History of Wikipedia (en.wiki)
Analisi della voce History of Wikipedia presa da en.wiki, 23 marzo 2009, ore 4:00
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History by subject area
External impact
- In 2007, Wikipedia is deemed fit to be used as a major source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in the Formula One trademark case ruling.[1]
- Over time Wikipedia gains recognition amongst other traditional media as a "key source" for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and related tsunami, the biographies of 2008 Presidential election candidates,[2] and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The latter article is accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published local to the shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event."[3]
- On Template:Date, Noam Cohen of the New York Times publishes A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
- On Template:Date, An article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[4]
Effect of biographical articles
Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography.
- November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy. Someone, who later admitted that he wanted to make a joke, wrote into the article that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy murder of 1963.
- December 2006: German comedian "Atze Schröder", who does not want his real name published, sued Arne Klempert, secretary of Wikimedia Deutschland, because of the Wikipedia article. Then the artist drew back his complaint, but wanted his attorney's costs to be paid by Klempert. Trial decided that the artist had to cover those costs by himself.[5]
- Template:Date: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport because of false information on his biography that he was a terrorist.[6][7]
- September 2008: Changes or "manipulations" at the Sarah Palin article in English Wikipedia have been noticed by the media.
- November 2008: Germany's Left Party politician Lutz Heilmann believed that some remarks in "his" article caused damage to his reputation. He succeeded in getting a court order to make Wikimedia Deutschland stop linking from its page www.wikipedia.de to German Wikipedia de.wikipedia.org. The result was a huge national support for Wikipedia, more donations to Wikimedia Deutschland, a rise from several dozen page views of "Lutz Heilmann" daily to half a million the two days after, and after a couple of days Heilmann asked the court to withdraw the court order.
- December 2008: Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch chapter, won a preliminary injunction. An entrepreneur was linked in "his" article with the criminal Willem Holleeder and wanted the article deleted. The judge in Utrecht did not follow him but believed the chapter that it has no influence on the content of Dutch Wikipedia.[8]
Controversies
- January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, attempted to promote itself on its Wikipedia page.
- October 2005: Alan Mcilwraith was exposed as a fake war hero with a Wikipedia page.
- November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy caused Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity was ascertained by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch. Following this, the scientific journal Nature undertook a peer reviewed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in Encyclopedia Britannica, and concluded they are comparable in terms of accuracy.[9][10] Britannica rejected their methodology and their conclusion.[11] Nature refused to make any apologies, asserting instead the reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms.[12] (For studies like this, see Reliability of Wikipedia. For traffic impact see Wikipedia history in images)
- Early-to-mid 2006: The congressional aides biography scandals came to public attention, in which several political aides were caught trying to influence the Wikipedia biographies of several politicians to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replace the article in part or whole by staff authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden, Gil Gutknecht.[13] In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents.[14] Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006.
- July 2006: Joshua Gardner was exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Wikipedia page.
- January 2007: English-language Wikipedians in Qatar were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP address. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar from the site.[15]
- On Template:Date, a Microsoft employee offered to pay Rick Jelliffe to review and change certain Wikipedia articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format.[16]
- In February 2007, The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials.[17][18] The editor, Ryan Jordan, became a Wikia employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, and communicated to the original article author. (See: Essjay controversy)
- February 2007: Fuzzy Zoeller sued a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Wikipedia biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network.
- Template:Date: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist.
- In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site Wikinews.
- In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently-deceased TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the S Club 7 song "Reach". In fact, he hadn't, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article.[19]
- In January 2008, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency.[20] In Bauer v. Glatzer, Bauer claimed that information on Wikipedia critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Wikipedia[21] and moved to dismiss the case on May 2, 2008.[22] The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on Template:Date.[23]
Notable forks and derivatives
See Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for a partial list of Wikipedia mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is maintained. A significant number of sites utilize the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia.
Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.
In 2006, Larry Sanger founds Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki. It has expert-led top-down culture, the absence of which in Wikipedia he views as a major concern.[24]
Publication on other media
The German Wikipedia was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004[25] and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139 page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia.[26] Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.[27]
In September 2008, Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.[28]
The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Wikipedia was published in April 2006 by SOS Children as the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection.[29] In April 2007, "Wikipedia Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles.[30][31] The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file or Torrent file, or accessed online at the project's website.
A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of Wikipedia available for use on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.[32]
Lawsuits
In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.[33]
Other notable occurrences
Early roles of Wales and Sanger
Both Wales and Sanger played important roles in the early stages of Wikipedia. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it.[34] Wales ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Wikipedia. Sanger wrote, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine" (emphasis in original text). He also wrote, "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia."[35] Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software."[36] Sanger coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name.[35] In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems.[37] In terms of project roles, Sanger spearheaded and pursued the project as its leader in its first year, and did most of the early work in formulating policies (including "Ignore all rules"[38] and "Neutral point of view"[39]) and building up the community.[37] Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of Bomis' funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and his changing personal priorities,[40] however by 2004 the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger heavily criticized Wikipedia, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair."[41]
Wales claims to be the founder of Wikipedia,[42] however, as explained by Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder."[37] There is evidence that Sanger was called co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Wikipedia press releases and Wikipedia articles, and in a September 2001 The New York Times article for which both were interviewed.[43] Wales later disputed this, stating, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title."[44] There is no evidence from before January 2004 of Wales disputing Sanger's status as co-founder.[45]
Today, Wales emphasizes this employer-employee relation and the fact that he was therefore the ultimate authority, to assert that this makes him the "sole founder," and Sanger cites earlier versions of Wikipedia pages (2004, 2006) and press releases (2002 - 2004), to demonstrate that media coverage articles from the time of his involvement routinely represent them as co-founders.[37][43][46][47]
Blocking of Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities. To date these have related to the People's Republic of China, Iran, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Syria.
Mainland China (multiple occasions)
The People's Republic of China and internet service providers in Mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking contentious Web sites in mainland China, and Wikimedia sites have been blocked multiple times in its history, sometimes all articles, and sometimes selectively by topic, region, language version, or ISP. Notable blocks include:
- June 2004: Access to the Chinese Wikipedia from Beijing blocked on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Possibly related to this, on May 31 an article from the IDG News Service was published, discussing the Chinese Wikipedia's treatment of the protests.[48]
- September 2004: A second and less serious outage. Access to Wikipedia was erratic or unavailable to some users in mainland China — this block was not comprehensive and some users in mainland China were never affected. The exact reason for the block is unknown, but it may have been linked with the closing down of YTHT BBS, a popular Peking University-based BBS that was shut down a few weeks earlier for hosting overtly radical political discussions.Template:Fact
- October 2005 to around mid October 2006: For the first few days the English Wikipedia seems to have been unblocked in most provinces in China, while users were still unable to access the Chinese version in certain provinces, varying by ISP. By November, both versions seemed to be accessible in all provinces and by all ISPs. The end of the block coincided with the Chinese Wikipedia's 100,000th article milestone.[49][50][51]
The first block had an effect on the vitality of Chinese Wikipedia, which suffered sharp dips in various indicators such as the number of new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. In some cases, it took anywhere from six to twelve months in order to recover to the levels of May 2004.
On Template:Date, the BBC reported that the Chinese Wikipedia had been unblocked that day in China; it had still been blocked the previous day. This came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the upcoming Olympic Games, and websites such as the Chinese edition of the BBC were being unblocked following talks between the International Olympic Committee and the Games' Chinese organisers.[52]
Syria
Access to Arabic Wikipedia was blocked between Template:Date and February 13, 2009 . (Other languages were accessible).
Tunisia
Wikimedia website was blocked for a few days in Tunisia (Template:Date - Template:Date).
United Kingdom
Template:Main On Template:Date, users in the United Kingdom were affected by a block of a page (Virgin Killer) and associated picture (Image:Virgin Killer.jpg), following a claim that the image was "potentially illegal" under the Protection of Children Act 1978. An estimated 95% of British users were affected by the block, which was put in place on the recommendation of the Internet Watch Foundation.[53]. The IWF's recommendation was rescinded on Template:Date.[54]
Uzbekistan
Access to Uzbek Wikipedia was blocked in Uzbekistan on Template:Date[55]; the block was lifted Template:Date. This was the second time Wikipedia had been blocked in Uzbekistan; the first case was in 2007.
See also
References
Template:Cleanup-section Template:Reflist
External links
Wikipedia records and archives
- Wikipedia's project files contain a large quantity of reference and archive material. Useful resources on Wikipedia history within Wikipedia are:
- Historical summaries
- Template:Selfref
- Size and statistics
- Template:Selfref
- Discussion and debate archives
- Template:Selfref
- Template:Selfref
- Template:Selfref
Third party
- The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource — Free Software Foundation endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia) 1999.
- Even older Wikipedia snapshot - Template:Date
- Early Wikipedia snapshot - Template:Date
- Larry Sanger, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir and Part II Slashdot (Template:Date - Template:Date)
- Giles, Jim, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica, Template:Date
- Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., March 2006
- Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature, Template:Date
