Spanish Civil War
No followers
Most recommended content
See AllFeatured creators
See AllAuthor, journalist, historian, and lecturer. Known for works such as King Leopold's Ghost, To End All Wars, Bury the Chains, The Mirror at Midnight, The Unquiet Ghost, and Spain in Our Hearts.
English soldier and writer. Notable for his participation in the Spanish Civil War and as a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in World War II.
Wikipedia is a free, open content online encyclopedia created through the collaborative effort of a community of users known as Wikipedians. Anyone registered on the site can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles. The site's name comes from wiki, a server program that enables anyone to edit Web site content through their Web browser.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of an earlier encyclopedia project, Nupedia, in January 2001. Originally, Wikipedia was created to provide content for Nupedia. However, as the wiki site became established it soon grew beyond the scope of the earlier project. As of January 2015, the website provided well over five million articles in English and more than that number in all other languages combined. At that same time, Alexa ranked Wikipedia as the seventh-most popular site on the Internet. Wikipedia was the only non-commercial site of the top ten.
Criticisms of Wikipedia include assertions that its openness makes it unreliable and unauthorative. Because articles don't include bylines, authors aren't publicly accountable for what they write. Similarly, because anyone can edit any article, the site's entries are vulnerable to unscrupulous edits. In August 2007, Virgil Griffiths created a site, WikiScanner, where users could track the sources of edits to Wikipedia entries. Griffiths reported that self-serving edits typically involved whitewashing or removal of criticism of a person or organization or, conversely, insertion of negative comments into the entry about a competitor. Wikipedia depends upon the vigilance of editors to find and reverse such changes to content.
In addition to the encyclopedia, the non-profit Wikipedia foundation oversees several other open-content projects, including:
Wiktionary, a dictionary and thesaurus
Wikibooks, a collection of free texts and other books
Wikiquote, a collection of quotations
Wikisource, a collection of free source documents
Wikiversity, a collection of free learning materials
Wikispecies, a directory of species
Meta-Wiki, which coordinates all the other projects.