Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project and Wikipedia's articles provide links within the articles to guide the user to related pages with additional and explanatory information.
There are currently approximately 2 million articles in English and every day thousands of visitors from around the world edit and create new articles to increase the knowledge base held by this encyclopedia. Most articles can be edited by anyone, with the exception of a select few, simply by clicking the edit this page link. This is in fact one of the strong points of Wikipedia, however it is also the biggest downfall of the encyclopedia. Users with a deep knowledge base on a particular subject can easily contribute information on their subject with ease, but this gives also rise to vandalism and wrong information. Fortunately, the software on which Wikipedia is powered by (mediaWiki) easily allows the rollback of information to previous articles.
With thanks to the large contributing community of Wikipedia, there is also no need to worry about accidentally damaging Wikipedia when adding or improving articles, as other editors are always around to advise or correct obvious errors. There are also several administrators that constantly ensure the behavior of the contributors conforms to the policies and guidelines.
Wikipedia is broadly considered as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica with similar error rates on major and minor omissions and errors within the articles. Thanks to the requirements of academic citations of sources allows Wikipedia to be a good starting point for research. However, due to the changing nature of wiki’s together with the possible of huge omissions and uncorrected vandalism, it is difficult to hold up against scrutiny when using Wikipedia as the main source of any research paper.
Most articles in Wikipedia start as stubs, but can become featured articles after many contributions. When contributing to Wikipedia, it is important to keep the five pillars of Wikipedia in mind. These five principles are:
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
- Wikipedia is free content
- Wikipedia works by building consensus
- Wikipedia has a code of conduct
- Wikipedia does not have firm rules, apart from these five pillars
Furthermore, the key policies and guidelines of Wikipedia are
- Wikipedia works by building consensus
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
- Respect other contributors
- Respect copyrights
- Avoid bias
- Include only verifiable information
Lastly, for new contributors there are a series of tutorials available that quickly and efficiently explain how to edit articles. As was mentioned previously, creating an account is not a requirement, however it is easy to create an account and allows you to build up a reputation for contributing worthwhile content.
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