Wikipedia

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Wikipedia
The inspiration of all wikis.
Type: Encyclopedia Hosting service: Self-hosted Founding date: January 15, 2001 Founder(s): Jimbo Wales (Jimmy Wales) Larry Sanger

Wikipedia is a multilingual, free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. It was founded on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales and Larry Sanger. It is also one of the most popular websites in existence.

Why It's a Trustworthy Encyclopedia

1. It is very informative, especially with historical people and events such as the 9/11 attacks, World War II, Summer of Love, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Netanyahu, and several others. In addition, there are pages for almost everything that fits within their notability guidelines, including the Devious Lick trend and the "My Immortal" fan-fiction.
   • Even if some of their other pages aren't as detailed, they are very likely to be improved later due to the large userbase, or even by yourself if you are interested.
   • The featured and good articles, which showcase the best articles on the wiki, are incredibly informative and have tons of references to back up their claims and make the wiki extremely reliable in some cases. They are also a great way of showing how you should write or edit an article on the site in the first place.
2. It is very unbiased, decently written and can be useful for research purposes.
3. Anyone with or without an account can edit, leading to a lot of edits on the wiki and most are very constructive and helpful.
   • You don't even need an account to start editing, and you can make edits anonymously, although it will reveal your IP address. Creating an account does have benefits, as it allows you to edit protected pages after a while and you have a chance to become part of the staff, as well as gaining recognition if you edit well enough.
4. A lot of pictures for almost everything, including images of real-world locations, film posters, video game box art, and photos. You can even find some pretty rare images on the site as well. Finally, some of the images themselves are also high quality, especially ones showcasing real-world locations.
5. There are a lot of admins and users on the wiki, so there is a lower chance of Wikipedia's vandalism getting noticed. This also means that pages will often be updated very quickly with new information. This also means that there are a lot of people on the site to help you out if needed, as the userbase overall is very friendly. There are also editors that improves certain types of articles on the website, such as Jochem van Hees (who edits mainly Eurovision articles), AS19Portsmouth (who edits mainly F1/motorsport articles), and finally, Lugnuts, who is widely considered to be among the greatest editors in Wikipedia's history.
6. Wikipedia also has some essays about how to edit the wiki and what is best for a user to do on them. Not only are the essays funny sometimes, but they are also incredibly helpful, are good for learning how to become a productive editor, and are even so useful that other wikis use them to improve.
   • In fact, there's an entire essay dedicated to funny stuff that's on the wiki, called Wikipedia:Silly Things.
7. It has a really nice style, and is incredibly easy to navigate, with all of the sub-pages such as "Recent Changes" and "Special Pages", as well as the search bar being placed logically and are relatively easy to find in all versions.
8. Their notability guidelines are fair, unlike other websites, as it must be a well-known place, media, or person with some historical significance to be able to be put on the site, and you just can't add something not many people know about.
9. Much like Super Mario Wiki and Encyclopedia SpongeBobia, it has deletion requests and requests for gaining admin rights.
10. There is a Simple English Wikipedia, which is meant to be used for basic English and condenses the information on the main Wikipedia pages into some easy-to-understand sentences.
11. It is multilingual, meaning pretty much anyone in the world can edit it, even non-English speakers; it also has multiple versions of the site for each language, with English Wikipedia being the most common.
12. It revolutionized wikis as a whole and is the responsible for making them popular.
    • It also inspired the creation of sites that allow you to create your own wiki, such as Fandom (known initially as Wikia and also co-founded by Wales), ShoutWiki, Miraheze, Wikidot, edit this. Info, and Telepedia.

Bad Qualities

1. Some pages aren't well-detailed and have barely any information. One of them used to be the LU (biscuits) page, in which there was a dispute over whether LU is a French, Pakistani, or American brand despite it being French due to being part of the culture of Nantes. The page has fortunately since been fixed.
2. There was an incident involving the then-contributor of the site Ryulong, and Crash Override Network.
3. The admins, bots, and users on the site can occasionally cause problems, such as ClueBot NG, NinjaRobotPirate, and MaterialScientist. Even standard users such as Island92, Serols, and Asher Heimermann also can sometimes cause problems. Some users can be considered unfriendly to some due to their political agendas.
   • Asher, in particular, is an issue as he added a removed America link back and called the person who deleted it a vandal. He was once blocked for advertising and disruptive editing back in 2007.
   • An admin by the username SummerPhD^v2.0 threatened to block a user by the name of The Man from Snowy River for "vandalism", when all they did was add pertinent cast members to a page about the film Benji the Hunted. Summer dismissed the user's arguments by claiming that being uncredited automatically makes an actor "minor", and therefore, does not belong on a certain film article. She also ignored the user's advice that he got most of the information from the director of the film, thus proving that the names of the actors were indeed sourced.
     • Summer also proved to be a massive hypocrite as she threatened to block the user for "vandalizing" the page, when she herself was the one doing the vandalism.
4. The Hungarian version is lower quality compared to other language versions of Wikipedia due to how inactive the edit-verifiers are, the existence of sub-stubs, sourced edits being undone, America linking (see below) being even more common than on the English Wikipedia, corrupt admins such as Gerry89, Pallerti, and Csigabi, and innocent users being blocked for no reason. There's also no pages for a lot of important things, such as the French region of Brittany and the bombing of London during World War 2/The Blitz (despite being documented on the Battle of Britain (Angliai csata) page).
   • For example, an innocent anonymous user was blocked for "vandalism", when all they did was removing speedy deletion templates on a page they created about the singer Varga Irén.
   • Another innocent user named Balázs6 being blocked, leading him to attempt suicide but thankfully He is survived.
5. America linking (linking nationalities to country pages) is common on a lot of pages (Even disambiguation pages), even though it is strictly prohibited under Wikipedia's overlink rules. One controversial user named Tommi1986 even openly supports America Linking, despite the WP:OVERLINK page stating that nationalities shouldn't be overlinked.
   • In the infancy of Wikipedia, nearly all pages had America links. This is justified, however, because it was allowed before 2014.
6. Some of the pages have some uncensored nudity and/or gore, which can make it inappropriate or scary for some audiences/readers especially the minors.
   1. To make things worse, there's no warning about these NSFW and NSFL images.