Online Encyclopedia
An online encyclopedia, also called a digital compilation, is a reference accessible online. One of the famous Online encyclopedias is Wikipedia. It is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. It is the world wide web’s most popular general reference work.
Encyclopaedias have been around for more than 2,000 years, summarising current scholarship in ways their readers can understand. The term “encyclopaedia” is derived from the Greek phrase “general education,” enkyklios paideia, and originally denoted a comprehensive or circular learning system or an all-encompassing education. In Pantagruel, chapter 20, François Rabelais first used the phrase in French when discussing education.
The definition of “encyclopaedia” has undergone significant alteration throughout its lengthy history. In today’s world, everyone imagines encyclopaedias as multivolume compilations of all knowledge, comprised of maps, an index, illustrated bibliographies and gazetteers, among other materials. They assume that it will contain biographies of important people from the past and the present and that the alphabetically arranged contents will have been written in their language by many people and edited by a highly qualified and scholarly staff.
However, none of these components has remained constant over time. There have been encyclopaedias of every size, ranging from massive collections of 100 volumes or more to a single 200-page book produced by one guy. However, as technology becomes more prevalent, online encyclopaedia is becoming more and more valuable and well-liked. Wikipedia is one of the most well-known and frequently used online encyclopaedias. You will find answers to almost anything you can think of in it.
A group of users known as Wikipedians worked together to establish Wikipedia, a free, open-content online encyclopaedia. While registration is unnecessary to modify articles, anybody registered on the site can create reports for publication. Wiki, a server programme that allows anybody to modify Web site material using their Web browser, is whence the site gets its name.
In January 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia as a spinoff of the prior encyclopaedia project Nupedia. Wikipedia was initially developed to offer material for Nupedia. However, the wiki site’s popularity quickly exceeded the original project’s parameters. The website provided far over five million articles in English as of January 2015 and much more in all other languages. At that time, Alexa listed Wikipedia as the seventh-most popular website on the Internet. The only non-commercial website in the top 10 was Wikipedia.
Best of Wikipedia
Having contributors from many areas of the world, Wikipedia provides its readers with a “world view” that could not be provided simply by a few contributors from a limited region. It also serves to eliminate cultural bias in articles. To use an extended metaphor, Wikipedia is very fertile soil for knowledge.
Can I edit Wikipedia?
Anyone can – it’s open to all and can be modified and edited by anyone. However, Wikipedia’s administrators protect some pages from direct editing if they believe they are regularly subjected to “vandalism” – the addition of abusive language or falsehoods.
Can I write on Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with internet access can write and change Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Wikipedia has been criticised for being untrustworthy and unauthoritative because of its openness. Article authors are not held publicly accountable for their writing because articles do not include bylines. Similarly, as anybody may modify any article, the entries on the website are open to shady alterations.
A website called WikiScanner was developed by Virgil Griffiths in August 2007 so that users may follow the origins of changes made to Wikipedia entries. Griffiths claimed that self-serving changes often comprised erasing or removing criticism of a person or organisation or, in the opposite case, inserting unfavourable remarks about a rival into the record. Editors are responsible for spotting and undoing such changes on Wikipedia.