man,
this dude seriously wanted to reply to some peeps. I couldn't read that whole post if I tried, I got about 10% of the way maybe.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=9877727&postcount=425
Wow... That is long
(No TWSS's! )
Does anybody else just had a case of long post phobia?
more than long...that's what I call multi quoting
nrfitchett4 said:
once again, you have to search for an update instead of it being sent to you to install. How many regular folks go looking for tech updates for their devices?
I think you said it better than I could...
I hope your apps are better than your spelling....
1. As already told to you, yes there is 3d gaming. There is also already quite a lot of good games on wp7. The only game I ever played on android when playing with it on my hd7 was angry birds. Even engadget which is all ios and android love these days admits that android has the worst gaming experience
2. Where is this long list of bugs. For a first release of a mobile OS, I would say they did quite well. Marketplace is about the only constant bug I read about.
3. The point of working out of the box, means, I don't have to hack/root/unlock my phone to make it work as smooth as the iphone. They set the standard for how a phone should work. Smooth as silk, with misleading load screens that take your mind off the fact it takes time for apps to open. A stock winmo phone has never been smooth. Some android phones are smooth out of the box, quite a few aren't. I was shocked that there are lag problems on the vibrant. To get it to work as a 1ghz phone should work, you have to root and install a lag fix.
How many times a day does your phone freeze, or lag? I have only reset my phone 3 times in over a month, all due to marketplace crashes. And it boots in under 30 seconds. Winmo can't do that.
I agree. I didn't get into this community because I wanted to at first. It was because I had to. To make my moto q9c, or my tp2, or my hd2 run decently, I had to come here and ppcgeeks, and spend hours reading threads, just to make my phone not embarrass me in the iphone crowd. Nothing better than trying to show off something as well made as the weatherpanel program for the hd2 and have your phone lock up for you, then take over a minute to reset, requiring you to take off the back cover.
I appreciate everything I have learned on here, but I won't miss having to tweak my phone to make it work.
Those of us who paid attention, knew it wasn't going to be like winmo. That old system functionality included way too many problems which is why MS had to start over.
Name one game besides angry birds that is better than a wp7 game...
You really don't get it. The majority of users:
1. Don't need access to files on their phones. As long as a program that needs the file can find it, then so be it. I don't care where wp7 puts that file. How many times have you needed a file on your computer, but didn't know where it got saved and had to search for it??? If I need to carry files, I have 3 or 4 usb sticks laying around.
2. I think you are the only person on this 40 page thread that says android has a faster UI than wp7.
3. Just because you think something is basic functionality doesn't make it so.
Most people don't care about file explorer, or total multi tasking, or using your phone as a mass storage device, or tethering.
They care about streaming music (zune), facebook (people tab gives you all updates in one spot), twitter (beezz is quickly becoming my favorite app), streaming videos (zune auto converts that for you), games (xbox live is kinda gimmicky right now, but the games are better then what I had on winmo and what android offers), texting (all phones do this, wp7 does this without lag, you know, the opposite of winmo), taking pics (auto saves them to skydrive, 2 presses of the screen to upload to facebook, email, text them).
1. Since I'm not tweaking my phone, I don't need 90% of the files I needed on my hd2.
2. Haven't had a problem downloading files, pressing on the file gives me the option to save.
3. If the app needs to access the file, it will be able to. Can you give an example of what you are even talking about?
4. And isn't that coming soon? I think you have a better argument with flash support, but oh wait, most android devices still don't have 2.2.
5. It's called zune, does the same thing.
6. What do you mean? If I'm typing something in office, leave and come back, it's still right there where I left it.
7. Can't argue that, though do I really need 15 apps open in the background? How's the battery life on android???
8. Didn't IOS just add that? Didn't hurt their sales the last 4 years.
Exactly. Flashing my wife's and son's hd2's, I noticed just how much lag there really is on winmo, even with a great custom ROM. There's a reason that spb MS is so successful and why MS 5.0 is also going to be on android. Out of necessity.
Really? I don't even have to ever connect my phone to my pc except:
1. First time it syncs with zune
2. Any updates to the OS from MS
All other syncing can be done over wifi and it will automatically happen.
I'm guessing you had to root and install the lag fix on your vibrant???
Umm, T-mobile offered all phones for a penny on father's day, android included. Carriers only care about getting you under contract with big data plan prices. That is where they make their money.
1. You are a 62 year old man with dexter's laboratory as your avatar? Kinda creepy
2. If that full range of functionality on winmo was such a selling point, why is MS bleeding market share???
What you need to understand is that the buyer's of today and tomorrow are teenagers who want multimedia, games, texting, and social networking on their phones. They are the driving market, not 62 year olds. Most 62 year olds have flip phones if they have phones at all, or they have iphones because their kids bought them for them.
MS said from the get go that entertainment aspects of the OS would be the primary goal at launch with business aspects being improved upon within the first year. So far they are doing just that.
Ok, so using your analogy, since wp7 is just then next version, then at least most of my 6.5 programs should work on wp7. Oh wait, they don't, because most of the new programs are written in a different programming language.
Apps I use everyday:
1. Beezz for twitter
2. Yomomedia for RSS feeds
3. Netflix
4. Zune
5. Games
6. weatherbug
7. youtube
8. office
9. flixster
that is pretty much my home screen.
The biggest problem with the kin is that verizon attached a smartphone data plan (30 bucks a month) on a glorified feature phone. That doomed it from the start. But that doesn't mean it didn't have some good ideas with its picture capabilities and social apps.
You need to root it and install the lag fix, that should fix a lot of the problems.
I'm hoping the back of my hd7 doesn't break. I am not thrilled that is plastic, though I haven't had to take it off yet to reset the phone either so that is a big plus of wp7.
You are the first person to ever called stock winmo stable....
Does WebOS even support sd cards? Probably not if none of the phones have them.
and to stop freezing, and stop lagging.
First time I've laughed at something in this thread.
This does bother me. Give me the option to buy an ad free version. Even some of the .99 apps I have bought have ads in them....
Doesn't bother me. The phone is working great. They are promising more 3rd party multitasking ability for the feb. update and that is the only thing I want. I want my twitter app to stay open when I click a url.
A lot of the problems with apps not opening where you left off is developer born. They have the ability to add tombstoning options to their apps but alot of apps don't take advantage of this.
I knew this phone wasn't going to be perfect out of the box. I wanted to be on at the ground floor and see where it went. So far, I am very happy with it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
orangekid said:
man,
this dude seriously wanted to reply to some peeps. I couldn't read that whole post if I tried, I got about 10% of the way maybe.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=9877727&postcount=425
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
bad for ur eyes
MacaronyMax said:
Wow... That is long
(No TWSS's! )
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
we can see that
husam666 said:
Does anybody else just had a case of long post phobia?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
still me
Mr. Clown said:
more than long...that's what I call multi quoting
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol
here's a longer post
husam666 said:
bad for ur eyes
we can see that
still me
lol
here's a longer post
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This one is longer... Also it's been shortened because there was a 30,000 character limit.
Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Wikepedia)
For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About.
Wikipedia
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from many different writing systems
Screenshot [show]
URL Wikipedia.org
Slogan The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Registration Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating new article pages or uploading files)
Available language(s) 257 active editions (276 in total)
Content license Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies
Owner Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1]
Launched January 15, 2001 (9 years ago)
Alexa rank 7 (December 2010)[2]
Current status Active
Wikipedia ( /ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free,[3] web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 17 million articles (over 3.5 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[5] and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][6][7][8] ranking seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers.[9][10]
The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger[11] and is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[12] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes.[13] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[14] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,[15] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived,[16][17] and an investigation in Nature found that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[18]
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[19] Some noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[20][21] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[22]
Contents
1 History
2 Nature of Wikipedia
2.1 Editing model
2.2 Rules and laws governing content
2.3 Content licensing
2.4 Reusing Wikipedia's content
2.5 Defenses against undesirable edits
2.6 Coverage of topics
2.7 Quality
2.8 Reliability
2.9 Community
3 Operation
3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
3.2 Software and hardware
3.3 Mobile access
4 Language editions
5 Cultural significance
6 Related projects
7 See also
8 Notes
9 Further reading
10 External links
History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[23]
Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20, 2010.
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[24][25] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[26][27] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[28] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[29] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[30] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[26] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[31] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[26]
Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article).
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.[32] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the two million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[33]
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[34] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[35] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol where the articles are a little more essayistic[36] – have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function tending to 4.4 million articles.
Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[37] In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009, that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H. Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[38] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.[39][40]
In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[41][42] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[43] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[44]
Nature of Wikipedia
See also: Reliability of Wikipedia, Criticism of Wikipedia, and Academic studies about Wikipedia
Editing model
See also: Wikipedia:How to edit a page and Wikipedia:Template messages
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a Wikipedia usability study, questioning users about the editing mechanism.[45]
In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia employs an open, "wiki" editing model. Except for a few particularly vandalism-prone pages, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in the English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are agreed on by consensus.[46]
Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German and the Hungarian editions of Wikipedia are exceptions to this rule: the German Wikipedia has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles,[47] to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Wikipedia plans to trial a related approach.[48][49] In June 2010, it was announced that the English Wikipedia would remove strict editing restrictions from "controversial" or vandalism-prone articles (such as George W. Bush, David Cameron or homework). In place of an editing prohibition for new or unregistered users, there would be a "new system, called 'pending changes'" which, Jimmy Wales told the BBC, would enable the English Wikipedia "to open up articles for general editing that have been protected or semi-protected for years." The "pending changes" system was introduced on June 15, shortly after 11pm GMT. Edits to specified articles are now "subject to review from an established Wikipedia editor before publication." Wales opted against the German Wikipedia model of requiring editor review before edits to any article, describing it as "neither necessary nor desirable." He added that the administrators of the German Wikipedia were "going to be closely watching the English system, and I'm sure they'll at least consider switching if the results are good."[50]
Editors keep track of changes to articles by checking the difference between two revisions of a page, displayed here in red.
Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Wikipedia. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.[51][52] This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.[53] Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made,[17] to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.
The editing interface of Wikipedia.
Articles in Wikipedia are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article" status: articles labeled as such are the ones that will be featured in the main page of Wikipedia.[54][55] Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged.[56]
A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate work on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Wikipedia also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, that, in the first sentence of any given article, the title of the article and any alternate titles should appear in bold.
Rules and laws governing content
For legal reasons, content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) of Florida, where Wikipedia servers are hosted. Beyond that, the Wikipedian editorial principles are embodied in the "five pillars", and numerous policies and guidelines are intended to shape the content appropriately. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines[57] and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. The rules on the non English editions of the Wikipedia branched off a translation of the rules on the English Wikipedia and have since diverged to some extent. While they still show broad-brush similarities, they differ in many details.
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia to be worthy of inclusion must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like.[58] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",[59] which usually means that it must have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media or major academic journals that are independent of the subject of the topic. Further, Wikipedia must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized.[60] In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[61] Finally, Wikipedia must not take a side.[62] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article.[63] This is known as neutral point of view, or NPOV.
Wikipedia has many methods of settling disputes. A "bold, revert, discuss" cycle sometimes occurs, in which a user makes an edit, another user reverts it, and the matter is discussed on the appropriate talk page. In order to gain a broader community consensus, issues can be raised at the Village Pump, or a Request for Comment can be made soliciting other users' input. "Wikiquette Alerts" is a non-binding noticeboard where users can report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with other editors.
Specialized forums exist for centralizing discussion on specific decisions, such as whether or not an article should be deleted. Mediation is sometimes used, although it has been deemed by some Wikipedians to be unhelpful for resolving particularly contentious disputes. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee settles disputes when other methods fail. The ArbCom generally does not rule on the factual correctness of article content, although it sometimes enforces the "Neutral Point of View" policy. Statistical analyses suggest that Wikipedia's dispute resolution ignores the content of user disputes and focuses on user conduct instead, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting users, but to weed out problematic users while weeding potentially productive users back in to participate. Its remedies include banning users from Wikipedia (used in 15.7% of cases), subject matter remedies (23.4%), article bans (43.3%) and cautions and probations (63.2%). Total bans from Wikipedia are largely limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. Warnings tend to be issued for editing conduct and conduct that is anti-consensus, rather than anti-social.[64]
Content licensing
All text in Wikipedia was covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work,[65] up until June 2009, when the site switched to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-by-SA) 3.0.[66] Wikipedia had been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses were incompatible.[67] In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC-BY-SA by August 1, 2009. Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch.[68] The referendum took place from April 9 to 30.[69] The results were 75.8% "Yes," 10.5% "No," and 13.7% "No opinion."[70] In consequence of the referendum, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees voted to change to the Creative Commons license, effective June 15, 2009.[70] The position that Wikipedia is merely a hosting service has been successfully used as a defense in court.[71][72]
The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to. This is in part because of the difference in copyright laws between countries; for example, the notion of fair use does not exist in Japanese copyright law. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' cc-by-sa) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Reusing Wikipedia's content
Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can re-distribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside of the Wikipedia website.
Thousands of "mirror sites" exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones, that also include content from other reference sources, are Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did.
Some web search engines also display content from Wikipedia on search results: examples include Bing.com (via technology gained from Powerset)[73] and Duck Duck Go.
Some wikis, most notably Enciclopedia Libre and Citizendium, began as forks of Wikipedia content.
The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, is a project that extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia and makes it available in a queriable semantic format, RDF. The possibility has also been raised to have Wikipedia export its data directly in a semantic format, possibly by using the Semantic MediaWiki extension. Such an export of data could also help Wikipedia reuse its own data, both between articles on the same language Wikipedia and between different language Wikipedias.[74]
Collections of Wikipedia articles have also been published on optical disks. An English version, 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles.[75][76] The Polish-language version contains nearly 240,000 articles.[77] There are also German-language versions.[78]
"Wikipedia for Schools", the Wikipedia series of CDs/DVDs, produced by Wikipedians and SOS Children, is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia targeted around the UK National Curriculum and intended to be useful for much of the English-speaking world.[79] The project is available online; an equivalent print encyclopedia would require roughly 20 volumes.
There has also been an attempt to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.[80][81]
Defenses against undesirable edits
The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[82]
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[83]
John Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."[84]
Obvious vandalism is easy to remove from wiki articles, since the previous versions of each article are kept. In practice, the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is very low, usually a few minutes,[16][17] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[84] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, but nevertheless the perpetrator was eventually traced.[85][86] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.
Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[51][87] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[15] has been noted,[88] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[89] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[90]
For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[91]
In practice, Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits,[92] blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.
For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[93] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[94] Such locking is applied sparingly, usually for only short periods of time while attacks appear likely to continue.
Coverage of topics
Pie chart of Wikipedia content by subject as of January 2008.[95]
See also: Notability in Wikipedia
Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia. Since it has virtually unlimited disk space it can have far more topics than can be covered by any conventional print encyclopedias.[96] It also contains materials that some people, including Wikipedia editors,[97] may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic.[98] It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Wikipedia had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site.[99] (See also: IWF block of Wikipedia)
As of September 2009, Wikipedia articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are written about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of large parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.[100]
The 20 most viewed articles on English Wikipedia in 2009[101]
1. Wiki
2. The Beatles
3. Michael Jackson
4. Favicon
5. YouTube
6. Wikipedia
7. Barack Obama
8. Deaths in 2009
9. United States
10. Facebook
11. Portal:Current events
12. World War II
13. Twitter
14. Transformers (film)
15. Slumdog Millionaire
16. Lil Wayne
17. Adolf Hitler
18. India
19. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
20. Scrubs (TV series)
A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to January 2008) in each field:[95]
Culture and the arts 30% (210%)
Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)
Geography and places: 14% (52%)
Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)
History and events: 11% (143%)
Natural and the physical sciences: 9% (213%)
Technology and the applied science: 4% (−6%)
Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)
Health: 2% (42%)
Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)
Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Theres about another 20,000 characters to it .
What is the max character limit? lol.
30,000
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http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11809598/XDA/Random%20****/scvdgbf.PNG
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Niice, lol. That's us.. Devs who push the limit >^^>
<^^<