A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms “followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)”. In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking kinbet casino en ligne problem, which is then called “wikification”, and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Book publishing data tracker Nielsen BookScan stated in 2013 that biography sales were dropping “far more sharply”. The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially printed versions like Encyclopædia Britannica, which were unable to compete with a free alternative.
Policies and content
Registered users may maintain a “watchlist” of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes.W 22 There are a variety of different ‘patrols’ on Wikipedia,W 23 including “New pages patrol” a patrol where newly created articles are checked for glaring issues.W 24 Editors also can make only one revert per day across the entire field and can be banned from editing related articles. However, restrictions on editing may reduce editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors.
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
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”.
Impacts of generative AI on Wikipedia views
As of September 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, German, French, Swedish, and Dutch Wikipedias.W 36 The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013update had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. It was described by the publisher as a “sweeping reflection on the global crisis of credibility and knowledge” with the book examining the “rules of trust” that enabled the growth and success of Wikipedia. In November 2013, New York magazine stated, “Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis.” The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Crash Bandicoot is a series of video games created by Naughty Dog and owned and published by Activision.
Marginalized topics are also more likely to lack significant coverage in reliable sources. Wikipedia’s policies may limit “its capacity for truly representing global knowledge”. Through its “Wikipedia Loves Libraries” program, Wikipedia has partnered with major public libraries such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to expand its coverage of underrepresented subjects and articles. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.W 50 The exact degree and manner of coverage on Wikipedia is under constant review by its editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see deletionism and inclusionism). Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article. The study concluded that learning with Wikipedia in flipped classrooms was more effective than in conventional classrooms, demonstrating that Wikipedia could be used as an educational tool in higher education.
Content policies and guidelines
In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories. Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes, the influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources. The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes.
Launch and growth
In December 2015, John Julius Norwich stated, in a letter published in The Times newspaper, that as a historian he resorted to Wikipedia “at least a dozen times a day”, and had “never caught it out”. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g. Creative Commons’ CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.W 96 Wikipedia’s accommodation of varying international copyright laws regarding images has led some to observe that its photographic coverage of topics lags behind the quality of the encyclopedic text. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as “neutral point of view”, they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.W 41 The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that “anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia … are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site”. In January 2025, the Arbitration Committee introduced the “balanced editing restriction”, which requires sanctioned users to devote only a third of their edits to articles related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict even when no misconduct rules have been violated. Under this system, new and unregistered users’ edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.
Some user rights are granted automatically, such as the autoconfirmed and extended confirmed groups, when thresholds for account age and edits are met. In 2008, there were 44 policy pages and 248 guideline pages; by 2013, scholars counted 383 policy pages and 449 guideline pages. Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized and therefore must not present original research.
Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from “a little more than 36,000 writers” in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study’s methodology. Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called “low-hanging fruit”—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.W 9 A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to “increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits”.
It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the Simple English Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition).citation needed These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. colour versus color)W 39 or points of view.W 40 As of January 2021,update the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages.
For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only users with 10 edits that have an account that is four days old may create a new article.W 19 On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. Wikipedia has been praised for its internal structure and culture, enabling the democratization of knowledge, and for its extensive coverage on various topics. Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).W 120 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. In 2015, French researchers José Lages of the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon and Dima Shepelyansky of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse published a global university ranking based on Wikipedia scholarly citations. Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain that editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult, and this discourages new potential contributors.
In the news
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 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.