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English Wikipedia

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From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For this Wikipedia that has more basic English, see Simple English Wikipedia.
Favicon of Wikipedia English Wikipedia
85%
Logo
Screenshot
The homepage of the English Wikipedia
Homepage in June 2020
Type of site
Online encyclopedia project
Available inEnglish
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byEnglish Wikipedia community
URLen.wikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, but needed for some tasks including
  • • protected page edit 
  • • page creation 
  • • file upload 
Launched15 January 2001; 23 years ago (2001-01-15)
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies

The English Wikipedia is the English language edition of the Wikipedia. English is the first language in which Wikipedia was written. It was started on 15 January 2001. It is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and the largest version of Wikipedia since April 2019.[1] It has 6,929,381 articles as of 24 December 2024.[2] In October 2015, the total volume of the compressed texts of the English Wikipedia's articles added up to 23.2 gigabytes.[source?]

An alternate logo from late 2001 to 2003

The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary (simplewiki). There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (angwiki).

Comparisons with other Wikipedia sites

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Wikipedia sites in other languages have imitated some of its technical and organizational features. It has a newsletter called The Signpost. As the English Wikipedia is very popular, there can be many people editing the Wikipedia in one minute. This made recent changes less effective for understanding changes. Instead, editors can select and watch for changes in particular articles, using the Watchlist feature of MediaWiki.[source?]

Both Watchlist and Recent changes can be filtered to show particular kinds of edits, such as edits from IP addresses or edits with signs of vandalism. Some editors use special software to detect and fix vandalism.[3][4]

Controversies

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Some believe that the English Wikipedia shows significant bias and unfairness.[5] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[6] An example of bias is that around 90% of Wikipedia editors are male.[7] Others think that Wikipedia is more useful than other encyclopedias because it is large and can be updated quickly.

The English language Wikipedia page from 18 January 2012, illustrating its international blackout in opposition to SOPA and PIPA.

In 2010, the logo of the English Wikipedia like most Wikipedia's was slightly changed. However, some Wikipedias, like the Simple English Wikipedia, still kept the old logo.

English Wikipedia, as one of the most visited websites worldwide,[8] has also been criticized for repeated occurrences of on-site antisemitism.[9][10]

Holocaust distortion

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In the 57-page article Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust[11] published in The Journal of Holocaust Research, Prof. Jan Grabowski and Dr. Shira Klein reported to have found widespread distortions of the Polish Holocaust history on the English Wikipedia.[10][11] The distortions involved the intentional exaggeration[10][11] of Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers, invention of Jewish "atrocities" against Poles, downplaying of Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blaming Jews for their own suffering in the Holocaust.[10][11]

Prof. Grabowski and Dr. Klein also criticized English Wikipedia's administrators and Wikimedia Foundation's lack of will to handle,[10][11] leaving the site vulnerable to state-sponsored disinformation:

Wikipedia’s administrators have largely failed to uphold Wikipedia’s policies [. ...] unable to deal with the issue of persistent distortion [...] Wikipedia’s articles [...] have become a hub of misinformation and antisemitic canards.

On another occasion, Prof. Grabowski said,[10]

As a historian, I was aware [...] of various distortions [...] of the Holocaust on Wikipedia. What I found shocking, was the sheer scale [...] and the small number of individuals needed to distort the history of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity.

Distortion of Jewish history

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In 2024, independent journalist investigations uncovered a large-scale off-site canvassing campaign to rewrite Jewish history and reshape the narrative surrounding the Israel–Palestine conflict, which involved 40 accounts having made at least 2,000,000 edits to over 10,000 Jewish-related articles.[12]

The off-site canvassing campaign was coordinated by an 8,000-member Tech for Palestine Discord channel,[12] where the organizers provided the participants in-depth training (e.g. strategy planning sessions, group audio "office hour" chats)[12] on getting used to Wikipedia's site operation,[12] assigning participants (in groups of 2~3) to edit hundreds of articles in rotation,[12] and gaming the rules to block others from correcting them.[12]

Reported examples of their revisionist[13] edits include[12]

  • Removal of "Land of Israel" from the origin of Jews in Jewish-related articles
  • Removal of mentions of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel in Jewish-related articles
  • Removal of mentions of Hamas' 1988 charter which involved the incitement to mass murder of Jews
  • Removal of mentions of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler[14][15] in Holocaust-related articles
  • Redefinition of Jews as an "ethnoreligious group and cultural community" from "ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant" in Jewish-related articles

On 12 December 2024, English Wikipedia's arbitration committee announced that two editors[16] had been banned indefinitely for off-site canvassing[12][16] and "encouraging other users to game the extended confirmed restriction and engage in disruptive editing."[16] Another three editors have also been slapped with sanctions for similar reasons.[16]

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References

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  1. ↑ 812500 (about 13 percent) more than the Cebuano Wikipedia. See m:List of Wikipedias.
  2. ↑ Statistics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Archived 2008-06-24 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved May 10, 2020
  3. ↑ jesse.hicks (February 18, 2014). "This machine kills trolls: How Wikipedia's robots and cyborgs snuff out vandalism". The Verge. Archived from the original on August 27, 2014. Retrieved July 16, 2020.
  4. ↑ "Wikipedia:Cleaning up vandalism/Tools". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. July 9, 2020. Archived from the original on October 26, 2023. Retrieved July 16, 2020.
  5. ↑ Simon Waldman, Who knows? Archived 2011-09-05 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian, October 26, 2004
  6. ↑ Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Archived 2006-01-16 at the Wayback Machine", Tech Central Station, November 15, 2004.
  7. ↑ Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Wikipedia". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on June 19, 2015. Retrieved October 31, 2014.
  8. ↑ "Most Visited Websites in Worldwide 2024 | Open .Trends". Semrush. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
  9. ↑
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved October 24, 2024.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7
  13. ↑
  14. ↑
  15. ↑
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3

Other websites

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to English Wikipedia.
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