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account_circle Michael Aaron Dennis verified_user Britannica Editors today Nov. 17, 2025 • History
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wiki, website that can be modified or contributed to by users. Wikis can be dated
to 1995, when American computer programmer Ward Cunningham created a new
collaborative technology for organizing information on websites. Using a
Hawaiian term meaning “quick,” he called this new software WikiWikiWeb,
attracted by its alliteration and also by its matching abbreviation (WWW).
Wikis were inspired in part by Apple’s HyperCard program, which allowed users
to create virtual “card stacks” of information with a host of connections, or links,
among the various cards. HyperCard in turn drew upon an idea suggested by
Vannevar Bush in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think.” There
Bush envisioned the memex, a machine that would allow readers to annotate and
create links between articles and books recorded on microfilm. HyperCard’s
“stacks” implemented a version of Bush’s vision, but the program relied upon the
user to create both the text and the links. For example, one might take a musical
score of a symphony and annotate different sections with different cards linked
together.
Bush also had imagined that memex users might share what he called “trails,” a
record of their individual travels through a textual universe. Cunningham’s wiki
software expanded this idea by allowing users to comment on and change one
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another’s text. Perhaps the best-known use of wiki software is Wikipedia, an
online encyclopaedia using the model of open-source software development.
Individuals write articles and post them on Wikipedia, and these articles are then
open for vetting and editing by the community of Wikipedia readers, rather than
by a single editor and fact-checker. Just as open-source software—such as the
Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser—has been developed by
nonprofit communities, so too is Wikipedia a nonprofit effort.
For those who challenge this model of development, Cunningham and his
followers adopted an interesting position. It is always going to be the case that
certain individuals will maliciously attempt to thwart open-source websites such
as Wikipedia by introducing false or misleading content. Rather than worrying
about every user’s actions and intentions, proponents of wiki software rely on
their community of users to edit and correct what are perceived to be errors or
biases. Although such a system is certainly far from foolproof, wikis stand as an
example of the origin of an Internet counterculture that has a basic assumption of
the goodness of people.
In addition to encyclopaedias, wiki
Related Topics: Internet • open
software is used in a wide variety of
source • website
contexts to facilitate interaction and
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cooperation in projects at various scales.
Manuals have been written using the wiki
model, and individuals have adapted wiki software to serve as personal
information organizers on personal computers.
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A women-in-STEM “edit-a-thon”
organized by Wikipedia in Nova Scotia,
What is Wikipedia?
Canada, 2018 In response to the persisten…
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Who started Wikipedia and when?
How is Wikipedia different from a traditional encyclopedia?
What are Wikipedia's main features or components?
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Wikipedia, free Internet-based encyclopedia, started in 2001, that operates
under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit
Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses collaborative software known as a wiki
that facilitates the creation and development of articles. Although some highly
publicized problems have called attention to Wikipedia’s editorial process, they
have done little to dampen public use of the resource, which is one of the most
visited sites on the Internet.
Origin and growth
In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, to establish
Bomis, Inc., a web portal company. In March 2000 Wales founded Nupedia, a free
online encyclopedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in chief. Nupedia was organized
like existing encyclopedias, with an advisory board of experts and a lengthy review
process. By January 2001 fewer than two dozen articles were finished, and Sanger
advocated supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopedia based on
wiki software. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of
[Link], but, following objections from the advisory board, it was
relaunched as an independent website a few days later. In its first year Wikipedia
expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German,
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Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated
and its articles moved into Wikipedia.
By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than 1,000,000
articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had surpassed
3,500,000. However, while the encyclopedia continued to expand at a rate of
millions of words per month, the number of new articles created each year
gradually decreased, from a peak of 665,000 in 2007 to 374,000 in 2010. In
response to this slowdown, the Wikimedia Foundation began to focus its
expansion efforts on non-English versions of Wikipedia, which by 2011 numbered
more than 250. Some versions had already amassed hundreds of thousands of
articles; indeed, the French and German versions both boasted more than a
million. Consequently, the foundation paid particular attention to languages of the
developing world, such as Swahili and Tamil, in an attempt to reach populations
otherwise underserved by the Internet. One impediment to Wikipedia’s ability to
reach a truly global audience, however, was the Chinese government’s periodic
restrictions of access to some or all of the site’s content within China.
Principles and procedures
In some respects, Wikipedia’s open source production model is the epitome of the
so-called Web 2.0, an egalitarian environment where the web of social software
enmeshes users in both their real and virtual-reality workplaces. The Wikipedia
community is based on a limited number of standard principles. One important
principle is neutrality. Another is the faith that contributors are participating in a
sincere and deliberate fashion. Readers can correct what they perceive to be
errors, and disputes over facts and over possible bias are conducted through
contributor discussions. Three other guiding principles are to keep within the
defined parameters of an encyclopedia, to respect copyright laws, and to consider
any other rules to be flexible. The last principle reinforces the project’s belief that
the open-source process will make Wikipedia the best product available, given its
community of users. At the very least, one by-product of the process is that the
encyclopedia contains a number of publicly accessible pages that are not
necessarily classifiable as articles. These include stubs (very short articles
intended to be expanded) and talk pages (which contain discussions between
contributors).
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The central policy of inviting readers to serve as authors or editors creates the
potential for problems as well as at least their partial solution. Not all users are
scrupulous about providing accurate information, and Wikipedia must also deal
with individuals who deliberately deface particular articles, post misleading or
false statements, or add obscene material. Wikipedia’s method is to rely on its
users to monitor and clean up its articles. Moreover, trusted contributors can
receive administrator privileges that provide access to an array of software tools to
speedily fix web graffiti and other serious problems.
Issues and controversies
Reliance on community self-policing has generated some problems. In 2005 the
American journalist John L. Seigenthaler, Jr., discovered that his Wikipedia
biography falsely identified him as a potential conspirator in the assassinations of
both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and that these malicious claims had
survived Wikipedia’s community policing for 132 days. The author of this
information could not be easily identified, since all that is known about
unregistered contributors is their computers’ IP (Internet protocol) addresses,
many of which are dynamically generated each time a user goes online. (The
contributor later confessed and apologized, saying that he wrote the false
information as a joke.) The Seigenthaler case prompted Wikipedia to prohibit
unregistered users from editing certain articles. Similar instances of vandalism
later led site administrators to formulate a procedure, despite protests from some
contributors, by which some edits would be reviewed by experienced editors
before the changes could appear online.
Although Wikipedia has occasionally come under fire for including information
not intended to be widely disseminated—such as images of the 10 inkblots used by
psychologists in the Rorschach Test—it has also adapted its philosophy of
openness in certain cases. For instance, after The New York Times reporter David
S. Rohde was kidnapped by Taliban militants in Afghanistan in 2008, his
employer arranged with Wikipedia for news of the incident to be kept off the
website on the grounds that it could endanger Rohde’s life. The site’s
administrators complied, in the face of repeated attempts by users to add the
information, until after Rohde’s eventual escape. Additionally, in 2010 it was
revealed that there was a cache of pornographic images, including illegal
depictions of sexual acts involving children, on Wikimedia Commons, a site
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maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation that served as a repository of media
files for use in all Wikimedia products. Although there were no such illegal images
on Wikipedia itself, the ensuing scandal prompted Jimmy Wales, who personally
deleted many of the Commons files, to encourage administrators to remove any
prurient content from Wikimedia sites.
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Wikipedia administrators also have the power to block particular IP addresses—a
power they used in 2006 after it was found that staff members of some U.S.
congressional representatives had altered articles to eliminate unfavorable details.
News of such self-interested editing inspired Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at
the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), to create Wikipedia Scanner, or
WikiScanner, in 2007. By correlating the IP addresses attached to all Wikipedia
edits with their owners, Griffith constructed a database that he made available on
the Internet for anyone to search through. He and other researchers quickly
discovered that editing Wikipedia content from computers located within
corporations and in government offices was widespread. Although most of the
edits were innocuous—typically, individuals working on subjects unrelated to their
positions—a pattern did seem to emerge of many articles being edited to reflect
more favorably on the editors’ hosts.
Debates about the utility of Wikipedia proliferated especially among scholars and
educators, for whom the reliability of reference materials was of particular
concern. While many classrooms, at nearly all grade levels, discouraged or
prohibited students from using Wikipedia as a research tool, in 2010 the
Wikimedia Foundation recruited several public policy professors in the United
States to develop coursework wherein students contributed content to the
Wikipedia site. As Wikipedia became a seemingly inescapable part of the Internet
landscape, its claims to legitimacy were further bolstered by an increasing number
of citations of the encyclopedia in U.S. judicial opinions, as well as by a program
administered by the German government to work with the German-language site
to improve its coverage of renewable resources.
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The number of active editors—i.e., those
zoom_in
who edit more than 100 articles a month
—peaked in 2007 and as of 2017 had
declined by about a third. Various
factors were blamed for this decline.
Wikipedia’s bureaucratic culture, with
its complex norms and its reliance on
automated procedures that tended to A Wikipedia editor teaching students
how to edit Wikipedia pages Editing
reject new edits, were seen as articles requires knowledge of a specific…
...(more)
discouraging to new editors. Editing the
articles requires knowledge of a
specialized markup language that is difficult to edit on smartphones and tablets.
Surveys of Wikipedia editors have revealed a persistent gender gap: only about
10–20 percent of the editors are women. In response to concerns about this
gender gap and how it is reflected in the encyclopedia, Wikipedia began about
2012 to encourage “edit-a-thons,” in which editors come together at events
devoted to increasing the site’s coverage of such subjects as feminism and
women’s history. Whether or not Wikipedia can solve these demographic
problems, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet
community can and cannot do.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
This article was most recently revised and updated by Tara Ramanathan.
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