Red tape is excessive or redundant regulation or bureaucratic procedures that create financial or time compliance costs.
It is usually associated with governments, but can apply to other organizations, such as private corporations.
Red tape differs from beneficial rules and safeguards.
It is the administrative burden, or cost to the public, over and above
the necessary cost of implementing policies and procedures. A distinction is sometimes made between rules that are dysfunctional
from inception ("rules born bad"), and rules that initially served a
useful function but evolved into red tape ("good rules gone bad").
Red tape can hamper the ability of firms to compete, grow, and create jobs. Research finds red tape has a cost to public sector workers, and can reduce employee well-being and job satisfaction. In 2005, the UK's Better Regulation Task Force suggested that red tape reforms could lead to an increase in GDP of 16 billion pounds per year, a greater than 1% rise. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business
estimated the cost to business of red tape arising from federal,
provincial and municipal government regulations was $11 billion in 2020,
or about 28% of the total burden of regulation for businesses in
Canada.
Many governments have introduced measures to limit or cut red tape, including the European Union, Argentina, the United States, and India. Experience from British Columbia, Canada suggests a successful red tape reduction initiative requires strong political commitment.
Red tape definition
The term "red tape" is sometimes employed as "an umbrella term
covering almost all imagined ills of bureaucracy", both public and
private. However, red tape is usually defined more narrowly as government
policies, guidelines, and forms that are excessive, duplicative or
unnecessary, and that generate a financial or time-based compliance
cost. Red tape can be categorized as dysfunctional from inception (say because of inadequate comprehension of the problem being addressed); or may evolve
into red tape when a rule is inadvertently changed or is no longer
needed (for example, a rule that requires carbon copies when
communication migrates to electronic mail).
Whereas red tape refers to unnecessary rules, administrative burden
(sometimes called "white tape") recognizes that regulations that are
intended for useful purposes may nonetheless entail a compliance cost.
Determining whether a regulation is justified rather than red
tape can be difficult. Nevertheless, making the proper distinction is
relevant when implementing reforms, and cutting red tape differs from deregulation.
Origins and history
Bundle of US pension documents from 1906 bound in red tape
It is generally believed that the term "red tape" originated in the early 16th century with the Spanish administration of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, who started to use red tape, balduque,
in an effort to modernize the administration that was running his vast
empire. The red tape was used to bind the most important administrative
dossiers that required immediate discussion by the Council of State, and separate them from files that were treated in an ordinary administrative way, which were bound with ordinary string. The origin of the word balduque is the name of the Dutch city 's-HertogenboschBolduque or Bois-le-Duc ("the duke's forrest"), where in those days the red tape was manufactured.
In Britain, Charles Dickens spoke of red tape in David Copperfield
(1850): "Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a
trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound
hand and foot with red tape." The English practice of binding documents and official papers with red tape was popularized in Thomas Carlyle's
writings, protesting against official inertia with expressions like
"Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of
Parliamentary Eloquence". As of the first decade of the 21st century, the British barristers' briefs continued to be bound with pink-coloured ribbon known as red tape.
In the United States, red tape was used to tie personal records of Civil War veterans, reputedly making access to them inconvenient. Early references to red tape in the U.S. include that of PresidentWarren G. Harding's Secretary of the InteriorAlbert B. Fall (later convicted for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal)
who, according to his own annual report for 1921, set himself the goal
of removing "red tape and technicalities" from the management of the
department's economic resources to combat stagnation. Similarly, the task handed to Scott C. Bone on his appointment as Governor of Alaska on 23 June 1921 was to "unravel government red tape".In 1921, the official explanation for the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment's strenuous march of 800 miles from Camp Sherman, Ohio to Fort Snelling
was given as "red tape". While the army reportedly had insufficient
funds to transport the regiment by rail, the cost to supply the troops
on the march exceeded what their train fare might have been.
Red tape has historically often been associated with military procurement. In 1938, the IG Farben chairman Carl Krauch used the argument that red tape was responsible for previous delivery delays on the part of private enterprise in persuading Hermann Göring, the head of the Four Year Plan, to appoint him as plenipotentiary for the chemical industry over an Army Ordnance representative. In his speech at the meeting of SS Major-Generals in occupied Poznań on 4 October 1943, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler made reference to "red tape" as an example of a potential obstacle to "inventions" within Nazi Germany's armaments industry. In 1947, a contractor who had worked during World War II under Vannevar Bush in the Office of Scientific Research and Development
remembered Bush's "impatience with Army red tape", apparently referring
to the OSRD's executive secretary Irvin Stewart's organisational
efforts.
As of the early 21st century, Spanish bureaucracy continued to be
notorious for extreme levels of red tape (in the figurative sense) In 2013, the World Bank ranked Spain 136 out of 185 countries for ease of starting a business, which took on average 10 procedures and 28 days. Similar issues persist throughout Latin America. In Mexico in 2009, it took six months and a dozen visits to government agencies to obtain a permit to paint a house. To obtain a monthly prescription for gamma globulin for X-linked agammaglobulinemia,
a patient had to obtain signatures from two government doctors and
stamps from four separate bureaucrats before presenting the prescription
to a dispensary. Mexico was the original home of Syntex, one of the greatest pharmaceutical firms of the 20th century, but in 1959, the company left for the American city of Palo Alto, California, in what is now Silicon Valley, because its scientists were fed up with the Mexican government's bureaucratic delays which repeatedly impeded their research.
Cost of red tape
It is impossible to know exactly how much of the burden of government
regulations is red tape — i.e., is excessive and delivers little or no
benefit.
However, a survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) found red tape represented about 28% of the total burden of regulation in Canada in 2020. A European Union (EU) survey reported in 2008 that 36% of EU small and
medium enterprises felt that red tape had "constrained their business
activities".
The total cost of regulation for U.S. business was estimated in
2021 at US$364.3 billion, and for Canadian business in 2020 at US$31.9
billion, or CAN$38.8 billion. This cost represents 1.5% of GDP for the U.S. and 1.7% for Canada.
The CFIB estimated that the cost of red tape arising from
Canadian federal, provincial and municipal government regulations was
$11 billion in 2020. (This excluded COVID-19 related costs, to make the amount more comparable to previous years.) The annual cost of red tape per employee was higher for firms with
fewer than 5 employees, at $1945, versus $398 for firms with 100 or more
employees.
The Better Regulation Task Force suggested in 2005 that
red tape reforms could potentially deliver an increase in income of 16
billion pounds per year, an amount greater than one percent of UK GDP. The EU's "Cutting Red Tape in Europe" report, which presented
suggestions on how to reduce the administrative burden when member
states implement EU legislation, estimated that the administrative
burden reduction potential of all recommendations in the report exceeded
€41 billion annually. Such calculations have been questioned, however, given that it can be
difficult to ascertain costs of regulation in industries that are
composed of diverse firms.
While a regulation may be useful, the cost of imposing it may
exceed the benefits. The Canadian federal government applies a
cost-benefit analysis to most regulatory proposals, which takes into
account the cost of the policy to consumers, businesses, and other
sectors of society. Since the 1970s, Australian governments have sought to subject
regulation to rigorous cost-benefit analysis so as to constrain both the
stock and flow of the regulatory burden.
Red tape reduction initiatives
It can be difficult to distinguish between justified regulatory costs
and unneeded regulations. For this reason, the expression "cutting red
tape" has been used to refer to both initiatives to reduce unnecessary regulation, and to policies to reduce the overall regulatory burden.
Canada
Canada's Red Tape Reduction Act of 2015 implemented a
one-for-one rule that requires the removal of a regulation each time
regulators impose a new administrative burden on business. Nevertheless, while Regulations decreased from 684 to 605 between 2014 and 2023, regulatory Requirements increased from 129,860 to 149,401.
A more successful reduction in red tape took place in the province of British Columbia, Canada, following a 2001 election promise to reduce the regulatory burden by 33%. At the time, regulation was heavy, with rules imposed on, for example,
the size of televisions in restaurants, the number of par-four holes at
golf courses, and the maximum seating capacity of ski hill lounges. After three years, a 37% reduction was achieved. A central element of
the program was a strong commitment from the minister responsible and
the provincial premier.
European Union
In the European Union (EU), reducing the administrative burden on firms has been a prominent theme since the 1990s. In 2024, the European Commission President
advocated a red tape reduction program that emphasized simplification
(eliminating regulatory overlap and contradictions), speed, and
coherence to deal with the EU's patchwork of national regulations. An ongoing EU objective has been to remove red tape in order to facilitate trade across the European single market.
For example, recycling labels on paint cans in Spain and France may
differ because the two countries' interpretation of EU legislation are
not aligned, and this prevents a can of paint made for the Spanish
market from being sold in France. The European Round Table for Industry
recommends stronger single-market enforcement so that lawmakers better
transpose EU laws into national laws, which would promote regulatory
harmonization and reduce the need for firms to manage different
administrative processes in each EU country.
India
To reduce the administrative burden, in September 2021 the Indian government launched the National Single Window System (NSWS) which integrates clearances across central ministries and states. In addition to providing a common entry point, NSWS consolidates
information requirements and aims to standardise application formats,
support online tracking, and enable time-bound processing. The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, is meant to reduce
procedural delays by decriminalising minor, technical provisions and
allow adjudication rather than prosecution. To minimize discretionary variation in routine cases, a “faceless”
(electronic communication) assessment, appeal, and penalty process was
introduced.
Korea
South Korea's Framework Act on Administrative Regulations
codifies the definition, registration and publication of regulations;
mandates regulatory impact analysis; provides for a presidential
Regulatory Reform Committee; and requires sunset or re-examination
clauses for new or strengthened regulations. On 15 September 2025 the first Core Regulation Rationalization Strategy Meeting was chaired by Korean President Lee Jae-myung,
who stated: "Amid complex interests, ministerial differences have left
regulations tangled like a spiderweb; sweeping them away is this
administration’s goal."
Among the major initiatives is the online Regulatory Reform
"Sinmungo" (request system) launched in 2014, which routes public and
business complaints for ministerial review in an effort to reduce
redundant paperwork and processing time. In 2015 the program Transfer Notification Plus replaced multiple
provider-specific applications with a single authentication and consent
procedure, thereby reducing visits, duplicate documentation,
mis-entries, and missed applications. Similarly, in 2019 a cross-government regulatory sandbox was introduced to reduce pre-market uncertainty for new technologies.
For example, autonomous delivery robots received a bundled approval for sidewalk operation in designated zones. Also in 2019, a Presidential Decree on Proactive Administration was adopted to curb procedural overload and to break the chain: interpretive uncertainty → extra documents → delay.
New Zealand
In March 2023, New Zealand established a Ministry for Regulation, which promotes a culture where "regulation is a last resort." The Regulatory Standards Bill
introduced in 2024 aims to codify principles of good regulatory
practice and "bring the same level of discipline to regulation that the
Public Finance Act brings to public spending, with the Ministry for
Regulation playing a role akin to that of Treasury." One of the Ministry's key initiatives was to build a red tape "tipline"
which is used to prioritize reviews and recommend legislative changes. Among the Ministry's "horror stories" was a proposal to reduce the size
of flour dust in commercial bakeries to such a low level that it
couldn't be reliably measured or distinguished from other particles,
making compliance effectively impossible.
United States
President
Donald J. Trump prepares to cut a "red tape" display of regulations
representative of 1960 and compared to the current numbers of
regulations, December 14, 2017, in the Roosevelt Room at the White
House, announcing how the administration is keeping its promise to
remove regulations burdening job creators and American taxpayers.
Applying rules consistently can affect the extent to which individuals perceive that red tape exists in a government agency. A survey-based experiment in the context of a jury duty summons found
inconsistently applied rules may be viewed as ineffective or unfair,
fueling the perception of a high level of red tape.
Perception of red tape (as opposed to useful regulation) may be
relevant in the public service context, since employees may be more
willing to comply with rules that they perceive as valuable.
Impact on public sector employees
Red tape and employee performance
India's Hota Committee Report noted "file-pushing", in the form of
extensive procedures and layered rules, slowed civil service
decision-making, even for routine administrative actions.A 2025 survey of 73,795 Korean government officials found 48.11% of
respondents agreed that inefficiencies were created by unnecessary
documents and reports, and 22.06% said eliminating "formalism and other
pseudo-work" was the most urgent priority to reduce inefficiency. Red tape led to unclear direction on rules, policies, and guidelines
and, thereby, to poor internal client service, according to the Blueprint 2020 report that surveyed over 2,000 Canadian public servants.
A study that used interviews with 22 New Zealand public sector
managers found red tape, in the form of irrelevant goals without real
benchmarks, made giving performance feedback difficult. In turn, this made it difficult to address poor employee performance.
Further, managers were less encouraged to develop their employees'
skills.
Red tape and employee autonomy
Red tape can reduce employee flexibility and autonomy. A study of Dutch child welfare
employees showed that red tape reduced interactions with clients and
job effectiveness, which decreased job satisfaction. Highly motivated
employees were found to be more sensitive to burdensome rules and
procedures.
Evidence from the civil service in India finds ambiguity in
interpreting overlapping rules may incentivise risk-averse behaviour and
crowd-out professional judgement. Further, this can dampen morale.
Red tape and employee job satisfaction
The more employees perceive red tape (formalistic procedural
burdens), the significantly lower is their job satisfaction according to
a Korean police organization survey study from 2016 (n=294). Similarly, the greater is the red tape perceived by civil servants, the
higher is their intent to leave their current employer, as stated in a
study that used data from the Korea Institute of Public Administration's
2019 Public Service Life Survey.
A 2022 study that used survey data from 354 schools in Chile
found school principals experienced increased emotional exhaustion and
risk of burnout when they were advised of an increase in red tape in the
form of unneeded compliance tasks. Similarly, research conducted into experiences of public-school leaders
and teachers in Belgium observed that when employees were faced with a
higher level of red tape (associated with the use of new digital
tools), they were more likely to experience emotional exhaustion and,
consequently, have a greater intention to leave their organization.
Red tape, economic growth, and corruption
Red tape and economic growth
While efficient government institutions can foster economic growth,
cumbersome and unnecessary bureaucracy that delays permits and licenses
slows technological advances. Red tape has been found to be an obstacle to investment and growth in a study using data for 68 countries.
Policies that require government regulation and bureaucratic
intervention can stifle economic progress, as has been documented by
economist Anne Krueger in the context of an import-substitution development strategy.
This type of policy reduces the incentive to produce exports, thereby
generating a foreign exchange "shortage" that puts pressure on
governments to restrict imports to high priority areas such as medicines
over consumer luxuries. These restrictions require increased
intervention, such as additional customs inspections and import
approvals. In turn, this leads to delays and greater complexity of the
system, which raises costs for importers. The higher costs create an
incentive for black-market activity, thereby leading to political
pressure to tighten still further the restrictive import regime. Over
time, regulation and red tape promote more red tape and regulation in a
vicious circle, as supporters of import substitution become more
entrenched, while those who oppose it, such as exporters, cannot survive
in the new environment. Rising costs of administration in the private sector, along with costs
of delays and market inefficiency, weigh on economic performance and
often result in an economic crisis.
Red tape and corruption
The existence of regulations and authorizations provides a kind of
monopoly power to the officials who must approve or inspect regulated
activities. When regulations are not transparent, or an authorization can be
obtained only from a specific office or individual (that is, there is no
competition in the granting of these authorizations), bureaucrats have a
great deal of power which may lead to corruption.
Officials may even intentionally introduce new regulations and
red tape in order to be able to extract more bribes by threatening to
deny permits. Particularly in developing and transition
economies, surveys indicate that a large proportion of an enterprise
manager's time (especially for small enterprises) requires dealing with
bureaucracies, and this time can be reduced through the payment of
bribes.
"Ignore all rules" (IAR) is a policy of the English Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, which reads (emphasis and links in original): "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." The rule, under different language, was proposed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger
to encourage editors to add information without focusing excessively on
formatting, though Sanger later criticized the rule's effects on the
community.
The policy allows Wikipedia users
to use a policy to occasionally work around the site's rules without
rejecting the entire rule system. A study in 2012 found that in "Articles for deletion"
discussions, which determine whether a Wikipedia article should be
deleted, comments were given more weight when they used IAR as
justification.
History
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, with few policies, the intention being that users would determine rules via consensus. "Ignore all rules" was proposed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on a "rules to consider page", and became one of the first formal guidelines of Wikipedia. Sanger later said that his intention was to convey that "people should
not worry about getting formatting right and getting every single detail
of policy under their belts before they started contributing". Having conceived of the rule as a "temporary and humorous injunction" he rejected it in his later project Citizendium as "other people were taking it seriously".
The original formulation of the rule was:
If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of
participation in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business.
The current formulation of the rule is:
If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. [emphasis in original]
Sanger has opined that his proposal of IAR was "ironic", as was his rejection of a formal title and enforceable authority. In Open Sources 2.0,
he describes these things as "clearly mistakes on [his] part", as they
prevented him from enforcing rules. Sanger proposes that a "founding
community charter" would have aided with issues in the community of
Wikipedia, though he believes IAR and other early decisions did "help
the project get off the ground".
Meaning
A flowchart relating to usage of rules on Wikipedia, displayed in the Wikipedia essay "What 'Ignore all rules' means"
"Ignore all rules" refers to the idea that a user is permitted to
violate a rule on a case-by-case basis, if the rule's application could
cause negative consequences. IAR provides agency for an editor whilst protecting the site's set of rules; it augments Wikipedia's bureaucratic structure. It is a logical impossibility, or a paradox, as its inclusion in Wikipedia's set of rules "makes rule violation an expected behavior". It is a variation of the barber's paradox.
"What "Ignore all rules" means", a Wikipedia essay, attempts to provide clarification as to the scope of IAR. The policy is argued not to justify all actions or prevent users from
being held accountable for their edits. It is instead said to encourage
the use of personal judgement and allow novices to contribute without
full awareness of every policy and guideline.
It has been said that upon conception, IAR was partially "an
admission that early contributors often faced situations in which any
extant rule would not make sense". However, as the project developed,
this became less relevant and by 2015 it had "become very difficult to
find a situation in which no existing rule would apply".
The rule is closely related to "Wikipedia has no firm rules", the
fifth of the "five pillars" which summarize the site's "fundamental
principles". It also links to the guideline which states that Wikipedia editors should "be bold", an idea which Sanger proposed "in a similar spirit" to IAR.
A 2008 article notes that though the policy is "only sixteen
words long, the page explaining what the policy means contains over 500
words, refers readers to seven other documents, has generated over 8,000
words of discussion, and has been changed over 100 times in less than a
year". It evaluates the word count increases of many policies on the
English Wikipedia, noting that though the word count of IAR had
decreased, when including the supplemental page explaining it, this
amounted to a 3600% increase in length since the rule's conception.
Use in practice
A 2012 American Behavioral Scientist study analyzed the English Wikipedia's deletion process, "articles for deletion"
(AfD). It found that IAR significantly impacted the weight of a
comment: a page was more likely to be retained if a Wikipedia editor
cited IAR in a "keep" vote, and more likely to be deleted if an editor
cited IAR in a "delete" vote. The study also found that an article was
more likely to be kept if the AfD contained a "keep" comment referring
to both IAR and a "notability"
policy (a rule on Wikipedia about which topics should have an article).
This was not the case for "delete" comments. Additionally, if an administrator
referred to IAR in favor of deletion then the article was more likely
to be kept. The study concluded that the rule acts by "strengthening the
efficacy of the individual and diminishing that of the bureaucracy".
In Joseph M. Reagle Jr.'s 2010 book Good Faith Collaboration
he writes that "ignore all rules" is "clever" and has substance of
merit, but it "is bound to require qualification", such as that found in
the essay "What 'Ignore All Rules' Really Means". McGrady proposed that Wikipedia's "Gaming the System" guideline is a
better way to convey the spirit of Wikipedia than IAR. The former
guideline forbids users from purposefully misinterpreting Wikipedia's
policies in order to undermine their intent, an action referred to as
"gaming". McGrady criticizes that IAR is "too abstract and too often misinterpreted or misused, itself a constant subject of gaming".
In his 2015 book Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz
writes that despite the policy, "ignoring the rules in Wikipedia is not
an effective strategy if a contributor wants his or her contribution to
stick". Tkacz goes on to say that "Wikipedia does have firm rules", but
that they "are not fixed for all time".
In a criticism of Wikipedia's bureaucracy, Dariusz Jemielniak
writes that the rule is "knocked over in practice", noting that there
are many essays on the site which explain when to use the rule.
Jemielniak recommends that a "bureaucracy-busting squad" should be
founded to "actively use and educate about" the rule. David Auerbach of Slate similarly writes that "ignore all rules" is hypocritically used by Wikipedia editors to "prevail in debates".
Initially available only in English, as of 2026, Wikipedia has grown to over 300 languages and is one of the world's most visited websites. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles,
remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than
67 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device
visits and 13 million edits per month (about fiveedits per second on average) as of April 2024. As of December 2025, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic
comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and
the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia each represent around 5%.
Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored
by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire
site, sometimes due to its criticism of the government or for content
otherwise considered blasphemous. Although Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about those events.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia's launch, but with limited success. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online
English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by
experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License. Still, before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.
Launch and growth
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as "Wikipedia Day"), as a single English language edition with the domain name www.wikipedia.com, and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name, proposed by Sanger to forestall any potential damage to the Nupedia name, originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its integral policy of "neutral point of view" arose within its first year. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business.
The Wikipedia home page on December 20, 2001
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken
down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.
The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.
Due to fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new
articles and of editors appears to have peaked around early 2007. The edition reached 3 million articles in August 2009. Around 1,800
articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that
average was roughly 800. 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". 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.
In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University
in Madrid, Spain, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000
editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost
only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology. 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. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of
editors was "stable and sustainable". A 2013 MIT Technology Review
article, "The Decline of Wikipedia", questioned this claim, reporting
that since 2007 Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and
suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators was also in decline. 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.
On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times
indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost
nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There was a decline of
about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most
popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English
Wikipedia declined by twelve percent, those of the German version slid
by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost 9 percent." Varma added, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users." When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
said that he suspected much of the page-view decline was due to
Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from
the search page, you don't need to click [any further]." By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular website globally. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page.
Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. These other Wikimedia projects include Wiktionary, a dictionary project launched in December 2002, Wikiquote, a collection of quotations created a week after Wikimedia launched, Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts, Wikimedia Commons, a site devoted to free-knowledge multimedia, Wikinews, for collaborative journalism, and Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. Another sister project of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, is a catalog of all species, but is not open for public editing. In 2012, Wikivoyage, an editable travel guide, and Wikidata, an editable knowledge base, launched.
Milestones
Cartogram showing number of articles in the top 88 Wikipedias (as of March 2024).
The size of the circles for Wikipedias that have less than a million
articles is fixed and not proportional to the size of the Wikipedia. The
smallest Wikipedia that made the cutoff is the Haitian Creole Wikipedia with 69K articles. The languages are roughly grouped by region:
In January 2007, Wikipedia first became one of the ten most popular websites in the United States, according to Comscore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, it was ranked ninth, surpassing The New York Times (No. 10) and Apple (No. 11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 million unique visitors. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month. On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore". As of March 2023, it ranked sixth in popularity, according to Similarweb. Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle
argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of
historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal
through "stigmergic accumulation".
In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia; in October 2014, Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument; and, in July 2015, 106 of the 7,473 700-page volumes of Wikipedia became available as Print Wikipedia. In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash landed on the surface of the Moon
carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia engraved on thin
nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA.
On January 18, 2023, Wikipedia debuted a new website redesign, called "Vector 2022". It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool.The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes.
Both Sanger and Wales gave public interviews in late 2025 about
their reflections about the status and state of Wikipedia, leading up to
its 25 years of operation on January 15, 2026; Wales appeared on the
PBS television news show GZERO Worl,d interviewed by Ian Bremmer and Sanger has appeared on the FOX news network, interviewed by Ashley Rindsberg. Wales's book The Seven Rules of Trust was published in October 2025 by Penguin Random House.
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.
Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly
50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia
content across its projects. According to the foundation, this growth is
largely attributed to automated programs, or "scraper"
bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use
in training large language models and related applications.
In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same month in 2024 in human page views. They speculate that it reflects the use of generative AI and social media on how people tend to search for information.
Collaborative editing
Differences between versions of an article are highlighted.
Restrictions
Due to Wikipedia's increasing popularity, some editions, including
the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain
cases. 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. On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial,
sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying
degrees. A frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or "extended
confirmed protected", meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended
confirmed" editors can modify it. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes. A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review
identified Wikipedia's page-protection policies as "perhaps the most
important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas". Wikipedia has delegated some functions to bots. 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. Bots must be approved by the community before their tasks are implemented.
In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit
modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on
certain conditions. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English
Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012. Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain
controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established
users before they are published. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community.
Articles related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are placed under extended-confirmed protection. Editors also can make only one revert per day across the entire field
and can be banned from editing related articles. These restrictions were
introduced in 2008. 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.
Review of changes
Wikipedia's editing interface
Although
changes are not systematically reviewed, Wikipedia's software provides
tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. Each article's
History page links to each revision. On most articles, anyone can view the latest changes and undo others'
revisions by clicking a link on the article's History page. Registered
users may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they
can be notified of changes. "New pages patrol" is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.
In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki
created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features
such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored
"creative construction" over "creative destruction".
Any change that deliberately compromises Wikipedia's integrity is
considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism
include additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include
advertising and other types of spam. Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely
blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the
deliberate addition of plausible but false information, can be more
difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify
page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate
the article's underlying code, or use images disruptively.
Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect and repair.
In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It remained uncorrected for four months. Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University,
called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any
way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales said he did
not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.After the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool". The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people.
Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which
can be discussed on article Talk pages. Disputes may result in repeated
competing changes to an article, known as "edit warring". It is widely seen as a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added, and criticized as creating a competitive and conflict-based editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles. 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.
Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive work behavior
at Wikipedia. He relied instead on "mutually reverting edit pairs",
where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in
sequence, returns to revert the first editor. The results were tabulated
for several language versions of Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia's
three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad. 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. In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors,
beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia.
Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia,
with roughly 500,000 such debates since Wikipedia's inception as of
2019. Once an article is nominated for deletion, the dispute is
typically determined by initial votes (to keep or delete) and by
reference to topic-specific notability policies.
Policies and content
"Five pillars of Wikipedia" redirects here. For the Wikipedia policy, see Wikipedia:Five pillars.
Wikipedia is composed of 11 different namespaces, with its articles being present in mainspace.
Other namespaces have a prefix before their page title and fulfill
various purposes. For example, the project namespace uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-governance-related discussions. Most readers are not aware of these other namespaces.
The fundamental principles of the Wikipedia community are
embodied in the "Five Pillars", while the detailed editorial principles
are expressed in numerous policies and guidelines intended to
appropriately shape content. The five pillars are:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view
Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute
Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility
Wikipedia has no firm rules
The rules developed by the community are stored in the Wikipedia
namespace, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website's policies
and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based
on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. They have since
diverged to some extent.
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style. A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",
which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in
reliable sources that are independent of the article's subject. Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established
and recognized and therefore must not present original research. Some subjects, such as politicians and academics, have specialized notability requirements. Finally, Wikipedia must reflect a neutral point of view. This is
accomplished through summarizing reliable sources, using impartial
language, and ensuring that multiple points of view are presented based
on their prominence. Information must also be verifiable. Information without citations may be tagged or removed entirely. This can at times lead to the removal of information which, though valid, is not properly sourced. As Wikipedia policies changed over time, and became more complex, their
number has grown. In 2008, there were 44 policy pages and 248 guideline
pages; by 2013, scholars counted 383 policy pages and 449 guideline
pages.
Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article. Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user
rights, granting them the technical ability to perform certain special
actions. Some user rights are granted automatically, such as the autoconfirmed and extended confirmed groups, when thresholds for account age and edits are met.
Experienced editors can choose to run for "adminship", which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being
changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes. Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in
decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making
edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary
editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive
editors from making unproductive edits.
By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to
Wikipedia's earlier years, in part because the process of vetting
potential administrators had become more rigorous. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship
over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted
adminship.
Dispute resolution
Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semi-formal dispute resolution
process. To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at
appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion
requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a
"request for comment", in which bots add the discussion to a centralized list of discussions,
invite editors to participate, and remove the discussion from the list
after 30 days. However, editors have the discretion to close (and delist) the
discussion early or late. If the result of a discussion is not obvious, a
closer—an uninvolved editor usually in good standing—may render a
verdict from the strength of the arguments presented and then the number
of arguers on each side. Wikipedians emphasize that the process is not a vote by referring to
statements of opinion in such discussions as "!vote"s, in which the
exclamation mark is the symbol for logical negation and pronounced "not".
Wikipedia encourages local resolutions of conflicts, which
Jemielniak argues is quite unique in organization studies, though there
has been some recent interest in consensus building in the field. Reagle and Sue Gardner argue that the approaches to consensus building are similar to those used by Quakers. A difference from Quaker meetings is the absence of a facilitator in the presence of disagreement, a role played by the clerk in Quaker meetings.
The Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute
resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement
between two opposing views on how an article should read, the
Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the
specific view that should be adopted.
Statistical analyses suggest that the English Wikipedia committee
ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes
are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between
conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing
potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles,
although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new
content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is
considered biased). Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of
cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%),
or Wikipedia (16%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit
warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be
limited to warnings.
Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated and
dedicated "talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for
editors to discuss, coordinate, and debate. Wikipedia's community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations. Its preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".
Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked there. Jimmy Wales
once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few
hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and
that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". Since Wikipedia relies on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus on topics that interest them.
The English Wikipedia has 7,170,272 articles, 52,416,890 registered editors, and 277,105 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days. Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as
signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are
Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may
target or discount their contributions. Becoming a Wikipedia insider
involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn
Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted
dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with
in-jokes and insider references". Editors who do not log in are in some sense "second-class citizens" on Wikipedia, as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who
have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on
the basis of their ongoing participation", but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty. New editors often struggle to understand Wikipedia's complexity.
Experienced editors are encouraged not to "bite" the newcomers in order
to create a more welcoming atmosphere.
Research
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". Jimmy Wales
stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done
by just 0.7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact, the most
active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget
showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Wikipedia
content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the
latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and
formatting is done by "insiders".
In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that "one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz,
who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their
content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low
edit counts. A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that
the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the
control group and the samples were small. According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content".
Diversity
Several studies have shown that most volunteer Wikipedia contributors are male. The results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Wikipedia contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. 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". Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.
There are currently 345 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). As of April 2026, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, German, French, Swedish, and Dutch Wikipedias. The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013 had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. The latter are both languages of the Philippines.
In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Spanish, Russian, Italian, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Waray, and Portuguese), seven more have over 500,000 articles (Persian, Chechen, Catalan, Indonesian, Korean, Serbian, and Tatar), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000.[W 36][W 35] The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 7.1 million articles. As of January 2021,
the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic,
with the remaining split among the other languages. The top 10 editions
represent approximately 85% of the total traffic.
Most viewed editions of Wikipedia, 2008–2024
Most edited editions of Wikipedia, 2001–2024
Articles in the 20 largest language editions of Wikipedia
(as of 18 April 2026)
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). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. colour versus color) or points of view.
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. The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly
between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other
factors.
Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and
distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every
single person on the planet in their own language". Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some
efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by
Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all
its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia, and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history,
geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language
not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about
small towns in the United States might be available only in English,
even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia
projects.
Estimation of contributions shares from different regions in the world to different Wikipedia editions
Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in
most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully
automated translation of articles. Articles available in more than one
language may offer "interwiki links", which link to the counterpart
articles in other editions.
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. 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.
English Wikipedia editor numbers
On March 1, 2014, The Economist,
in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis
concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "the
number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third
in seven years." The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). 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. The number of active
editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking
in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of
2014.
In contrast, the trend analysis for Wikipedia in other languages
(non-English Wikipedia) shows success in retaining active editors on a
renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively
constant at approximately 42,000. 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.
Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014. Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. In 2010, columnist and journalist Edwin Black described Wikipedia as being a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods". 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.
Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black
alleged (in 2010 and 2011, respectively) that articles are dominated by
the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an "ax
to grind" on the topic. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin. In 2020, Omer Benjakob and Stephen Harrison
noted that "Media coverage of Wikipedia has radically shifted over the
past two decades: once cast as an intellectual frivolity, it is now
lauded as the 'last bastion of shared reality' online."
Multiple news networks and pundits have accused Wikipedia of being ideologically biased. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much "leftist bias". Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger,
who left Wikipedia in 2002 to establish competing websites, has said
that Wikipedia had become "propaganda" for the left-leaning
"establishment" and warned the site can no longer be trusted. In 2022, libertarian John Stossel
opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time,
appeared to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the
political left, specifically on political topics. Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a "western cultural bias" (or "pro-western bias") or "Eurocentric bias", reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, "similar biases that are found in
the 'ivory tower' of academic historiography". Carwil Bjork-James
proposes that Wikipedia could follow the diversification pattern of
contemporary scholarship and Dangzhi Zhao calls for a "decolonization" of Wikipedia to reduce bias from opinionated White male editors.
Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. However, a peer review in 2005 of forty-two scientific entries on both Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica by the science journal Nature
found few differences in accuracy, and concluded that "the average
science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
Others raised similar critiques. The findings by Nature were disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica, and in response, Nature gave a rebuttal of the points raised by Britannica. In addition to the point-for-point disagreement between these two
parties, others have examined the sample size and selection method used
in the Nature effort, and suggested a "flawed study design" (in Nature's manual selection of articles, in part or in whole, for comparison), absence of statistical analysis (e.g., of reported confidence intervals), and a lack of study "statistical power" (i.e., owing to small sample size, 42 or 4 × 101 articles compared, vs >105 and >106 set sizes for Britannica and the English Wikipedia, respectively).
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. 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. Legal Research in a Nutshell
(2011), cites Wikipedia as a "general source" that "can be a real boon"
in "coming up to speed in the law governing a situation" and, "while
not authoritative, can provide basic facts as well as leads to more
in-depth resources".
Economist Tyler Cowen
wrote: "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed
journal article on economics was more likely to be true after a not so
long think, I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that some
traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases, and
novel results, in his opinion, are over-reported in journal articles, as
well as relevant information being omitted from news reports. However,
he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites and
that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them. 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". In September 2022, The Sydney Morning Herald
journalist Liam Mannix noted that: "There's no reason to expect
Wikipedia to be accurate ... And yet it [is]." Mannix further discussed
the multiple studies that have proved Wikipedia to be generally as
reliable as Encyclopædia Britannica, summarizing that "...turning our back on such an extraordinary resource is... well, a little petty."
Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. 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.
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. 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. The article stated that: "Beginning Monday [from the date of the
article, June 16, 2014], changes in Wikipedia's terms of use will
require anyone paid to edit articles to disclose that arrangement. Katherine Maher,
the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's chief communications officer, said
the changes address a sentiment among volunteer editors that 'we're not
an advertising service; we're an encyclopedia.'" These issues, among others, had been parodied since the first decade of Wikipedia, notably by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.
Discouragement in education
Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually
appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as
authoritative. Wales once (2006 or earlier) said he receives about ten emails weekly
from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they
cited Wikipedia; he told the students they got what they deserved. "For
God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia", he said.
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. In June 2007, Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association,
condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, stating that academics who
endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a
dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything".
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. The experimental group was instructed
to learn before class and get immediate feedback before going in (the
flipped classroom model), while the control group was given direct
instructions in class (the conventional classroom model). The groups
were then instructed to collaboratively develop Wikipedia entries, which
would be graded in quality after the study. The results showed that the
experimental group yielded more Wikipedia entries and received higher
grades in quality. 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.
On March 5, 2014, Julie Beck, writing for The Atlantic
magazine in an article titled "Doctors' #1 Source for Healthcare
Information: Wikipedia", stated that "Fifty percent of physicians look
up conditions on the (Wikipedia) site, and some are editing articles
themselves to improve the quality of available information." Beck continued to detail in this article new programs of Amin Azzam at the University of San Francisco to offer medical school courses to medical students for learning to edit and improve Wikipedia articles on health-related issues, as well as internal quality control programs within Wikipedia organized by James Heilman
to improve a group of 200 health-related articles of central medical
importance up to Wikipedia's highest standard of articles using its
Featured Article and Good Article peer-review evaluation process. In a May 7, 2014, follow-up article in The Atlantic
titled "Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text?", Julie Beck
quotes WikiProject Medicine's James Heilman as stating: "Just because a
reference is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's a high-quality reference." Beck added that: "Wikipedia has its own peer review process before
articles can be classified as 'good' or 'featured'. Heilman, who has
participated in that process before, says 'less than one percent' of
Wikipedia's medical articles have passed."
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. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia. 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 contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic. The "Wikipedia is not censored" policy has sometimes proved
controversial: in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against
the inclusion of images of Muhammad in the English edition of its Muhammad article, citing this policy. The presence of politically, religiously, and pornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wikipedia by national authorities in China and Pakistan, among other countries.
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. A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota
indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage
topics. There was a greater concentration of females in the "people and
arts" category, while males focus more on "geography and science". An editorial in The Guardian in 2014 claimed that more effort went into providing references for a list of female porn actors than a list of women writers.
Systemic biases
Wikipedia's policies may limit "its capacity for truly representing
global knowledge". For example, Wikipedia only considers published
sources to be reliable. Oral knowledge
of Indigenous cultures is not always reflected in print. Marginalized
topics are also more likely to lack significant coverage in reliable
sources. Wikipedia's content is therefore limited as a result of larger
systemic biases.
Academic studies of Wikipedia
have shown that the average contributor to the English Wikipedia is an
educated, technically inclined white male, aged 15–49, from a developed,
predominantly Christian country. The corresponding point of view (POV) is over-represented. This systemic bias in editor demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia.There are two broad types of bias, which are implicit (when a topic is omitted) and explicit (when a certain POV is over-represented in an article or by references).
Interdisciplinary scholarly assessments of Wikipedia articles
have found that while articles are typically accurate and free of
misinformation, they are also typically incomplete and fail to present
all perspectives with a neutral point of view. 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". 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.
Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute
in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is
highly uneven, with Africa being the most underrepresented. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.
Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing information about graphic content. Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva,
and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily
available to anyone with access to the internet, including children. The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles. It also has non-sexual photographs of nude children.
The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from the German rock band Scorpions—features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent
girl. The original release cover caused controversy and was replaced in
some countries. 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.
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. 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. That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law. Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.
Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger's accusation, saying that Wikipedia did not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it." Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without
consulting the community. After some editors who volunteered to maintain
the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily,
Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time
as part of his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to the
Wikimedia Foundation mailing-list that this action was "in the interest
of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content
issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted". Critics, including Wikipediocracy, noticed that many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010 have reappeared.
Privacy
One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia regards one's right to remain a private citizen rather than a public figure in the eyes of the law.It is a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life. The Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy
states, "we believe that you shouldn't have to provide personal
information to participate in the free knowledge movement", and states
that "personal information" may be shared "For legal reasons", "To
Protect You, Ourselves & Others", or "To Understand &
Experiment".
In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic,
aka "Tron", a deceased hacker. On February 9, 2006, the injunction
against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting
the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents was being violated.
Wikipedia has a "Volunteer Response Team" that uses Znuny, a free and open-source software fork of OTRS to handle queries without having to reveal the identities of the
involved parties. This is used, for example, in confirming the
permission for using individual images and other media in the project.
In late April 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that
Wikipedia will not submit to any age verifications that may be required
by the UK's Online Safety Bill
legislation. 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.
Wikipedia was described in 2015 as harboring a battleground culture of sexism and harassment. The perceived tolerance of abusive language was a reason put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship. Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.
In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media.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. Prior to winning the award, Strickland's only mention on Wikipedia was
in the article about her collaborator and co-winner of the award Gérard Mourou. 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.
A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University's College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University
found significant gender differences in confidence in expertise,
discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. "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."
Nine Theses
"Nine Theses" refers to a reform proposal published by Larry Sanger in October 2025. Sanger's Nine Theses
on Wikipedia presents a critical assessment and reform agenda for
Wikipedia. The proposal is part of his broader effort to address what
Sanger perceives as systemic issues within Wikipedia, which include,
ideological bias, lack of transparency in the editor hierarchies, and an
ineffective consensus-based decision-making procedure.
Katherine Maher, the third executive director of Wikimedia, served from 2016 to 2021.
Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission. The foundation's 2020 Internal Revenue Service Form 990
shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million,
with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost
$11 million.
In May 2014, Wikimedia Foundation named Lila Tretikov as its second executive director, taking over for Sue Gardner. TheWall Street Journal
reported on May 1, 2014, that Tretikov's information technology
background, from her years at University of California offers Wikipedia
an opportunity to develop in more concentrated directions guided by her
often repeated position statement that, "Information, like air, wants to
be free." The same Wall Street Journal
article reported these directions of development according to an
interview with spokesman Jay Walsh of Wikimedia, who "said Tretikov
would address that issue (paid advocacy)
as a priority. 'We are really pushing toward more transparency ... We
are reinforcing that paid advocacy is not welcome.' Initiatives to
involve greater diversity of contributors, better mobile support of
Wikipedia, new geo-location tools to find local content more easily, and
more tools for users in the second and third world are also
priorities", Walsh said.
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, Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016. 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. She said to Bloomberg Businessweek
regarding the harassment issue that: "It establishes a sense within the
community that this is a priority ... [and that correction requires
that] it has to be more than words."
Maher served as executive director until April 2021. Maryana Iskander
was named the incoming CEO in September 2021, and took over that role
in January 2022. She stated that one of her focuses would be increasing
diversity in the Wikimedia community. Iskander served until January 2026, when Bernadette Meehan took over as CEO.
Wikipedia is also supported by many organizations and groups that
are affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation but independently run,
called Wikimedia movement affiliates. These include Wikimedia chapters
(which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia
Deutschland and Wikimedia France), thematic organizations (such as
Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups. These affiliates participate in the promotion, development, and funding of Wikipedia.
The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database system. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.
Several MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of the MediaWiki software. In April 2005, a Lucene extension was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from
MySQL to Lucene for searching. Lucene was later replaced by CirrusSearch
which is based on Elasticsearch. In July 2013, after extensive beta testing, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) extension, VisualEditor, was opened to public use. It was met with much rejection and criticism, and was described as "slow and buggy". The feature was changed from opt-out to opt-in afterward.
Computer programs called bots
have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as
correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start
articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical
data. One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors
when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or
unmatched parentheses). Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be
restored by other editors. An anti-vandal bot is programmed to detect
and revert vandalism quickly. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government. Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation. According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots.
In March 2026, an AI agent named Tom edited Wikipedia under the account TomWikiAssist. The account was blocked for being an unapproved bot.
Hardware operations and support
Overview of system architecture as of August 2022
As of 2021, page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Varnish caching servers and back-end layer caching is done by Apache Traffic Server. Requests that cannot be served from the Varnish cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass them to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering
for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further,
rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until
invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for the most
common page accesses.
Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers running the Debian operating system. By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, VirginiaA second application data center was created in 2014 in Carrollton, Texas, to improve Wikipedia's reliability. Both datacenters work as the primary one, in alternate semesters, with the other one working as secondary datacenter. In 2017, Wikipedia installed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia. In 2022, a caching data center was opened in Marseille, France. In 2024, a caching data center was opened in São Paulo, the first of its kind in South America. As of November 2024, caching clusters are located in Amsterdam, San Francisco, Singapore, Marseille, and São Paulo.
Internal research and operational development
Following growing amounts of incoming donations in 2013 exceeding seven digits, the Foundation has reached a threshold of assets which qualify its consideration under the principles of industrial organization economics to indicate the need for the re-investment of donations into the internal research and development of the Foundation. Two projects of such internal research and development have been the
creation of a Visual Editor and the "Thank" tab in the edit history,
which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. The estimates for reinvestment by industrial organizations into internal research and development was studied by Adam Jaffe,
who recorded that the range of 4% to 25% annually was to be
recommended, with high-end technology requiring the higher level of
support for internal reinvestment. At the 2013 level of contributions for Wikimedia presently documented as 45 million dollars, the computed budget level recommended by Jaffe for reinvestment into
internal research and development is between 1.8 million and
11.3 million dollars annually. In 2019, the level of contributions were reported by the Wikimedia Foundation as being at $120 million annually, updating the Jaffe estimates for the higher level of support to between $3.08 million and $19.2 million annually.
Multiple Wikimedia projects have internal news publications. Wikimedia's online newspaper The Signpost
was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who
would join the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees in 2008. The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia's sister projects.
Wikipedia editors sometimes struggle to access paywalled sources needed to improve a subject. The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia.Over 60 publishers have partnered with The Wikipedia Library to provide access to their resources: when ICE Publishing
joined in 2020, a spokesman said "By enabling free access to our
content for Wikipedia editors, we hope to further the research
community's resources – creating and updating Wikipedia entries on civil
engineering which are read by thousands of monthly readers."
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. The GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs licensed under the GPL.
This made it a poor choice for a general reference work: for example,
the GFDL requires the reprints of materials from Wikipedia to come with a
full copy of the GFDL text. In December 2002, the Creative Commons license
was released; it was specifically designed for creative works in
general, not just for software manuals. The Wikipedia project sought the
switch to the Creative Commons. Because the GFDL and Creative Commons were incompatible, in November 2008, following the request of the project, the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) released a new version of the GFDL designed specifically to allow
Wikipedia to relicense its content to CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009. In April 2009, Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum, which decided the switch in June 2009.
The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across
language editions. Some language editions, such as the English
Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, 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). 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. 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. 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.
Methods of access
Since Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or redistribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website.
Thousands of "mirror sites" exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones that also include content from other reference sources are Reference.com and Answers.com. Another example is Wapedia, which began to display Wikipedia content in a mobile-device-friendly format before Wikipedia itself did. Some web search engines make special use of Wikipedia content when displaying search results: examples include Microsoft Bing (via technology gained from Powerset) and DuckDuckGo.
Collections of Wikipedia articles have been published on optical discs. An English version released in 2006 contained about 2,000 articles. The Polish-language version from 2006 contains nearly 240,000 articles, the German-language version from 2007/2008 contains over 620,000 articles, and the Spanish-language version from 2011 contains 886,000 articles. Additionally, "Wikipedia for Schools", the Wikipedia series of CDs / DVDs produced by Wikipedia and SOS Children, is a free selection from Wikipedia designed for education towards children aged eight to seventeen.
There have been efforts to put a select subset of Wikipedia's articles into printed book form.Since 2009, tens of thousands of print-on-demand books that reproduced English, German, Russian, and French Wikipedia articles have been produced by the American company Books LLC and by three Mauritian subsidiaries of the German publisher VDM.
The website DBpedia, begun in 2007, extracts data from the infoboxes and category declarations of the English-language Wikipedia. Wikimedia has created the Wikidata
project with a similar objective of storing the basic facts from each
page of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects and make it
available in a queryable semantic format, RDF. As of February 2023, it has over 101 million items. WikiReader is a dedicated reader device that contains an offline copy of Wikipedia, which was launched by OpenMoko and first released in 2009.
Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged. Wikipedia publishes "dumps" of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023, there is no dump available of Wikipedia's images. Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this.
Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk,
where volunteers answer questions from the general public. 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.
A mobile version showing the English Wikipedia's Main Page on October 2, 2024Wikipedia page views by platform
Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection. 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. The article in The New York Times
reported the comparison statistics for mobile edits stating that, "Only
20 percent of the readership of the English-language Wikipedia comes
via mobile devices, a figure substantially lower than the percentage of
mobile traffic for other media sites, many of which approach 50 percent.
And the shift to mobile editing has lagged even more." In 2014 The New York Times
reported that Möller has assigned "a team of 10 software developers
focused on mobile", out of a total of approximately 200 employees
working at the Wikimedia Foundation. One principal concern cited by The New York Times
for the "worry" is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition
issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts
to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment. By 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation's staff had grown to over 700 employees.
Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service. In June 2007, Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official
website for wireless devices. In 2009, a newer mobile service was
officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more
advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or WebOS-based devices. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged since.
Many devices and applications optimize or enhance the display of
Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate
additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata like geoinformation.
The Android app for Wikipedia was released in January 2012, to
over 500,000 installs and generally positive reviews, scoring over four
of a possible five in a poll of approximately 200,000 users downloading
from Google. The version for iOS was released on April 3, 2013, to similar reviews. Wikipedia Zero
was an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to expand the reach of
the encyclopedia to the developing countries by partnering with mobile
operators to allow free access. It was discontinued in February 2018 due to lack of participation from mobile operators.
Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain that editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult, and this discourages new potential contributors. 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. Simonite alleges some Wikipedians
use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate other,s and those
editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors
on how to resolve this. Lih fears for Wikipedia's long-term futu,re
while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain, and rival
encyclopedias will not replace it.
Chinese access
Access to Wikipedia has been blocked in mainland China since May 2015. This was done after Wikipedia started to use HTTPS encryption, which made selective censorship more difficult.
Cultural influence
Trusted source to combat 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. 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'."
Readership
In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia
was ranked fifth globally among all websites, stating "With 18 billion
page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, ... Wikipedia
trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, the largest with
1.2 billion unique visitors." However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly
to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping. The website has since recovered its ranking as of April 2022.
In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles, Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009. The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia. In 2011, Business Insider gave Wikipedia a valuation of $4 billion if it ran advertisements.
According to "Wikipedia Readership Survey 2011", the average age
of Wikipedia readers is 36, with a rough parity between genders. Almost
half of Wikipedia readers visit the site more than five times a month,
and a similar number of readers specifically look for Wikipedia in
search engine results. About 47 percent of Wikipedia readers do not
realize that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. As of February 2023, Wikipedia attracts around 2 billion unique devices monthly, with the English Wikipedia receiving 10 billion pageviews each month.
During the COVID-19 pandemic,
Wikipedia's coverage of the pandemic and fight against misinformation
received international media attention, and brought an increase in
Wikipedia readership overall. Noam Cohen wrote in Wired that Wikipedia's effort to combat misinformation related to the pandemic was different from other major websites, opining, "Unless Twitter, Facebook and the others can learn to address misinformation more effectively, Wikipedia will remain the last best place on the Internet." In October 2020, the World Health Organization announced they were freely licensing its infographics and other materials on Wikimedia projects. There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.
Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act. The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the US federal courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization—though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case. Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some US intelligence agency reports. In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology
launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules
and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a
draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism, often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.
In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide. On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 US election campaign,
saying: "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first
results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important
as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are
being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day." An October 2007 Reuters
article, titled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol", reported the
recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's
notability.
One of the first times Wikipedia was involved in a governmental affair was on September 28, 2007, when Italian politicianFranco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the minister of cultural resources and activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama.
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.
Jimmy Wales accepts the 2008 QuadrigaA Mission of Enlightenment award on behalf of Wikipedia.
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".
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".
For Derakhshan, Wikipedia's goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers "endangered" due to the "gradual shift from a typographic
culture to a photographic one, which in turn mean[s] a shift from
rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment". Rather than "sapere aude" (lit.'dare to know'),
social networks have led to a culture of "dare not to care 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". 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."
Awards
Wikipedia team visiting the Parliament of AsturiasWikipedians meeting after the 2015 Asturias awards ceremony
Wikipedia has won many awards, receiving its first two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica
contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an
invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later
that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.
In 2015, Wikipedia was awarded both the annual Erasmus Prize, which recognizes exceptional contributions to culture, society or social sciences, and the Spanish Princess of Asturias Award on International Cooperation. Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian Wikipedia users.
Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term wikiality, meaning "together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on". Another example can be found in "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence", a July 2006 front-page article in The Onion, as well as the 2010 The Onion article "'L.A. Law' Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today".
In an April 2007 episode of the American television comedy The Office, office manager (Michael Scott) is shown relying on a hypothetical Wikipedia article for information on negotiation tactics to assist him in negotiating lesser pay for an employee. Viewers of the show tried to add the episode's mention of the page as a
section of the actual Wikipedia article on negotiation, but this effort
was prevented by other users on the article's talk page.
"My Number One Doctor", a 2007 episode of the television show Scrubs, played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the Battlestar Galactica episode guide.
In 2008, the comedy website CollegeHumor
produced a video sketch named "Professor Wikipedia", in which the
fictitious Professor Wikipedia instructs a class with a medley of
unverifiable and occasionally absurd statements. The Dilbert
comic strip from May 8, 2009, features a character supporting an
improbable claim by saying "Give me ten minutes and then check
Wikipedia." In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.
On August 23, 2013, the New Yorker
website published a cartoon with this caption: "Dammit, Manning, have
you considered the pronoun war that this is going to start on your
Wikipedia page?" The cartoon referred to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning), an American activist, politician, and former United States Army soldier who had recently come out as a trans woman.
In June 2024, nature.com published a fictional Wikipedia Talk
page under the title "Plastic-eating fungus caused doomsday" by Emma
Burnett. The Talk page concerned a fictional article describing the
unintended consequences of the release of a plastic-eating fungus to
clean up an oil spill. The article contained Talk page topics found on
Wikipedia, like discussions of changes in the articles priority level.
Publishing
A group of Wikimedians of the Wikimedia DC chapter at the 2013 DC Wikimedia annual meeting standing in front of the Encyclopædia Britannica(back left) at the US National Archives
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. Nicholas Carr's 2005 essay "The amorality of Web 2.0" criticizes websites with user-generated content
(like Wikipedia) for possibly leading to professional (and, in his
view, superior) content producers' going out of business, because "free
trumps quality all the time". Carr wrote, "Implicit in the ecstatic
visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening." Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with rigorous peer review processes.
Wikipedia's influence on the biography publishing business has been a concern for some. Book publishing data tracker Nielsen BookScan stated in 2013 that biography sales were dropping "far more sharply". Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia
and author of two biographies wrote, "The worry is that, if you can get
all that information from Wikipedia, what's left for biography?"
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. 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)". The study was updated in 2019.
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". He described it as "a
work of reference as useful as any in existence", with so wide a range
that it is almost impossible to find a person, place, or thing that it
has left uncovered and that he could never have written his last two
books without it.
A 2017 MIT study suggests that words used in Wikipedia articles end up in scientific publications. Studies related to Wikipedia have been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to support various operations. One of the most important areas is the automatic detection of vandalism and data quality assessment in Wikipedia.
Related projects
Several interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries
written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The
first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro
computers) and photographs from more than a million contributors in the
UK, and covered the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the
first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major
multimedia document connected through internal links), with the
majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the
UK. The user interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project
were emulated on a website until 2008.
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). One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative.
Subsequent collaborative knowledge websites have drawn inspiration from Wikipedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life and the online wiki encyclopedias Scholarpedia and Citizendium. The latter was started by Sanger in an attempt to create a reliable alternative to Wikipedia.
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