about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
en.wikipedia.org
Primary Twitter:
@wikipedia

Wikipedia is a web-based and collaborative encyclopedia project.

As of January 2012, Wikipedia has 20 million articles — more than 3.8 million of them in English — which have been written by volunteers from around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia’s tagline is “the free encyclopedia.”

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. It began as a complement to Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project (its tagline was also “the free encyclopedia”) whose articles were written by experts — generally academics — and reviewed under a formal process. (While Wales is credited with the general idea of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited the idea to use a wiki to reach that goal.)

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001 through an announcement Sanger made to the Nupedia mailing list. There were initially relatively few rules about writing and editing articles, though Wikipedia’s “neutral point-of-view” policy — the ethos that guides its editorial process — developed quickly among its contributors.

Questions of accuracy

Though most see Wikipedia as a success story and a testament to the power of user-generated contributions and, more generally, the wisdom of crowds (Clay Shirky has called the project an “unplanned miracle”), some also accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies. They also challenge the project’s reliability and accuracy. One of the most famous inaccuracies occurred in 2005, when the journalist John Seigenthaler realized that his Wikipedia entry claimed that he had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. (In fact, he had been an aide and friend to Robert Kennedy.) The claim had been on his page for four months. Seigenthaler wrote a scathing op-ed in USA Today condemning Wikipedia for “character assassination,” leading to widespread questions about Wikipedia’s accuracy and authority.

After the incident, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales responded with his own USA Today op-ed, and updated Wikipedia policy to bar unregistered users from creating new articles.

When it comes to comparing Wikipedia’s content to traditional encyclopedias, though, there’s some evidence to suggest comparable accuracy. A 2005 investigation by the journal Nature found that the science articles in Wikipedia and those in the Encyclopedia Britannica had a similar rate of “serious errors.” (Brittanica has disputed those findings.) As the economist Tyler Cowen put it, “If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia and journalism

Though Wikipedia remains controversial as a one-stop source for accurate information, it is increasingly being used not just as for reference material, but also for breaking-news updates. Increasingly, collaboratively created Wikipedia entries are doubling as real-time information aggregators in breaking-news situations.

Wikipedia has also been an inspiration for a more contextualized approach to news narrative. News outlets’ topic pages take advantage of the public desire for evergreen reference content that Wikipedia has demonstrated. In 2008, news theorist Matt Thompson proposed the creation of context-rich journalism stories by “Wikipedia-ing the News.”

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
April 22, 2014 / Craig Silverman
Why Vox (and other news orgs) could use a librarian — The facts of the present won’t sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion. —William Macneile Dixon Every 45 years, roughly half of the medical knowledge about cirrhosis...
April 11, 2014 / Mark Coddington
This Week in Review: Vox and the wonk boom, and Comcast defends its TWC merger plans — Vox, tech, and wonk journalism: Former Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein launched his explanatory journalism site, Vox, this week, cautioning in an introductory note with co-editors Melissa Bell and Matt Yglesias that i...
Feb. 12, 2014 / Joseph Lichterman
Who edits breaking news articles on Wikipedia? — What can we learn from examining the networks of users who edit articles on Wikipedia? That’s the question Brian Keegan, a post-doctoral fellow at Northeastern University, is asking, and he gave a presentation of s...
Jan. 14, 2014 / Joshua Benton
What makes people contribute to Wikipedia? — Interesting presentation from Jerome Hergueux down the street at the Berkman Center. He studies peer production — “a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals w...
Aug. 6, 2013 / Caroline O'Donovan
Google’s new search feature makes it easier to find seminal articles on big topics — When big news breaks, readers clamor for updates — but they also yearn for context. For example, when word got out Monday afternoon that Jeff Bezos had spent $250 million to become the new owner of The Washington Post,...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Megan Garber. Main text last updated: January 5, 2012.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
GateHouse Media logo

GateHouse Media is a newspaper company based in Fairport, N.Y., that owns hundreds of small papers across the country. GateHouse owns 91 dailies and hundreds of weeklies and shoppers, many of them in Massachusetts, Illinois and New York. It was formed in 2005 by Fortress Investment Group out of the former Liberty Group Publishing. In…

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »
http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/wikipedia/
www.niemanlab.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
31867
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:O4JZWBNEZ2TPH6Y5SKF7ZH66T7CD62CL
<urn:uuid:5e3dd11b-307f-4020-a434-4080368f3534>
2014-08-29T09:58:39Z
216.92.13.127
sha1:AS66ETYNL3SRIG2EANZHOOIXOMW6KR73
<urn:uuid:6fc4f348-4245-4b96-87f2-1a78b763a4c9>
http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/wikipedia/
response
<urn:uuid:a837c83b-89ee-44b3-8e96-57f3084b6f82>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf