Wikipedia:Overview FAQ
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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 possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." Wikipedia exists to bring knowledge to everyone.
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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.
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Who is responsible for the articles on Wikipedia?
- You are! Actually, you can even edit this very FAQ! As there are more than one million (1,000,000) other Wikipedians, 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.
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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 do not want to communicate publicly, you can contact the directors of the Foundation at board@wikimedia.org. 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.
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What is Nupedia?
- Nupedia was a more formal encyclopedia project that spawned Wikipedia. It is now defunct; see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia.
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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, and the goal of most Wikipedians is to ensure that democracy, (albeit leavened with a little anarchy), remains the supreme power on Wikipedia.
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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What keeps Wikipedia from being destroyed?
- The page history of almost all versions of pages is available. It consists of the text, the date and time of every edit, the user who made it, the edit summary, and a possible marking as "minor edit". It is linked to from Recent Changes, Related Changes and from every article. The page history of deleted pages is not available to non-administrators. However, the revision history is kept for some time and can be retrieved by a sysop, who can also undelete the page. The history of uploaded files is also kept.
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What if two people edit the same article at the same time?
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How big is Wikipedia?
- Wikipedia currently has 0 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 930,000 articles with 340 million words. The Britannica has about 85,000 articles with 55 million words. Encarta has about 63,000 articles and 40 million words to date. See: Wikipedia:Size comparisons.ar:ويكيبيديا:أسئلة عامة
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