Wikipédia

Wikipédia (delivery /?wiki?pe:?dj?/) is one encyclopaedia free, free, universal and multilingual based on Internet. It is written by voluntary volunteers and is collaborativement based on one Web site (HTTP://fr.wikipedia.org/ for the version ) using technology Wiki blogists, which means that articles can there be added, supplemented or be modified by practically whoever.

This name is also referred to the more general project aiming at building a large free free encyclopaedia of rights. The project began it January 15 2001 in complement of the project Nupédia, it now is led, financed and managed by Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. It did not cease since growing in popularity,[ 1 ] and led to the creation of several other brothers projects Wiktionnaire, Wikibooks and Wikinews.

The articles of Wikipédia are regularly quoted in various media and by academies, which appreciates its free distribution and its edition of it, and its great extent of covered subjects. The editors are encouraged to pursue an official policy of " neutrality from point of view "whereby broad prospects are approached without wanting to determine a truth. Also, because of its opened nature, it vandalism and the inaccuracies are constant problems, and the statute of Wikipédia as a work of reference remain prone to controversies. One criticized it for its, his preference for the consensus rather than the attribution of appropriations, and his apparent lack of responsibility and authority when one compares it with other encyclopaedias.

There are approximately 200 editions of Wikipédia located by language (among them a hundred are active). The ten editions including/understanding more than 50 000 articles are published in, French,,, and. Its German edition was distributed on, and numbers its other editions is or was by various Web sites.

A presentation of Wikipédia intended for the media is available on the page Wikipédia:Press kit.

Synopsis

Significance of the name

The word Wikipédia was conceived from:

  • Wiki, which comes from wiki wiki, meaning rapid in hawaiien, but too éditable by transformation via
  • pédia, coming from paideia, meaning education in Greek.

Wikipédia suggest the idea of knowledge in perpetual renewal and, which require a constant update. By its origin, Wikipédia is female kind, but when the word indicates the project and the whole of the activity, it also gets busy with the masculine.

Essential characteristics

The Wikipédia project has three essential characteristics, which define together its niche on World Wide Web and make it single:

  • Firstly and above all, the Wikipédia project is the realization of one encyclopaedia, and not of one , one forum of discussion or one directory Web, etc. See what Wikipédia is not. Wikipédia is not it Wiktionnaire, but them outlines are accepted, good outlines containing only one brief description, with the manner of a dictionary.
  • The project is one wiki. A wikiwiki allows creation and the modification by any person of any page. Wikipédia is the first encyclopaedia general practitioner to be developed under this format. Whereas the Wikipédia project modified, for the needs to create an encyclopaedia, a great part of the surrounding original culture of WikiWikiWebs, it always preserves its Community aspects (managed and created by Wikipédia:The Community). The participants in Wikipédia create jointly and apply, of rules and recommendations to keep the project in a productive functioning order and clash.
  • The text of Wikipédia is reusable according to conditions' of (of English GNU Free License Documentation, whose name is also known in the shortened form GFDL). Thus, an individual or an organization can use the contents of Wikipédia, including commercially, while conforming under the terms of the free Licence of documentation GNU. See and Project:Copyright.

The characteristic more striking of Wikipédia, namely that each one can modify the encyclopaedia without requiring the least authorization, resulted in using the sentence It' S not has bug it' S has feature (It is not a bug, it is a functionality) like currency (Time magazine July 18 2005 quoting Jimbo Wales). It corresponds within the meaning of the traditional answer given to the new visitors very astonished to be able to modify a page, and who hurry most honestly to prevent of the world that they thus there have just discovered one bug.

History

Origin of the project

Wikipédia is supported by and Free Foundation Software (foundation for the free software) of . Stallman is one of the people who propagated the idea of the utility of a "universal free encyclopaedia" (see her test in line and English "The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource") before Wikipédia and Nupédia are not created.

Nupédia

Wikipédia is in the beginning resulting from Nupédia, a project ofencyclopaedia in founded free line in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and supported by the company Bomis (whose Jimmy Wales is itshareholder majority), which took part in the financial arrangement of the project and which engaged full-time Larry Sanger, under editor. The Nupédia encyclopaedia functioning with one, its progression appeared however slow and, in January 2001, because of the frustration caused by this slowness of progression, Larry Sanger proposed the creation of one wiki in order to increase the speed of development of the articles. This idea to apply the format wiki to work out an encyclopaedia germinated following a conversation that Larry Sanger had with the programmer Ben Kovitz, who explained the concept to him of wikiwiki at the time of a meal with San Diego, the morning of January 2 2001. Larry Sanger then proposed in Jimmy Wales to combine the potential of the format wiki to the installation of a more flexible encyclopaedia, which gave place to the creation of the Wikipédia encyclopaedia.

Wikipédia

Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipédia was born in English January 15 2001. The Wikipédia encyclopaedia French-speaking person, officially founded it March 23 2001, was as for it the first during in another language of this encyclopaedia which develops since in manner multilingual.

As from this moment, Larry Sanger worked parallel to the Nupédia encyclopaedia and with the Wikipédia encyclopaedia, for which it took part in the formulation of the majority of the policies of origin. Following the suppression in February 2002 budget of Bomis allocated with the remuneration of its work for Nupedia and Wikipédia, Larry Sanger has officially resigned on March 1 2002 of its title of editor as a chief of Nupédia and his functions of organizer as a chief of Wikipédia - functions which it then assumed on a purely voluntary basis. During the year following its departure, Nupédia ceased its activities because of the slowness of its progression (Nupédia was definitively closed it September 26 2003) and Wikipédia, it, continued on the contrary its expansion.

Consequently, the Wikipédia project operated by , using the rules and recommendations adapted in the course of time by the various contributors. June 20 2003, the Wikimédia Foundation, HTTP://wikimediafoundation.org, was created to manage and finance the various projects of Wikipédia. general payments of the Wikimédia Foundation were established in January 2004.

CD-Romanian : The realization of a version of Wikipédia on paper and CD-Romanian in August 2003 by Jimmy Wales.

Wikipédia in German language is sold on CD-Romanian since the second six-month period 2004. The figure symbolic system of the 10 000e CD-Romanian sold was crossed in April 2005.

Patronage : To face the increase in the number of articles and readers, the foundation Wikimedia in April 2005 an agreement made with Yahoo who will provide waiters located in Asia. (complete official statement)

Participants

Wikipédia is daily published by very many Net surfers called Wikipédiens coming from various places of the sphere.

There is not "chief" with the Wikipédia project as such. For thirteen months (as from January 2001), Larry Sanger was remunerated by Bomis (the company of which Jimmy Wales is the main thing shareholder), for its work of editor as a chief and organizer as a chief on anglophone Wikipédia, but with that it should be specified that the work which it before carried out for Nupédia (as from March 2000) has also integrated it into Wikipédia. Larry Sanger presented its resignation of Wikipédia and Nupédia it 1er March 2002. Current and last employees of Bomis take part or took part in the project, either on the encyclopaedia (it is the case of Tim Shell), or like developers (as for Jason Richey and Toan Vo).

On French-speaking Wikipédia, there never was of editor as a chief and the project is entirely managed by its voluntary participants. To contribute to it, it is enough to read the assistance for first steps and possibly to create an account.

Technical aspects

Parallel Wikipédia and its projects are WikiWikiWebs free. Developed originally by communities of free developers of software, Wikis are dynamic Web sites, of which any visitor can modify the page which it is reading. WikiWiki is much simpler than it HTML, it is enough to a few moments to learn it (two apostrophes to put in italic, three to boldface, two hooks for a bond). On Wiki, the limit between the visitor and the author tend to disappear. Created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, Wiki draws its name from the word hawaïen "WikiWiki", which means "quickly".

On Wikipédia, the participants add their contributions to those of the others, they correct the errors of other writers and work together on the difficult topics by respecting a neutrality from point of view. On Wiki, all the history of the contributions is always preserved. Thus, even in the presence of "vandal" (the nickname of the people which deteriorates the contents of a Wiki page), Wiki is not endangered. Wikipédia is currently largest Wiki of the world.

Wikipédia functions with the free software MediaWiki

Antecedents

The idea to gather the whole of human knowledge in the same place goes up with old library of Alexandria and of Pergame. As for the modern concept which incarnated by encyclopaedias, it emerged with Denis Diderot, and them encyclopedists XVIIIE century.

At the end of XIXE century, Belgians Henri The Fountain and Paul Otlet invent Universal decimal system and foresee a system that Otlet described as follows: "One can imagine the electric telescope, allowing to read at home books exposed in the room teleg of the large libraries, in the pages requested in advance. It will be the telephoned book. "

The idea to use an automated process going beyond the simple one impression of contents to build a more flexible encyclopaedia and more rich person can be found in the news ofH. G. Wells World Brain (1937), and in the futuristic vision of Vannevar Bush bond called Memex, in its article Have We May Think (1945). An important step was also taken with Ted Nelson and sound Xanadu project (1960).

With the development of, several people tried to develop encyclopaedias on Internet. The president of FSF insisted on the utility of one Universal encyclopaedia and free source of training in 1999. It commented on the creation of Wikipédia like an enthralling news and the FSF encourages everyone with to visit and contribute to the site.

Draft reports

Wikipédia is occasionally compared with the collaboratifs projects in line following:

  • : a project of encyclopaedia (also a Wikimedia project);
  • Everything2 who is a more general practitioner and particularly does not seek to build an encyclopaedia; its contents are also under licence copyleft ;
  • Disinfopedia : a bearing project on propaganda ;
  • Consumerium : a project intended to provide to the consumer information on the products, and to increase the capacity of the consumer in a market economy;
  • : version parallel and independent of;
  • Wikinations.Be : an encyclopaedia practises of Belgium;
  • Wikinatons : an encyclopaedia practises of the citizen;
  • Ekopedia : a treating practical project of encyclopaedia of the alternative techniques of life, in particular in terms of nature conservancy. Ekopedia is also based on the software MediaWiki but is not a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Different Wikipédias

Wikipédia currently exists in approximately 200 languages. Mid-October 2005, eight encyclopaedias had more than 100 000 articles, thirty-and-a laid out of more than 10 000 articles and the four versions which comprise the most articles were English Wikipédia (776 000 articles), in German (305 000 articles), in French (177 000 articles) and in Japanese (148 000 articles).

Censure

In , Wikipédia is regularly censured by the government which blocks the access to all the Net surfers, as from October 19 2005.

To download the data base

Data of Wikipédia (present in one ), all confused languages, can be downloaded from HTTP://download.wikipedia.org

Hierarchical organization of information

Sites re-using the French-speaking contents of Wikipédia

The contents of Wikipédia can be copied and modified subject to the conditions envisaged by .

Some of the sites re-using the French-speaking contents of Wikipédia are very attentive with the respect of the free Licence of documentation GNU, whereas other sites provide the obligatory mentions with an obvious unwillingness (mentions hardly readable for example, or absence of bond towards French-speaking Wikipédia). Lastly, certain sites use the contents of Wikipédia in an illegal way, by not quoting the sources or by putting the contents under copyright.

For a detailed list of these sites, to see Wikipédia:List sites re-using the French-speaking contents of Wikipédia.

See too Wikipédia:Mirror sites of Wikipédia.

Promotion table of Wikipédia French-speaking

Month/year No. Articles
(official) 		No. Articles
> 2 KB 		Size bases
data 		No. of contributors
> 10 contributions 		No. visits
by day
September 2003 17 K 15% 29 Mo 305 12 K
October 2003 18 K 15% 31 Mo 352 13 K
November 2003 20 K 16% 36 Mo 431 16 K
December 2003 22 K 17% 41 Mo 488 12 K
January 2004 26 K 17% 47 Mo 546 18 K
February 2004 28 K 18% 52 Mo 652 23 K
March 2004 32 K 19% 61 Mo 773 30 K
April 2004 35 K 20% 68 Mo 852 33 K
May 2004 38 K 21% 76 Mo 940 28 K
June 2004 42 K 22% 85 Mo 1074 26 K
July 2004 46 K 23% 96 Mo 1210 26 K
August 2004 51 K 23% 109 Mo 1349 26 K
September 2004 56 K 24% 121 Mo 1479 29 K
October 2004 60 K 24% 133 Mo 1588 38 K
November 2004 66 K 25% 149 Mo 1869 ?
December 2004 73 K 25% 166 Mo 2178 ?
January 2005 79 K 25% 182 Mo 2409 ?
February 2005 88 K 24% 203 Mo 2588 ?
March 2005 96 K 24% 223 Mo 2809 ?
April 2005 104 K 24% 243 Mo 3032 ?
May 2005 113 K 24% 265 Mo 3344 ?
June 2005 124 K 25% 294 Mo ? ?
July 2005 142 K ? ? ? ?


Saturdays April 23 2005, Wikipédia crossed the bar symbolic system of 100 000 articles ! And exceeded the 150 000 it August 18 2005.

More information in Sitemap

Associated projects

See too

To follow wikipédia:

Bibliography

  • Wikis of Jerome Delacroix (a chapter is devoted to Wikipédia), 200 pages, editions m2 Eds, 2005, ISBN 2952051445

Selection of articles on Wikipedia

HTTP://www.nouvo.ch/h-138


 

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