Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia that you can edit and contribute to. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest quality to every single person on the planet in his or her own language." Wikipedia exists to bring knowledge to everyone who seeks it.
The content is owned by everyone and can be added to or changed by anyone. This is in line with the original intent of making the internet a truly free, global society.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida. It operates several online collaborative projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (including Wikijunior), Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Meta-Wiki.
Its existence was officially announced by Wikipedia co-founder[3][4] Jimmy Wales, who was running Wikipedia within his company Bomis, on June 20, 2003. Its approval by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, by letter in April 2005, as an educational foundation in the category "Adult, Continuing Education" means all contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes.
Given the massively-collaborative nature of the project, there is no single point of contact. If you send an e-mail to an individual board or staff member, they will likely just forward it to the group of Wikipedia volunteers who answer reader inquiries. You can reach those volunteers yourself, by e-mailing infowikimedia.org.
Alternatively, if you want to communicate with a specific user, you can leave a message on his or her personal talk page. The talk page for User:Jane Doe is located at User talk:Jane Doe. Many Wikipedians have also registered their e-mail addresses, which you can use by clicking the "E-mail this user" link on their user pages. In addition, each article has a talk page. Use the discussion link at the top of each article to get to its talk page.
Editors with user names enjoy several benefits. Among them is the positive reputation that goes with quality work. Wikipedians with an established history are respected especially with regard to neutralizing article disputes. In addition, Wikipedians sometimes find collaborating with anonymous users frustrating, because it is more difficult to contact them with questions, concerns, or suggestions. This is not to say there is a Wikipedia hierarchy per se. Although there are editors with administrative abilities (see Wikipedia:Administrators), these are approved by the community.
Wikipedians with user names are, in a sense, more anonymous than contributors that do not log in. That is, while anyone can see the IP address of a user who did not log in when he/she edited, only a few, especially trusted people are able to view the IP address of a logged-in user (and this is rarely done). Therefore, if you are concerned about privacy and anonymity, you may prefer to create a user name for yourself in order to hide your IP address.
However, editing as an unregistered user is acceptable. Many valuable contributors have made this choice. That said, you will not be able to create or rename pages without a user name. Some pages are also protected from editing by unregistered users in order to prevent vandalism.
Given that anyone can edit any article, it is, of course, possible for biased, out-of-date, or incorrect information to be posted. However, because there are so many other people reading the articles and monitoring contributions using the Recent Changes page, incorrect information is usually corrected quickly. Thus, the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia is improving all the time. You are encouraged to help by correcting articles, validating content, and providing useful references.
Software robots automatically reverse obvious defacement immediately. Moreover, there are hundreds of people who spend a little time each day watching the list of recent changes on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol). Any user interested in a particular page can add it to a personal "watchlist", which shows when a page is updated and whether that update is a joke or a substantial contribution. Furthermore, any of the many readers who pass by can correct vandalism or erroneous information.
So, the popular pages, which are the most likely to be defaced, are also those that receive the most attention from editors and readers, any of whom can 'revert' vandalism.
To stem a recurrent problem, an article can be temporarily protected from editing and/or user names and IP addresses can be blocked from editing.
Site X seems to be violating Wikipedia's copyright. Do you guys know about this?
Wikipedia currently has 7,001,001 articles in total in the English version alone. (This article count is also available on the main page.)
In a past comparison of encyclopedias, Wikipedia had about 1,400,000 articles with 340 million words in total, the Encyclopædia Britannica had about 85,000 articles with 55 million words in total, and Microsoft's Encarta had about 63,000 articles and 40 million words in total. See: Wikipedia:Size comparisons.
Thanks to the mass-collaboration of Wikipedians, the enlargement of Wikipedia continues at a rapid pace, a pace much greater than that of conventional encyclopedias.
What can I do about libelous content or an invasion of privacy?
By design, Wikipedia is quite easy to edit so you can simply revert wrong or hurtful information yourself. However, because every revision is logged, special steps are required to remove this information from the historical record. Please see Wikipedia:Oversight and Wikipedia:Libel for Wikipedia's policy on removing historical revisions, and how to request such a change.
