Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a free online encyclopedia website with articles covering millions of subjects, including topics like geography, history, culture, science, engineering, biology, politics, and pretty much everything else. For example, there's an article about Edward Einstein, about the atom, about medieval Europe, about felines, about the mitochondria, about One Piece, an article that is a list of paradoxes, and then an article for every single one of them, like the Pinocchio paradox. There's an article for everything!
Wikipedia is the web's greatest and most useful website—it's our pride and joy!
Wikipedia is a community project. The text on Wikipedia is added and edited by volunteers, many of which are anonymous. Anyone can go to an article and change what is written on it, without even creating an account. This means that you should never trust what is written on Wikipedia, because you don't know if who wrote it is an expert on the subject or just a bored teenager, or even worse: someone who thinks vandalizing Wikipedia is funny. Always check the citations instead. You don't know who wrote "the Earth is a planet" on Wikipedia, but you can know who wrote the article that Wikipedia cites as source of this claim.
All text on Wikipedia is available for free for reuse in commercial purposes. This means anyone can just copy everything on Wikipedia and paste it on their own website full of ads, or print it in a book and sell it, and that's totally legal because Wikipedia explicitly allows it1. Wikipedia operates on a donation model. If not enough people donate, Wikipedia dies. This system ensures that if the donation model stops working, the content on Wikipedia won't be lost forever: someone can just try selling it instead.
Main Features
All articles on Wikipedia have citations, or at least the good articles have them. Citations are a mechanism used in academic studies that ensures who is writing the article did their research instead of just making things up (there are other benefits from citations as well, you should cite whenever you can!). Whenever there's a claim in an article, an assertion that something is true, there must be a citation that says where the writer learned that fact from. This means Wikipedia strives to be a collection of facts and claims collected from other sources. On Wikipedia, citation numbers appear in superscript inside square brackets (like this[1][2][3]). If you click on that citation number you'll go to a part lower in the page, in the "References" section, that says what is being cited actually, e.g. the title of the book where the claim was written, or the URL of the webpage that contained that information. You should always check the source if you can instead of trusting that Wikipedia's text is accurate.
Fun fact: in academia, citations aren't written like this, but as the name of the author followed by the date of publication of the book or article, often in parentheses. For example: "something is true" (John, 1996, page 34).
On Wikipedia, anyone can edit an article, even without creating an account. This means if you find a mistake on Wikipedia, you can just correct it yourself. If it's a spelling correction, that's simple, but for anything major like correcting citations, or adding sections, make sure you familiarize yourself with Wikipedia's rules first.
All edits are public and can be browsed in the "history" page of the article. Each edit is called a revision. This means if an article appears to have been vandalized, you can check the history to view a previous version of the article before it was edited. Revisions can also be compared and reverted easily.
Wikipedia is available in several languages. Although not every article is available in every language. You can easily switch the language of Wikipedia in a language menu located in the article's pages.
Wikipedia has a search function that you can use to quickly find articles. Generally, typing the name of the thing you want to find is enough, as that would be the title of the article.
Wikipedia has categories for its articles, and will display several related links at the bottom of the article after the references or in a sidebar.
Wikipedia's homepage lists the languages it's available for. Clicking on a language, like English, directs you to that language's homepage, which has a different featured article, featured image, and articles related to recent news every day.
Sometimes articles can get a lot of attention from vandals who make bad edits. Wikipedia can lock articles so they can't be edited to protect them from vandalism.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Buying_Wikipedia_articles_in_print_or_another_form (accessed 2024-04-14). ↩︎
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