The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Wikipedia:
Descriptions of Wikipedia
Reference work – compendium of information, usually of a specific type, compiled in a book for ease of reference. That is, the information is intended to be quickly found when needed. Reference works are usually referred to for particular pieces of information, rather than being read from beginning to end. The writing style used in these works is informative; the authors avoid use of the first person, and emphasize facts. Encyclopedia – type of reference work or compendium holding a comprehensive summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. Glossary of Library Terms. Riverside City College, Digital Library/Learning Resource Center. Retrieved on: November 17.2007. Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries, which are usually accessed alphabetically by article name. Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries. Online encyclopedia – large database of useful information, accessible via the World Wide Web. Database – organized collection of data. The data is typically organized to model aspects of reality in a way that supports processes requiring information. For example, modelling the availability of rooms in hotels in a way that supports finding a hotel with vacancies. Online database – database accessible from a network, including from the Internet (such as on a web page). Website – collection of related web pages containing images, videos, or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet address known as a Uniform Resource Locator. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web. Wiki – website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often developed and used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and note services. The software can also be used for personal notetaking. Community – group of interacting people with social cohesion, who may share common values. Community of action – community in which participants endeavor collaboratively to bring about change. Community of interest – community of people who share a common interest or passion. These people exchange ideas and thoughts about the given passion, but may know (or care) little about each other outside of this area. The common interest on Wikipedia is knowledge. Community of purpose – community that serves a functional need, smoothing the path of the member for a limited period surrounding a given activity. For example, researching a topic on Wikipedia.org, buying a car on autobytel.com, or antique collectors on icollector.com or individual. Virtual community – social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Online community – virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted number of people can initiate posts, such as Weblogs. Wiki community – users, especially the editors, of a particular wiki.
Implementation of Wikipedia Structure of Wikipedia List of Wikipedias – Wikipedia is implemented in many languages. As of April 2018, there were 304 Wikipedias, of which 294 are active. Logo of Wikipedia – unfinished globe constructed from jigsaw pieces, with some pieces missing at the top, inscribed with glyphs from many different writing systems. Articles – written works published in a print or electronic medium. Each Wikipedia is divided into many articles, with each article focusing on a particular topic. Content management on Wikipedia – processes for the collection, managing, and publishing of information on Wikipedia Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia – opposing philosophies of editors of Wikipedia concerning the appropriate scope of the encyclopedia, and the appropriate point for a topic to be included as an encyclopedia article or be "deleted". Notability in English Wikipedia – metric used to determine topics meriting a dedicated encyclopedia article. It attempts to assess whether a topic has "gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time" as evidenced by significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic. Reliability of Wikipedia – Wikipedia is open to anonymous and collaborative editing, so assessments of its reliability usually include examinations of how quickly false or misleading information is removed. An early study conducted by IBM researchers in 2003, two years following Wikipedia's establishment, found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly—so quickly that most users will never see its effects" and concluded that Wikipedia had "surprisingly effective self-healing capabilities". Vandalism on Wikipedia – the act of editing the project in a malicious manner that is intentionally disruptive. Vandalism includes the addition, removal, or other modification of the text or other material that is either humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, spam or promotion of a subject, or that is of an offensive, humiliating, or otherwise degrading nature. There are various measures taken by Wikipedia to prevent or reduce the amount of vandalism. Computer technology that makes Wikipedia work: Hardware Computers – general purpose devices that can be programmed to carry out sets of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. A computer that is used to host server software is called a "server". It takes many servers to make Wikipedia available to the world. These servers are run by the WikiMedia Foundation. Software – Wikipedia is powered by the following software on WikiMedia Foundation's computers (servers). It takes all of these to make Wikipedia pages available on the World Wide Web: Operating systems used on WikiMedia Foundation's servers: Ubuntu Server – used on all Wikipedia servers except those used for image file storage Solaris – used on Wikipedia's image file storage servers MediaWiki – main web application that makes Wikipedia work. It is a free web-based wiki software application developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), written in PHP, that is used to run all of WMF's projects, including Wikipedia. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it. Content storage – Wikipedia's content (it's articles and other pages) are stored in MariaDB databases. WikiMedia Foundation's wikis are grouped into clusters, and each cluster is served by several MariaDB servers, in a single-master configuration. Distributed object storage – distributed objects are software modules that are designed to work together, but reside either in multiple computers connected via a network. One object sends a message to another object in a remote machine to perform some task. Ceph – a free and open-source software-defined storage platform that provides object storage. Swift – a distributed and consistent object store. Proxy servers – act as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server and the proxy server evaluates the request as a way to simplify and control its complexity. Proxies were invented to add structure and encapsulation to distributed systems. Today, most proxies are web proxies, facilitating access to content on the World Wide Web. The proxy servers used for Wikipedia are: For serving up HTML pages – Squid and Varnish caching proxy servers in front of Apache HTTP Server. Apache processes requests via HTTP, the basic network protocol used to distribute information on the World Wide Web. For serving up image files – Squid and Varnish caching proxy servers in front of Sun Java System Web Server DNS proxies – WikiMedia Foundation's DNS proxy servers run PowerDNS. It is a DNS server program that runs under Unix (including Ubuntu). DNS stands for "domain name system". Load balancing – the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources. Linux Virtual Server (LVS) – Wikipedia uses LVS on commodity servers to load-balance incoming requests. LVS is also used as an internal load balancer to distribute MediaWiki and Lucene back-end requests. PyBal – Wikimedia Foundation's own system for back-end monitoring and failover. Caching Memcached – Wikipedia uses Memcached for caching of database query and computation results. For full-text search – Wikipedia uses Lucene, with extensive customization contributed by Robert Stojnic. Wikimedia configuration files Setting up Wikipedia on a home computer Downloading Wikipedia's database (all article text) Installing MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia)
Wikipedia community Community of Wikipedia – loosely-knit network of volunteers, sometimes known as "Wikipedians", who make contributions to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. A hierarchy exists whereby certain editors are elected to be given greater editorial control by other community members. Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) – panel of editors elected by the Wikipedia community that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between editors of the online encyclopedia. It acts as the court of last resort for disputes among editors. The Signpost – on-line community-written and community-edited newspaper, covering stories, events and reports related to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation sister projects.
Viewing Wikipedia off-line Kiwix – free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia foundation as well as public domain texts from the Project Gutenberg. XOWA – open-source application written primarily in Java by anonymous developers, intended for users who wish to run their own copy of Wikipedia, or any other compatible Wiki offline without an internet connection. XOWA is compatible with Microsoft Windows, OSX, Linux and Android.
Diffusion of Wikipedia Diffusion – process by which a new idea or new product is accepted by the market. The rate of diffusion is the speed that the new idea spreads from one consumer to the next. In economics it is more often named "technological change". Diffusion of innovations – process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. List of Wikipedias – Wikipedia has spread around the world, being made available to people in their native tongues. As of June 2023, there were 320 Wikipedias.
Websites that use Wikipedia Books LLC – publishes print-on-demand paperback and downloadable compilations of English texts and documents from open knowledge sources such as Wikipedia. DBpedia – project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. Wikipediavision – site that shows in semi-realtime where anonymous edits to Wikipedia are originating from.
Websites that mirror Wikipedia Answers.com Bing Facebook Reference.com TheFreeDictionary.com Wapedia
Wikipedia derived encyclopedias Books LLC VDM Publishing Veropedia WikiPilipinas WikiReader
Parodies of Wikipedia