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Wikipedia

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These learning resources aim at providing knowledge that all Wikipedia and Mediawiki users, authors and administrators should possess. It aims at answering questions such as:

  • How can wikis and Wikipedia as phenomenon be understood?
  • How to edit and administrate Wikipedia and Mediawiki sites?
  • How can students, teachers, librarians, journalists, etc, use and relate to Wikipedia and other wikis?
  • What are the main criticisms of Wikipedia?
  • What research exists related to Wikipedia as phenomenon?
  • What are the current wiki technology development trends?

About Wikipedia

See more at Wikipedia article on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a multilingual, wiki-based, free-content online encyclopedia project. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki, the Hawaiian word meaning quick, and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most of its articles to be edited by almost anyone with access to the website and is a free site for all types of ages. Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".

Wikipedia has more than fifty eight million articles in many languages, including more than 6 million articles in both the English-language version and the Cebuano-language version and more than two million in the German-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 18 of them have more than 50,000 articles. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity, and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top fifteen most visited sites, and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking the proper sources that, in the eyes of most "Wikipedians" (as Wikipedia's contributors call themselves), are necessary for an article to be considered "high quality". However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their articles on the natural sciences. This study was challenged by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., who described it as "fatally flawed".

Wikipedia and the Neutrality Principle

A precis of key ideas from Jose Van Dijck, who wrote a chapter on Wikipedia and the neutrality principle in her 2013 book, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford University Press).

Learning resources

The following is a list of learning resources that may be useful as course material on courses about Wikis and Wikipedia. The list is organized after resource type, and includes resources developed within this project and related Wikiversity projects as well as external links.

Syllabi

Assignments and exercises

Videos

These are recorded seminars, lectures, webinars and instructions videos related to Wikipedia:

Slides

See also: Commons:Category:Wikimedia_presentations_in_English and meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations.

These are slide show presentations, lecture notes and handouts related to Wikipedia:

Scientific publications

These are peer-reviewed academic papers related to Wikipedia, that students may review and use as references:

Text books

These text books may be used as course literature:

Glossaries

These glossares may serve as lists of terms that a student should understand after a course about Wikipedia:

Wikipedia articles

These are articles, essays and help pages available at en.wikipedia.org, that may be useful as course materials on a course about Wikipedia:

Case studies

Statistical sources

University level courses

Other courses, workshops, conferences and events

Other lists of learning resources

See also

See also other wikiversity resources and pages:

Wiki

Wikipedia

Search for Wikipedia on Wikipedia.

MediaWiki

Wikimedia

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