【明報專訊】Launched thirteen years ago yesterday, Wikipedia (維基百科) has revolutionised the acquisition, transfer and spread of knowledge, and is now an indispensable item in many web users' browsing bookmarks.
◆Contents [hide]
1. Founding of Wikipedia
2. How Wikipedia works
3. Impacts
4. Criticism
5. Censorship of Wikipedia
◆Founding of Wikipedia
A non-profit encyclopedia (百科全書), Wikipedia was created by Jimmy Wales, an American Internet entrepreneur, and Larry Sanger, an American Internet software developer. Their original intention was to create a free online English encyclopedia with articles written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. However, the duo soon decided to create a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001. Thanks to support from many early contributors, it grew quickly since its inception. On 8 August 2001, Wikipedia had over 8,000 articles. English Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia ever assembled on 9 September 2007, when it passed the mark of two million articles.
How Wikipedia works
Wikipedia allows outside editing, which means readers can edit text without having to obtain permission. Each Wikipedia entry contains a "History" page recording revisions. Wikipedia editors use the page to undo undesirable changes or restore lost content.
There are currently 287 language editions of Wikipedia. Nine of them (English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian and Swedish) have over one million articles each, six others (Cebuano, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Waray-Waray) have over 700,000 articles.
Impacts
Wikipedia has revolutionised learning, and some have stated that it represents a threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, who may be unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. For example,Microsoft Encarta, a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation, was discontinued in 2009.
According to Alexa and comScore, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide. And analysts have suggested that Wikipedia, though a collaboratively edited encyclopedia, appears to be increasingly used by academic researchers.
Criticism
Since virtually anyone may edit them, Wikipedia articles are susceptible to vandalism (破壞). There have been articles to which false information, obscenities (猥褻語言) or crude humour were added. Very often such vandalism is detected and removed quickly, but there have been cases in which they went undetected even for months.
Though it is now an important research tool, Wikipedia has attracted a lot of criticism. It has been criticised for inaccurate information, biased content, poor writing and even obscene content. It is also very easy for someone with an axe to grind to manipulate it. There have been cases in which Wikipedia pages of politicians were modified for purposes of political spinning or libel.
Censorship of Wikipedia
That Wikipedia contains a lot of materials considered politically sensitive by some governments has led to its censorship in some countries, most notably in China. The site received positive coverage in China's state press in early 2004, but it was blocked on 3 June 2004 on the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Since then it has been reopened and reblocked repeatedly. There have been suggestions that Wikipedia has practiced self-censorship (自我審查) to accommodate the Chinese government's point of view.
