Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia consisting of articles exclusively written by its users. Anyone can create an account and edit the entries, and thousands of people participate in the creation and maintenance of its content.

A Wikipedia arbitration council made up of 11 people (one absent from judging) has ruled to ban edits from URLs that come from the Church of Scientology. The unanimous decision comes after a number of deceptive edits were made to Scientology-related pages on the open-source encyclopedia.The Register: Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology (May 29, 2009)

On March 24, 2010, Wikipedia's European servers experienced overheating. This caused their DNS servers to malfunction, disabling access to wikipedia.orghttp://mashable.com/2010/03/24/wikipedia-is-down/

• Wikipedia offered the following comments on the sitution:

"Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/global-outage-cooling-failure-and-dns/

Wikipedia has reached cultural saturation. It has become a starting point for many a research project, and its vast breadth makes even obscure details readily available for a searcher. Just as many people learned to "Google" something to get results, the public at large has learned to look something up on Wikipedia to get quick and relatively reliable information on a wide variety of subjects, from American presidents to Pokemon characters.

According the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia, Wikipedia began as an offshoot of a project called Nupedia, which was a free English language online encyclopedia written by experts. The founders of Wikipedia are Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, who together established the publicly editable encyclopedia using a wiki format.

The main issues that Wikipedia has had to face are charges of bias and unreliability. The openly editable format leads some to believe the content on Wikipedia is unreliable, as anyone can edit the text to read anything they want. Wikipedia solves this problem by locking down hot button pages, such as George W. Bush, from editing, and by having a team of trusted editors check edits. They also rely on users to catch and report errors.

Wikipedia is free and doesn't run advertising, so it depends on donations, grants and gifts to operate. Since Wikimedia launched its fundraising campaign in November 2009, more than more than 125,000 donors have participated in raising a total of $6.2 million. The company's goal was to raise $6 million so that it can make it through this fiscal year which ends in June. Wikimedia is still accepting donations. Any monies received over the $6 million mark will be reserved for expenses during the next fiscal year.

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• Wired.com: Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology (May 29, 2009)

• The Independent: Wikipedia to stay free as readers rush to the rescue (January 3, 2009)

• Computer World: Wikipedia raises $6.2M needed for its operations (January 2, 2009)

• AMNews: Wikipedia often misses important drug facts (December 29, 2008)

• Washington Independent: Wikipedia: McCain's Newest ... Advisor? (August 12, 2008)

• ReadWriteWeb: Wikipedia Gets Published - Should Writers Get Paid? (May 6, 2008)

• The Economist: The battle for Wikipedia's soul (March 6, 2008)

• ABC News: Felon Became COO of Wikipedia Foundation (December 21, 2007)

• The Telegraph: Wikipedia clamps down on 'unreliable' editors (September 20, 2007)

• Bloomberg.com: "Wikipedia, YouTube Held Responsible for Civilization's Collapse"

• Macworld: "English Wikipedia Unblocked in China"

• Vallejo Times Herald: "Wikipedia Banned from UCSC Class"

• Washington Post: "Wikipedia's Help From the Hill" (2006)

• Yahoo! UK: Wikipedia COO was convicted felon

• Wikipedia: Wikipedia News | Press Coverage | Wikipedians in the News

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