The quality of content is more important than the expertise of who contributes it. Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines.
Fixing links with unsupported characters
- The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia.
- Many devices and applications optimize or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata like geoinformation.
- In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.W 56 Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, becoming the third woman to ever receive the award.
- In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA.
- These ideas include “featured articles”, the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short “stub” articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.
- In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much “leftist bias”.
Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a “western cultural bias” (or “pro-western bias”) or “Eurocentric bias”, reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, “similar biases that are found in the ‘ivory tower’ of academic historiography”. In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appeared to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of vegas casino whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much “leftist bias”. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.
Nicholas Carr’s 2005 essay “The amorality of Web 2.0” criticizes websites with user-generated content (like Wikipedia) for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers’ going out of business, because “free trumps quality all the time”. The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially printed versions like Encyclopædia Britannica, which were unable to compete with a free alternative. The Talk page concerned a fictional article describing the unintended consequences of the release of a plastic-eating fungus to clean up an oil spill. In an April 2007 episode of the American television comedy The Office, office manager (Michael Scott) is shown relying on a hypothetical Wikipedia article for information on negotiation tactics to assist him in negotiating lesser pay for an employee. Another example can be found in “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence”, a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article “‘L.A. Law’ Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today”.
A 2013 study from Oxford University found that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tend to address broader, global issues. A notable discussion within the English Wikipedia community concerns the preference for national variety of the English language, particularly American English and British English. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%.
Accuracy of content
Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia’s inception. In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. The English Wikipedia’s three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad.
On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled “The Future of Wikipedia”, cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that “the number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years.” The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 The English Wikipedia has 7,118,730 articles, 50,949,695 registered editors, and 267,535 active editors. Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages. Under this system, new and unregistered users’ edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published. Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly 50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia content across its projects.
Internal research and operational development
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. This allows specifying the language (hereby ‘sl’ for Slovenian) of the interface messages that will be displayed when opening the page ‘Glavna stran’ in the Commons project. Featured articles are articles of the highest quality that can be found on Wikipedia. By replacing “en” with the code for another language, you can reach the Main Page of the wikipedia in that language, if it exists. BOXThe prefix “en” in the url is the for English language. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium.
Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page’s title or categorization, manipulate the article’s underlying code, or use images disruptively.W 24 In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views. According to the foundation, this growth is largely attributed to automated programs, or “scraper” bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use in training large language models and related applications. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.W 17
Language editions
- The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by “sharp” comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014.
- A study published by PLOS One in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world.
- Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).W 119 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999.
- Wikipedia’s content must conform with its policies, including being verifiable by published reliable sources.
There are currently 342 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). The results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. According to a 2009 study, there is “evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content”.
Content policies and guidelines
For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.W 45 In January 2025, the Arbitration Committee introduced the “balanced editing restriction”, which requires sanctioned users to devote only a third of their edits to articles related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict even when no misconduct rules have been violated. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only users with 10 edits that have an account that is four days old may create a new article.W 19 On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. Wikipedia editors also have the ability to create hyperlinks to chosen URLs, pointing to pages either within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, or elsewhere on the Web. Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors. The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia’s software makes it easy to reverse errors, and experienced editors watch and patrol bad edits. While the Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines, new editors do not need to be familiar with them before they start contributing. Wikipedia currently has more than sixty-six million articles in more than 300 languages, including 7,118,730 articles in English, with 267,535 active contributors in the past month. Written collaboratively by volunteers known as Wikipedians, Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with Internet access, except in limited cases in which editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia consists of freely editable content, with articles that usually contain numerous links guiding readers to more information.
Experienced editors are encouraged to not “bite” the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 33 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them.
Wikipedians
There are two broad types of bias, which are implicit (when a topic is omitted) and explicit (when a certain POV is over-represented in an article or by references). This systemic bias in editor demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia. A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage topics. Through its “Wikipedia Loves Libraries” program, Wikipedia has partnered with major public libraries such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to expand its coverage of underrepresented subjects and articles.
Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes, the influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources. Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any edition, at 7,118,741 as of January 2026.b It contains 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias,b although it lacks millions of articles found in other editions. The English Wikipedia is the primarya English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We can use localurl for a link to a project which uses the same string in the URL between the server name and the question mark ($wgScript, on Wikimedia “/w/index.php”), but not for links to other projects. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK.
Follow Us
A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. This pattern is attributed to the status of English as a global lingua franca, leading to contributions from many editors for whom English is a second language. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias.
The edition’s one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages. This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project. There is an external online converter for encoding custom URLs to mediawiki format.
WikiProjects and assessment
Statistical analyses suggest that the English Wikipedia committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.W 28 Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website’s policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus.
In November 2013, New York magazine stated, “Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis.” The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.W 7 Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia’s domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.W 8 Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name ,W 4 and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month. The encyclopedia is home to 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003).