Although Wikipedia content has been accessible through the mobile web since July 2013, The New York Times on February 9, 2014, quoted Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stating that the transition of internet traffic from desktops to mobile devices was significant and a cause for concern and worry. According to a study by Pnina Shachaf in the Journal of Documentation, the quality of the Wikipedia reference desk is comparable to a standard library reference desk, with an accuracy of 55 percent. Since Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or redistribute it at no charge.W 97 The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content on Wikipedia or its related projects but merely a hosting service for contributors to and licensors of Wikipedia, a position which was successfully defended in 2004 in a court in France. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine,W 95 while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law). When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work.W 88 The GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs licensed under the GPL.
Launch and growth
Sanger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one about lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted “obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children”, under the PROTECT Act of 2003. In April 2010, Sanger wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of US federal obscenity law. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom after the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) decided the album cover was a potentially illegal indecent image and added the article’s URL to a “blacklist” it supplies to British internet service providers. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events. The October 22, 2013, essay by Tom Simonite in MIT’s Technology Review titled “The Decline of Wikipedia” discussed the effect of systemic bias and policy creep on the downward trend in the number of editors. In 2011, Wales claimed that the unevenness of coverage is a reflection of the demography of the editors, citing for example “biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare”.
In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.W 57 Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”, becoming the third woman to ever receive the award. Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women’s topics. Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation said that such checks would run counter to the website’s commitment to minimal data collection on its contributors and readers.
WMF executives stated that the Community Tech employees could apply for different positions in the organization, that the wishlist process would be restructured, and that the WMF would recognize a union that gains majority support from staff. Multiple news networks and pundits have accused Wikipedia of being ideologically biased. Articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Journal of Academic Librarianship have criticized Wikipedia’s “undue-weight policy”, concluding that Wikipedia explicitly is not designed to provide correct information about a subject, but rather focus on all the major viewpoints on the subject, give less attention to minor ones, and creates omissions that can lead to false beliefs based on incomplete information. No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively improving substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of “fake news” because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, “the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created”. As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia “makes no guarantee of validity” of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.W 48 Concerns have been raised by PC World in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that kinbet casino en ligne results from users’ anonymity, the insertion of false information, vandalism, and similar problems. Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.
Content policies and guidelines
There are currently 348 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). Distribution of the 68,290,490 articles in different language editions (as of September 9, 2026)W 35 Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, said that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to “ugly, intimidating behavior”. Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Wikipedia contributors. According to a 2009 study, there is “evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content”.
Noam Cohen, writing in The Washington Post states, “YouTube’s reliance on Wikipedia to set the record straight builds on the thinking of another fact-challenged platform, the Facebook social network, which announced last year that Wikipedia would help its users root out ‘fake news’.” In 2017–18, after a barrage of false news reports, both Facebook and YouTube announced they would rely on Wikipedia to help their users evaluate reports and reject false news. Lih fears for Wikipedia’s long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain, and rival encyclopedias will not replace it. Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this. Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih states that the number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years, and Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this.
History
Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.W 5W 6 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former’s servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia’s launch, but with limited success.
Vandalism
Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 62 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 63 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. “Nine Theses” refers to a reform proposal published by Larry Sanger in October 2025. “Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men.” Her exclusion from Wikipedia led to accusations of sexism, but Corinne Purtill writing for Quartz argued that “it’s also a pointed lesson in the hazards of gender bias in media, and of the broader consequences of underrepresentation.” Purtill attributes the issue to the gender bias in media coverage.
In the news
A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage topics. A 2020 research study published in Studies in Higher Education argued that Wikipedia could be applied in the higher education “flipped classroom”, an educational model in which students learn before coming to class and apply it in classroom activities. Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.W 49 In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia’s large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014.update Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages, at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. A study published by PLOS One in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world.
In June 2024, Nature published a fictional Wikipedia talk page under the title “Plastic-eating fungus caused doomsday” by Emma Burnett. Consequently, the challenge for Wikipedia and those who use it is to “save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know.” This is while Wikipedia faces “a more concerning problem” than funding, namely “a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website”. In a 2017 opinion piece for Wired, Hossein Derakhshan describes Wikipedia as “one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web” and contrasted its existence as a text-based source of knowledge with social media and social networking services, the latter having “since colonized the web for television’s values”. A working group led by Peter Stone (formed as a part of the Stanford-based project One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence) in its report called Wikipedia “the best-known example of crowdsourcing … that far exceeds traditionally-compiled information sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, in scale and depth”. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Wikipedia, “the seventh most consulted website”, to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.
The groups were then instructed to collaboratively develop Wikipedia entries, which would be graded in quality after the study. In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.