Thursday, April 2, 2009

Wikipedia

What in the world is the encyclopedia called Wikipedia all about?????????


Wikipedia can be defined as a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project.

What does that mean?

    Well, to start off with, Wiki means "a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki).

    A wiki  is a webpage with layers or tabs. There are four tabs called article, discussion, view source, and history.

The article page is where the contributor submits the article. The discussion page is the talk page where discussions take place between the contributors of the article page. The view source page is the protection page for the articles. The history page shows the revision history.

    This makes the Wikipedia Encyclopedia unique in that it allows anyone to contribute information. Yes, this means anyone in the World that has Internet access can contribute.

    According to Wikipedia, this encyclopedia is "written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world; anyone can edit it. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites,  attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. As of today, there are 2,820,558 articles in English."     

    The important part of contributing is that the contributor needs to follow the five pillars of character which are:

        Wikipedia is an encyclopedia,

        Wikipedia must has a neutral point of view,

        Wikipedia is free content,

        Wikipedia has a code of conduct, and

        Wikipedia does not have firm rules.

 



 

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