WWikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.
W#1Lib1Ref is a Wikipedia campaign inviting every librarian on Earth to participate in the online encyclopedia project, specifically improving articles by adding citations.
WThe Henryk Batuta hoax was a hoax perpetrated on the Polish Wikipedia from November 2004 to February 2006, the main element of which was a biographical article about a nonexistent socialist revolutionary, Henrik Batuta.
WBomis was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.
WCitizendium is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
WSince the launch of Wikipedia in January 2001, a number of controversies have occurred. Wikipedia's open nature, in which anyone can edit most articles, has led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing, the amount of vandalism, and the accuracy of information on the project. The media have covered a number of controversial events and scandals related to Wikipedia and its parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Common subjects of coverage include articles containing false information, public figures and corporations editing articles for which they have a serious conflict of interest, paid Wikipedia editing and hostile interactions between Wikipedia editors and public figures.
WCrnogorska Enciklopedija was an internet encyclopedia project written in Montenegrin, which existed from 2006 to 2008. It was started by the IT Association of Montenegro in 2006 as an experimental project, with the goal of providing a base for a future Montenegrin Wikipedia. As of late 2008, it is nonfunctional. It used the MediaWiki software, running at version 1.6.8, and did not carry advertising.
WDBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to semantically query relationships and properties of Wikipedia resources, including links to other related datasets. In 2008, Tim Berners-Lee described DBpedia as one of the most famous parts of the decentralized Linked Data effort.
WEnciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.
WThe Essjay controversy centered on a Wikipedia editor named Ryan Jordan, who fabricated a largely false profile under which he worked for two years and rose to levels of administrative trust within the organization. Under the username "Essjay", Jordan was presented as a university professor of religion by The New Yorker, which later acknowledged it did not know his real name. The controversy came to involve Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales who, after initially defending Jordan, eventually asked for his resignation.
WOn 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux glass shatter obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.
WIn July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) sent an email letter warning of possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement to Derrick Coetzee, an editor/administrator of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
WNupedia was an English-language, web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia, but Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by committee, with experts to predefine the rules, and it approved only 21 articles in its first year, compared to Wikipedia posting 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year. Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to volunteer content. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 25 approved articles that had completed its review process, and another 150 articles were in progress. Wales preferred Wikipedia's easier posting of articles, while Sanger preferred the peer-reviewed approach used by Nupedia and later founded Citizendium in 2006 as an expert-reviewed alternative to Wikipedia.
WOn January 18, 2012, a series of coordinated protests occurred against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These followed smaller protests in late 2011. Protests were based on concerns that the bills, intended to provide more robust responses to copyright infringement arising outside the United States, contained measures that could possibly infringe online freedom of speech, websites, and Internet communities. Protesters also argued that there were insufficient safeguards in place to protect sites based upon user-generated content.
WSteven Pruitt is an American Wikipedia editor who holds the highest number of edits made on the English Wikipedia. With over three million edits and more than 35,000 articles created, he was named as one of the 25 most important influencers on the Internet by Time magazine in 2017. Pruitt edits under the pseudonym "Ser Amantio di Nicolao," a reference to a minor character in Giacomo Puccini's opera Gianni Schicchi. He fights systemic bias on Wikipedia to promote the inclusion of women via the Women in Red project.
WBlocking of Wikipedia in Russia is an event that occurred in August 2015, in which some selected articles of Wikipedia were blocked in Russia.
WFrom 29 April 2017 to 15 January 2020, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey. On 29 April 2017, Turkish authorities blocked online access to all its language editions throughout the country. The restrictions were imposed by Turkish Law No. 5651, due to the English version's article on state-sponsored terrorism, where Turkey was described as a sponsor country for ISIL and Al-Qaeda, which Turkish courts viewed as a public manipulation of mass media. Requests by the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority to edit several articles to comply with Turkish law were not acted on.
WThe Universal Edit Button is a browser extension that provides a green pencil icon in the address bar of a web browser that indicates that a web page on the World Wide Web is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates that there is a web feed available. Clicking the icon opens the edit window. It was invented by a collaborative team of wiki enthusiasts, including Ward Cunningham, Jack Herrick, and many others.
WOn 12 January 2019, the main telecommunications provider in Venezuela, CANTV, issued a block against the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. All of CANTV's 1.5 million users were affected by the decision. The block was lifted on 18 January 2019, following widespread criticism against the state-owned company, claiming it was in response to the Venezuelan presidential crisis.
WJimmy Donal Wales is an American-British Internet entrepreneur. He is also a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.
WIn May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
WThe Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia is a 2009 popular history book by new media researcher and writer Andrew Lih.
WWikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Wikipedia. Its members have brought information about Wikipedia's controversies to the attention of the media. The site was founded in March 2012 by users of Wikipedia Review, another site critical of Wikipedia.