On January 15th, Wikipedia, the web-based, collaborative encyclopedia celebrates its tenth anniversary. The website that began with a “Hello world” sentence written by Jimmy Wales, the founder, has now 17 million of articles in hundred of languages, and 4 hundred million visitors per month. Although, this knowledge base concentrates a great amount of information, its leaders believe, it remains work to be done.
The directors of Wikipedia, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation -a nonprofit, charitable, organization that operates Wikipedia, and Mr. Wales, co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia, said in a New York Times article ("Wikipedia Marks 10 Years of Edit-It-Yourself" Thur.13 Jan. 2011) that the website will try to diversify the profile of its editors.
Today, 80 percent of Wikipedia editors are well educated, twenty-something male with a technical background, said Mr. Wales; thus, there is a tendency to stress science topics to the detriment of the humanities. Therefore, Wikipedia leaders will seek to recruit more women and older people, and will try to balance the expertise of collaborators.
In addition to the effort to diversify, executives want to open Wikipedia to more languages (20 percent of its articles are in English). In a special message in which Mr. Wales thanked editors for their contribution to the base of information and the readers for engaging with ideas and knowledge, he made a global call to action.
“Even though we’ve got millions of articles, even though we’re in hundreds of languages, there’s still a lot of work to do. So, I want everybody out there, if you have never edited on Wikipedia, try it. Click on edit. You see some problem, fix it for us. We would really appreciate it. Well, happy birthday, Wikipedia!” concluded Mr. Wales.
An attempt to improve the quality of its articles, Wikipedia signed a partnership with 16 universities (Harvard and Georgetown are among them). Professors who agreed to participate, will teach their classes how to write encyclopedia entries, with complete footnotes.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia with the help of volunteers across the world is organizing events and online activities to commemorate the day. To find the events that are happening in your city, to organize an event or to collaborate with a design concept, go to: http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page#Celebrate
Wikipedia is a popular general reference work on the Internet that ranked eighth among all websites on Alexa Internet, Inc. The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
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