Weeklybio:About

About Wiki-Biodata

For information on Wiki-Biodata's administrative structure, see Wiki-Biodata:Administration. See also: Wiki-Biodata:Purpose Further information: Wiki-Biodata:Essay directory § About Wiki-Biodata

History

Further information: History of Wiki-Biodata The English edition of Wiki-Biodata has grown to 6,466,738 articles, equivalent to around 3,000 print volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Including all language editions, Wiki-Biodata has 58,428,184 articles, equivalent to around 21,900 print volumes.[1]

Wiki-Biodata was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia, begun by the online media company Bomis. Because Nupedia required highly qualified contributors and had an elaborate peer review system, its content grew slowly. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, Nupedia's founder and Bomis' cofounder, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed for the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a wiki could allow public members to contribute material, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.

There was considerable resistance from Nupedia's editors and reviewers to associate it with a Wiki-format website; so Sanger gave the new project the name "Wiki-Biodata", and it was launched on its own Wiki-Biodata.com domain on January 15 (now called "Wiki-Biodata Day" by some users). Its server (in San Diego) and bandwidth were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have worked on Wiki-Biodata include Tim Shell, one of Bomis' cofounders and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey.

In May 2001, Wiki-Biodatas were launched in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish, and were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian versions. Polish was added In September,[2] and further commitment to Wiki-Biodata's multilingual provision was made. Afrikaans, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian versions were announced by the end of that year.

When the Wikimedia Foundation was launched in 2003, Wiki-Biodata's domain was changed to Wiki-Biodata.org, corresponding with its new parent organization's .org top-level domain denoting its not-for-profit nature. There are now Wiki-Biodatas in over 300 languages.

Contributors

Main pages: Wiki-Biodata:Who writes Wiki-Biodata? and Wiki-Biodata:Wiki-Biodatans Further information: Wiki-Biodata:Administration § Editors File:The Impact Of Wiki-Biodata.webmPlay media Wiki-Biodata contributors

Anyone with Web access can edit Wiki-Biodata, and this openness encourages the inclusion of a tremendous amount of content. About 130,000 people—from expert scholars to casual readers—regularly edit Wiki-Biodata. These experienced editors help create a consistent style, following our Manual of Style. Contributors are called "editors" or "Wiki-Biodatans", regardless of their experience.

Several mechanisms are in place to help Wiki-Biodata members maintain civility while carrying out the important work of crafting a high-quality resource. Editors can watch pages, and technically skilled persons can write editing programs to track or rectify bad edits. When there are disagreements on content, editors often work together to compile articles that fairly represent current expert opinion. Aspiring authors may wish to read Contributing to Wiki-Biodata before contributing.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation owns the site, it is largely uninvolved in Wiki-Biodata's editing or daily operation.

Trademarks and copyrights

Main pages: Wiki-Biodata:Copyrights and wmf:Trademark policy

Wiki-Biodata is a registered trademark of the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which was formed in 2003 to fund the two-year old Wiki-Biodata and has since created a family of free-content projects also built and maintained by contributing users.

Most of Wiki-Biodata's text and many of its images are dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text is identified either on the page footer, in the page history, or on the article's Talk (discussion) page. Every image has a description page indicating the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

Contributions remain their creators' property, while the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses ensure they are freely distributable and reproducible. (See content disclaimer for more information.)

Credits

Text on Wiki-Biodata is a collaborative work, and the efforts of individual contributors to a page are recorded in that page's history, which is publicly viewable. Information on the authorship of images and other media, such as sound files, can be found by clicking on the image itself or the nearby information icon to display the file page, which includes the author and source, where appropriate, along with other information.