Wikipedia.org
If you’re trying to find information on a subject, chances are you go online. And when you go online to do this research, chances are you stumbled upon Wikipedia. And depending on who you talk to, this may or may not be a good thing. But more on that later. First off, what is Wikipedia, and how did it become so popular and massive?
Well, Wikipedia.com was started back in 2001 by a couple of guys name Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It actually was a by product of a company called Nupedia, which was an online encyclopedia written by experts and closely scrutinized for accuracy.
Wikipedia grew immensely fast after its initial launch. By the end of 2001, it covered 18 different languages, and had somewhere close to 20,000 articles. It continued to grow in leaps and bounds over the next few years. It was decided however fairly early in the game that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and was moved from Wikipedia.com to Wikipedia.org in 2002.
Now how Wikipedia works is what leads to its contraversy. Wikipedia is based on an open editing model, that means registered users can add or change content, whether its true or not. The name for that is “wiki”.
So basically, this “wiki” based encyclopedia was allowing any registered user to add their own articles, and whether it was just their opinion or actual fact didne matter. And since there is no review process, users can get their content posted immediately.
There are some features however on Wikipedia that help users avoid misinformation. On each article there is a history and discussion page. And whether you’re a registered user or not, you can view these pages to see the changes that the article has been through, or what type of discussions are going on about the subject.
So how does Wikipedia stay up and running without having ads on their site to fund it? Good question. Wikipedia is actually funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non profit organization that actually supports quite a few other “wiki” projects.
And of course this mountain of knowledge isnt simply stored in thin air. It takes a massive amount of hardware to keep wikipedia up and running. It runs mainly on dedicated clusters of Linux servers, and as of 2008, they have 300 servers in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam, and 23 in Seoul. That is quite a leap from their 39 servers they were running on in 2005. And its no surprise they have that many servers. Wikipedia gets on average between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second. That kind of traffic would definitely crash any other server.
When Wikipedia first started out, all the information on it was covered under the GNU free documentation license. With that license, anyone was free to use anything found on Wikipedia as they saw fit, with the exception of commercial use, which under this license would require the info to retain the copyright of the author. Then in 2009, Wikipedia switched to the Create Commons Share Alike license. The cool thing about the switch is that is was decided by a community referendum, with 75.8% wanting the switch.
It was mentioned earlier that Wikipedia covers a few languages. Today they cover over 200 different languages. How does that traffic break down? Well, the english subdomain of Wikipedia receives a majority of the traffic, with around 52%. the next in line would be the spanish Wikipedia with 19%. then french, polish, german, japanese, and portuguese all rank under 5%.
In 2004, enligh wikipedia reached a fairly significant milestone. They passed the 2 million article mark, making it the largest encyclopedia ever put together. The previous recoed was held by the Yongle encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.
Now Wikipedia has hit the 3 million article mark. But it doesnt add as many articles as it once did in its hay day. In 2007, wikipedia was averaging about 2200 articles a day. In 2009, that has been drastically reduced to about half, with only 1300 articles submitted daily on average. Some people believe this is because new users feel like they have nothing new to add.
Well, love it or hate it, Wikipedia is definitely here to stay. Who knows where it will be in the future, and what kind of improvements are in store. Wikipedia is definitely a corner stone in the world wide web. The only question left is, have you contributed to the mountain of knowledge known as wikipedia?
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