[edit] Site X seems to be violating Wikipedia's copyright. Do you guys know about this?

All text on Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Over 100 sites using Wikipedia for content have been identified, and categorized by their degree of compliance, at Wikipedia:GFDL Compliance. Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks has more information, including what to do if someone is violating the GFDL license.

[edit] Which wiki software does Wikipedia run on?

Wikipedia, and the other Wikimedia projects use the MediaWiki software to facilitate collaborative editing and storage of page histories.

For more information on MediaWiki see:

• The MediaWiki article
• The MediaWiki web site

[edit] What if two people edit the same article at the same time?

See Help:Edit conflict.

[edit] How big is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia currently has 1,715,442 articles in total in the English version alone (this article count is also available on the main page). A fairly recent comparison of Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft's Encarta showed that Wikipedia had about 1,400,000 articles with 340 million words. The Britannica had about 85,000 articles with 55 million words. Encarta had about 63,000 articles and 40 million words to date. See: Wikipedia:Size comparisons.

[edit] What can I do about libellous content or an invasion of privacy?

By design, Wikipedia is easy to edit so you can simply revert wrong or hurtful information yourself. However, because every revision is logged, special steps are required to remove this information from the historical record. Please see Wikipedia:Oversight and Wikipedia:Libel for Wikipedia's policy on removing historical revisions, and how to request such a change.