Wikipedia Case

3. How Wikipedia Works

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be freely edited by anyone, whose name is a combination of “wiki”, a technology for creating collaborative content, and “encyclopedia”, a collection of concise but detailed information on all branches of knowledge. Wikipedia depends on users to generate suggestions for changes. To understand how that worked in practice, it is important to understand the editing process and how this affects the content.

Open-source Licensing

Most images and other content in Wikipedia are covered by the GNU free documentation license, which ensured the content would remain freely distributable and reproducible. Wikipedia believes the site is organized in a way that all errors would be corrected given enough eyes. In other words, more review leads to improve an entry, as following Linus’ Law: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. This is the Wikipedia’s philosophy shared among a community of volunteers.

The Community of Wikipedians

Wikipedia has a variety of volunteers ranged from mere users to dedicated contributors called Wikipedians. Wikipedians are only a few thousand, an elite group who controlled the bulk of editing such as deleting, restoring, protecting pages, and blocking users for violating policy. Content is generated by a combination of devoted contributors and a diverse group of users. Even if some edits are legitimate, well written contributions, they will be scrutinized by other users and added to or changed until a consensus is reached among Weakipedians. Wikipedia heavily depends on many volunteer contributors devoting themselves to limiting the damage from destructive behavior such as vandalizing and prank.

Policies & Guidelines

Content on Wikipedia is required to be three things: written from a neutral point of view, verifiable, and not original research.

Having a neutral point of view is central to the encyclopedic style that is expected of...