ウィキペディア
Wikipedia is an international, open content, collaboratively developed encyclopedia found at http://wikipedia.org/. As of January 2003, it covers a vast spectrum of subjects and has over 100,000 articles in English as well as about 37,000 articles in other languages.
The project started in English on January 15, 2001, and projects to build Wikipedia in other languages are very active.
主な特徴
There are three essential characteristics of the Wikipedia project, which together define its niche on the World Wide Web and make it unique:
- First and foremost, the Wikipedia project is self-consciously an encyclopedia. That means, that it covers human knowledge in depth and in breadth and is not a dictionary, online discussion forum, or similar. See also What Wikipedia is not.
- The project is also essentially and self-consciously a wiki, which allows for general public authorship and editing of any page. Wikipedia is the first serious general encyclopedia to be developed using a wiki system. While Wikipedia has altered much of the original culture which surrounds WikiWikiWebs for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia, it continues to retain the community-managed and -built aspects of them.
- Also essential to the project and its success is the fact that it is open content. Open content text and media are licensed by the copyright holder to the general public, permitting anyone to redistribute and alter the text free of charge, and guaranteeing that no one will be able to restrict access to amended versions of the content. The participants' understanding that their efforts will be freely distributable is one of the main incentives they have to participate. Wikipedia uses the copyleft license GFDL; see Wikipedia:Copyrights for the details.
Wikipedia, like Nupedia (another free encyclopedia project), is supported by free software exponent Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation; Stallman is one of the people who articulated the usefulness of a "free universal encyclopedia" before Wikipedia and Nupedia were founded (see his essay online, The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource).
Some drawbacks of the wide open nature of Wikipedia are inevitable. For example, in articles on topics that are unfamiliar to most of the contributors, the accuracy and neutrality are questionable.
方針
Wikipedia's participants commonly follow, and enforce, a few basic policies that seem essential to keeping the project running smoothly and productively. The following are just a few of those policies; for more information, please see Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines.
First, because there are a huge variety of participants of all ideologies, and from around the world, Wikipedia is committed to making its articles as unbiased as possible. The aim is not to write articles from a single objective point of view -- this is a common misunderstanding of the policy -- but rather, to fairly and sympathetically present all views on an issue. See neutral point of view page for further explanation, and for a very lengthy discussion.
Second, there are a number of important article naming conventions with which participants should familiarize themselves.
Third, Wikipedians use so-called "talk" pages to discuss changes to the text, rather than discussing the changes within the text itself. See the page about talk pages as well as the editing policy page. Concerns which seem to span many articles may require a more general treatment at Meta-Wikipedia which tries to track what is going on here.
Fourth, there are a number of kinds of entries which are generally discouraged, because they do not, strictly speaking, constitute encyclopedia articles. See what Wikipedia is not.
Fifth, there are a variety of rules that have been proposed and which have varying amounts of support within the Wikipedia community. The most widely supported rule is: "If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business." It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that the wiki is as well-disciplined and good-natured as it is. See the rules to consider page for more information.
Personnel
Wikipedia has been built by hundreds of volunteer scholars, hobbyists, students, and generally knowledgeable people from around the world who happened to show up at the website and who, seeing the activity and the ease of article-creation, felt inspired to donate some of their knowledge. Participants in the project are called Wikipedians. Numbers of participants have dramatically increased since its inception, and the number of highly educated participants is growing as well.
There is no editor-in-chief per se. The two people who founded Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales (CEO of the small Internet company Bomis, Inc.) and Larry Sanger, like to think of themselves as participants who are charged with seeing to it that the project does not stray from the path on which it is already travelling.
For the first years (and a few months) of Wikipedia's existence, Larry was a paid employee. His job was to oversee Wikipedia (and Nupedia); with the advice of everyone, it was his responsibility to make final, fair decisions on issues where community consensus could not be reached. Funding ran out for his position, leading to his resignation, but he still contributes occasionally.
Jimmy and Wikipedians as a whole have taken over some of Larry's former responsibilities. Other current and past Bomis employees who have done some work on the encyclopedia include Tim Shell, one of the co-founders of Bomis, as well as programmers Jason Richey and Toan Vo.
歴史
Wikipedia had its origin in a conversation between two old Internet friends, Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief of Nupedia, and Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and polymath, on the evening of January 2, 2001, in San Diego, California. Kovitz was a Ward's Wiki regular at the time (and may still be). When Kovitz explained the basic wiki concept to Sanger over dinner, Sanger immediately saw that a wiki would be an excellent format whereby a more open, less formal encyclopedia project could be pursued. For months prior to this, Sanger and his boss, Jimmy Wales, president and CEO of Bomis, Inc., had been discussing various ways to supplement Nupedia with a more open, complementary project.
So it did not take much for Sanger to persuade Wales to set up a wiki for Nupedia. Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10. There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers, however, to making Nupedia closely associated with a website in the wiki format. Therefore, the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own address, Wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now humorously called "Wikipedia Day" by some Wikipedians). The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) was donated by Wales.
The project has received large numbers of participants from being mentioned, three times, on the tech website Slashdot -- there were two minor mentions March 5 and March 30, and then a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited techology abd culture website Kuro5hin on July 26. Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there has been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially from Google, which alone daily sends hundreds of new visitors to the site.
The project passed 1,000 pages around February 12, 2001, and 10,000 articles around September 7. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created -- a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On August 30, 2002, the number of 40,000 articles was reached. The rate of growth has more or less steadily increased since the inception of the project, except for some software-induced slow-downs as will be explained below.
Until January 2002, Sanger was employed by Bomis as editor in chief of Nupedia and the unofficial leader of Wikipedia. Funding ran out, and Sanger resigned from both positions in March 2002. He still contributes to the project and posts on the project's mailing list.
In February 2002, the very active Spanish Wikipedia lead by Edgar Enyedy suddenly broke off and established their own Enciclopedia Libre at the University of Seville (http://enciclopedia.us.es/); the stated reasons were fear of commercial advertising and lack of control. In October of the same year, an effort led by Wikipedia participant Daniel Mayer ("maveric149") and others was made to reunite the projects, but the participants of Enciclopedia Libre voted against reunification before Wikipedia could offer a reunification proposal. The users of Enciclopedia Libre did, however, leave open the possibility for a future merge and expressed an interest in maintaining lines of communication. This episode also sparked a great deal of discussion about the role of the non-English Wikipedias and has led to several changes and planned changes wanted by the non-English Wikipedia communities.
The particular version of wiki software that originally ran Wikipedia was UseModWiki, written by Clifford Adams. In January 2002, Wikipedia began running on PHP wiki software, which used an underlying MySQL database, added many features and was specifically written for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske. After a while, the site started to slow down to an extent where editing became almost impossible; several rounds of modifications to the software provided only temporary relief. Then Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the software from scratch; the new version, a major improvement, has been running since July 2002.
The project has occasionally been visited by "vandals" who remove articles or post inappropriate content. Usually, these vandalisms are undone quickly by the regulars, but repeated vandalisms of the project's main page led to the protection of this page so that it could only be changed by administrators.
In March 2002, the user "24" (named after his internet address) began to make a large number of idiosyncratic left-leaning and controversial edits; heated discussions with him led to what some described as threats, and what most perceived as personal attacks and insults. Jimbo Wales banned 24 from the site in April 2002 after lengthy debate on the mailing list. "Helga", who had persistently made right-wing controversial edits to pages related to German history and had been the cause of much lament by Wikipedia's historians, was banned in September 2002, again after discussion on the mailing list.
In August 2002, shortly after Jimbo Wales had stated that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
In the same summer, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the Wikipedia Manual of Style and the Policies and guidelines documents.
Derek Ramsey ("Ram-Man") started in October 2002 to use a "bot", or program, to add a large number of articles about U.S. towns; these articles were automatically generated from census data. Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics. See Wikipedia:Bots for a description and Wikipedia talk:Bots for a discussion of the pros and cons of this approach.
In December 2002, the sister project Wiktionary was created; it aims to produce a dictionary and thesaurus of the words in all languages. It runs on the same server as Wikipedia and uses the same software.
In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was installed. The code had been written by Taw.
On January 22, 2003, Wikipedia was again slashdotted after having reached the 100,000 article milestone. Two days later, the German language Wikipedia, http://de.wikipedia.org/, the largest non-English version passed the 10,000 article milestone.
For further history, see the archives of the Wikipedia Announcements page as well as the mailing list archives as well as m:History of Wikipedia.
Antecedents
The idea to collect all of the world's knowledge within arm's reach, under a single roof goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon.
The idea of the printed encyclopedia goes back to just a little before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. Major university libraries are excellent museums of monumental encyclopedic endeavors in various countries. Frequently found titles are the English Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Spanish Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada, the German Meyer's Konversationslexikon and Brockhaus. See encyclopedia for more information.
The idea to use automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' short story of a World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush' future vision of the microfilm based Memex, As We May Think (1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960).
The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the early 1990s. One branch of such activity is the digitization of old printed encyclopediae. In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), but disagreement about the methods halted the work after the first volume. In 2002, ASCII text of all 28 volumes was published on http://1911encyclopedia.org/ by another source; a copyright claim was added to the materials, but it probably has no legal validity. Other digitization projects have made progress on other titles. One example is Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) digitized by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
The other and more interesting branch is the creation of new, free contents on a volunteer basis. In 1991, the participants of the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.douglas-adams started a project to produce a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a fictional encyclopedia used in the works of Douglas Adams. It became known as Project Galactic Guide. Although it originally aimed to contain only real, factual articles, policy was changed to allow and encourage semi-real and unreal articles as well. Project Galactic Guide contains over 1700 articles, but no new articles have been added since 2000.
In 1993, a project called Interpedia was being discussed; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and died; it was taken over by the explosion of the web and the emergence of high-quality search engines.
同様の計画
Wikipedia is occasionly compared to the following collaborative projects:
- Nupedia, a slow moving project to produce a free peer reviewed encyclopedia.
- Everything2 has a wider range and does not exclusively focus on building an encyclopedia; its contents are not available under a copyleft license.
- H2G2, a collection of sometimes humorous encyclopedia articles, based on an idea from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Articles are also not freely modifiable.
Prospective participants
If you would like to participate and contribute to Wikipedia, please start with the gentle introduction at 新規参加者の方、ようこそ. You may also want to have a look at the Wikipedia FAQ collection.