Wikipedia is a Web-based, freely editable encyclopedia by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Sourced

• [H]owever closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler.
  • Critique given by former Encyclopædia Britannica editor Robert McHenry in a frequently cited 2004 piece The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

• Wikipedia's promise is nothing less than the liberation of human knowledge - both by incorporating all of it through the collaborative process, and by freely sharing it with everybody who has access to the internet. This is a radically popular idea.
  • The Economist, 20 April 2006

• Shoppin' online for deals on some writable media. I edit Wikipedia.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic, "White & Nerdy", Straight Outta Lynwood (2006)

• When I visited the offices [in St. Petersburg, Florida] in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
  • Stacy Schiff, 2006-07-31, Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?, The New Yorker

• Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.
  • Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell), The Office, "The Negotiation" [3.18], 5 April 2007

• You just can't put something with commercial motive into Wikipedia. Admitting it is hardly better; it is still a crime. The Wikipedians and bloggers will attack hard and they will deserve what they get.
  • On an attempt to promote a marketing slogan by creating a Wikipedia article for it
  • Jeff Jarvis (June 23, 2007). "Buying their voices". BuzzMachine. HostingMatters. Retrieved on 2007-06-29.

• You set up this fantastic site, with people sending information all around the world, and you don't make any money of it! It's practically an un-American activity!
  • Clive Anderson, 2007-07-24, The Wikipedia Story, BBC Radio 4

• Hofstadter: The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me. Solomon: So fix it. Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back.
  • On "Douglas Hofstadter" article; Deborah Solomon, "The Mind Reader," New York Times, (2007-04-01)

• It seems that Wikipedia.com, that splendid source for all kinds of information, is no longer dedicated to the truth, assuming it ever was. Individuals who have tried to edit the pages about Barack Obama — to reflect the incontrovertible fact that he is not God, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan — report that their contributions have vanished within minutes of posting them, and that they, themselves, have been suspended for three days following each 'infraction'. When some sort of official at Wikipedia was contacted about this, she stonewalled, claiming that this censorship was the work of 'volunteers', implying they were somehow beyond control of Wikipedia itself. Like the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge were 'volunteers'.
  • L. Neil Smith, "Announcifications From Your Publicatorialist: Wikipedia, Missouri, and Ceres", 15 March 2009

• Even the founders of Wikipedia had no clue when they started the project of what it would accomplish. They dug a hole to find water, and struck oil instead.
  • Erik Zachte (Wikimedia Foundation data analyst), "Numbers and Strategy", July 24th, 2009.

• We now see the strong emergence of the Social Web instead of the Semantic Web, and a proposal has been made to use Wikipedia, the largest hierarchical collection of information in the world, as bottom-up input for the ontologies required to give shape to the Semantic Web.
  • Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, Sander Duivestein, Me the media: rise of the conversation society, Ed. VINT printed by Bariet, The Netherlands, 2009, ISBN 978 90 75414 22 6, p.277.

• Wikipedia is effectively one-of-a-kind. No other mass-market or topically broad wikis have had meaningful success to date. Even Wikimedia's other wiki projects are not nearly as active as Wikipedia. If successful wikis are rare, Wikipedia might be a one-in-a-million lightning strike — some unique combination of factors succeeded in this case, but those circumstances are unlikely to replicate. If so, Wikipedia's rarity might also highlight its fragility.
  • Goldman, Eric, Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences, 8, Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law

• Wikipedia is, for many users, the primary site for information on the Web (...) At present, Wikipedia hosts more than 2.9 million English-language articles, with a total of 13 million articles available in more than 250 different languages (...) Wikipedia is the second-most searched site on the Internet, behind only Google.
  • Michael Miller, Sams Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes, Pearson Education, inc., 2010, ISBN 978-0-672-33123-7, pages 3 & 5.

• As Wikipedia founder Jim Wales revealed, back in 2005, 50 percent of all Wikipedia edits were made by just 0.7 percent of users; 75 percent of all articles were written by less than 2 percent of the user base. These numbers reveal that the active Wikipedia community is a lot smaller than you might think. It's understandable, then, for this active group to be somewhat self-centered, and not always accommodating to new or causual users.
  • Michael Miller, Sams Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes, Pearson Education, inc., 2010, ISBN 978-0-672-33123-7, page 163.

Unsourced

• The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in theory.
  • Stephen Colbert

• Possibly the greatest idea of the Computer Age.
  • BritishWebWorld magazine

• The real problem is not Wikipedia, but reporters who fail to check their facts.
  • Joseph Wilson

• At last, an encyclopedia by potheads!
  • Dave Attell

• The big secret of course is that Wikipedia is not really about an encyclopedia, it's just a big game of nomic.
  • Jimbo Wales

• We don't know how many unique users visit the site because we're lame and don't keep track of it - we don't sell advertising, so we don't have to.
  • Jimbo Wales

• Our mission is to document human knowledge, no matter how unpleasant or offensive it may be to some people.
  • szyslak

• Wikipedia functions much like an iceberg: for every page of supposedly factual information one sees peeking out, hidden below are countless thousands of pages on debate, argument, and vandalism.
  • Uncyclopedia

• The best thing about Wikipedia is that you can make up your own information to put on it!
  • David Smith

• Wikipedia:The Yoda of the Internet!
  • Katy Chase in "In The Real World" (www.intherealworld.moonfruit.com)

• With Wikipedia, everyone can read anything anyone wrote on everything!
  • Unknown source

• I love Wikipedia. It's the first place I go when I'm looking for knowledge, or when I want to create some.
  • Stephen Colbert

• I love Wikipedia. Any site that's got a longer entry on "truthiness" than on Lutherans, has its priorities straight.
  • Stephen Colbert

External links

• Wikipedia multi-lingual portal

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