How Wikipedia works

We’ve all done it.

Overhearing an unfamiliar term in conversation, on TV, or reading the newspaper, we sign on to the internet and pull up “Wikipedia” to find out more information on the unknown term. We pull up an entry from Wikipedia’s database and instantly get a crash course on one of 2,706,266 English topics.(1)

But how exactly does this helpful tool work? What makes the world of Wikipedia turn?

Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia online, where users are allowed to add and edit entries. Started in 2001, the site has spread to include more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. (2) As the site describes: “Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.”(3)

Wikipedia.com is run by a software application called “MediaWiki.”(4) This software is generally used by companies for internal knowledge management and for content management.(5) For Wikipedia specifically, this software application retains a history of all edits and changes made to specific entries. Originally, the site ran on a small wiki engine, “UseModwiki,” but switched over in 2003, under the design of Lee Daniel Crocker.(6)

The name “Wikipedia” derives from the word “wiki,” a collaborative website, and “encyclopedia.” Any user with access to the internet is able to edit or add to any existing entries or start a new entry. As the site proclaims:“Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within Wikipedia’s editing policies and to an appropriate standard. Substandard or disputed information is subject to removal.”(7) For this reason, users of the site are divided into separate roles. There are the users, called readers, who only use the site to obtain information. Additionally, there are “editors,” who edit existing information on the site’s articles. However, there are also layers of proofreaders and reviewers who verify the validity of information added to the site.(8)

According to Angela Beesley, a member of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, these roles include: readers, editors, administrators, patrollers, policy makers, subject area experts, content maintainers, software developers, and system operators.(9) Each of these roles are used to ensure “the legitimacy of an article: that the contents is sound, that no copyright is violated, that nothing libelous is said, and other concerns.”(10)
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For this first entry, I chose to search using subject directories (Google Scholar and Google Directory) because they gave me more focused search results on my topic. While using them, I also noticed that they weeded out advertisements and irrelevant information, simplifying my own search. By choosing to use a scholarly research tool and a general research tool, it broadened my results and gave me differing viewpoints on the same topic.

I tried several subject directories, but got the best results from Google Scholar and Google Directory. I searched twice in each of these directories, using the search terms “About Wikipedia” and “How Wikipedia Works.”

The best sites I found were:
1. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1149453.1149456
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
My results from this page also lead me to other helpful sites, including:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars


contains a citation and PDF for an interview with several Wikipedia employees. The interview was done via email before the International Symposium on Wikis in 2006. The ACM Portal website is published by the Association for Computing Machinery and offers many full-length articles. The information is very current, copyrighted in 2009. However the interview itself was done by Dirk Reihle, the chair of the 2006 symposium. The Symposium was geared towards explaining why and how Wikis work and why they are beneficial. The interview is somewhat outdated, since it was for the 2006 symposium. This interview was useful in explaining the different types of users and editors on the Wikipedia page. It gives a detailed description of the process and exactly who does what. However, the interview is noticeably biased, considering the interviewees are full-heartedly in favor of the information presented on the site, therefore any information presented in contest to the accuracy of Wikipedia is excluded. This site won’t be useful in our second blog posting…

was probably the most obvious source on Wikipedia. And while I tried to ignore it in my searching, it became inevitable to read the information. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia is a good source on itself. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a registered nonprofit charity, supported through donations. The foundation’s mission is to “encourage the growth, development, and distribution of free, multilingual content.” (11) The “About” page was last updated on January 16, 2009 and is very current. Surprisingly, this information seems to be pretty reliable. As our presentation is on Wikipedia itself, this “About” page is going to be very helpful in information we will need later on. Obviously, the site is very “pro-Wikipedia.” However, the site even acknowledges some of the drawbacks of the open editing policy, letting users know that not all the information is factual. Yet, other sites might be more beneficial in covering the controversies presented by the site.

(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(4)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(5)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
(6)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
(7)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(8)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.

(9)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.

(10)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.

(11)http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home