Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:48, 15 December 2005

Misplaced Pages (pronounced as or , also ) is a multi-lingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with an internet connection. The project began on January 15 2001 as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Misplaced Pages has more than 2,550,000 articles, including more than 860,000 in the English-language version. Since its inception, Misplaced Pages has steadily risen in popularity, and has spawned several sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews.

Articles in Misplaced Pages are regularly cited by both the mass media and academia, who generally praise it for its free distribution, editing, and diverse range of coverage. Editors are encouraged to uphold a policy of "neutral point of view" under which notable perspectives are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth. But Misplaced Pages's status as a reference work has been controversial. Its open nature allows vandalism, inaccuracy, and opinion. It has also been criticised for systemic bias, preference of consensus to credentials, and a perceived lack of accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias.

There are over 200 language editions of Misplaced Pages, around 100 of which are active. Ten editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish. Its German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by websites.

Characteristics

Misplaced Pages's slogan is "The 💕 that anyone can edit", and the project is described by its founder Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distribute a 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." It is developed on the wikipedia.org website using a type of software called a "wiki", a term originally used for the WikiWikiWeb and derived from Hawaiian Wiki Wiki, the name of the shuttle bus line at Honolulu International Airport and itself derived from a reduplication of wiki ("quick"). Wales intends that Misplaced Pages should achieve a "Britannica or better" quality and be published in print.

Several other encyclopedia projects exist or have existed on the Internet. Traditional editorial policies and article ownership are used in some, such as the expert-written Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the now-defunct Nupedia. More casual websites such as h2g2 or Everything2 serve as general guides, the articles of which are written and controlled by individuals. Projects such as Misplaced Pages, Susning.nu, and the Enciclopedia Libre are wikis in which articles are developed by numerous authors, and there is no formal process of review. Misplaced Pages has become the largest such encyclopedic wiki by article and word-count. Unlike many encyclopedias, it has licensed its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Misplaced Pages has a set of policies identifying types of information appropriate for inclusion. These policies are often cited in disputes over whether particular content should be added, revised, transferred to a sister project, or removed altogether.

Free-content

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), the license under which Misplaced Pages's articles are made available, is one of many "copyleft" copyright licenses that permit the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content provided its authors are attributed and this content remains available under the GFDL. When an author contributes original material to the project, the copyright over it is retained with them, but they agree to make the work available under the GFDL. Material on Misplaced Pages may thus be distributed to, or incorporated from, resources which also use this license. Misplaced Pages's content has been mirrored or forked by hundreds of resources from database dumps. Although all text is available under the GFDL, a significant percentage of Misplaced Pages's images and sounds are non-free. Items such as corporate logos, song samples, or copyrighted news photos are used with a claim of fair use. Material has also been given to Misplaced Pages under no-derivative or for-Misplaced Pages-only conditions. However, some editions only accept free media.

Misplaced Pages has been used by the media, academics, and others as a reference or supplement. News organizations have referred to Misplaced Pages articles as sources or in sidebars containing related information on the Web, some regularly. According to lists maintained by Misplaced Pages's editors, its articles have been cited most frequently in the news media. Less frequently, it has been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. For instance, the Parliament of Canada website refers to Misplaced Pages's article on same-sex marriage in the "further reading" list of Bill C-38. Noncomprehensive lists are maintained by Wikipedians of Misplaced Pages as a source.

Language editions

Misplaced Pages encompasses 119 "active" language editions as of March 2005. Its five largest editions are, in descending order, English, German, French, Japanese, and Polish. In total, Misplaced Pages contains 205 language editions of varying states with a combined 2.6 million articles.

Language editions operate independently of one another. Editions are not bound to the content of other language editions, and are only held to global policies such as "neutral point of view". Articles and images are nonetheless shared between Misplaced Pages editions, the former through pages to request translations organized on many of the larger language editions, and the latter through the Wikimedia Commons repository. Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in any edition.

The following is a list of the larger editions, sorted by number of articles as of 15 December 2005. (The article count, however, is a very limited metric for comparing the editions. For instance, in some Misplaced Pages versions nearly half of the articles are stubs which were created automatically by robots.)

1. English (865,140)
2. German (327,791)
3. French (205,037)
4. Japanese (164,075)
5. Polish (148,453)
6. Italian (126,431)
7. Swedish (121,481)
8. Dutch (112,829)
9. Portuguese (88,409)
10. Spanish (79,470)
11. Chinese (50,053)
12. Russian (48,901)
13. Norwegian Bokmål (44,155)
14. Finnish (41,106)
15. Danish (35,732)

Editing

Almost all visitors may edit Misplaced Pages's articles, and all registered users can create new ones and have their changes instantly displayed. Misplaced Pages is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Further, this real-time, collaborative model allows rapid updating of existing topics and introduction of new topics. Its authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will" by anyone who so wishes. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group. Decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Misplaced Pages is instead done by consensus and occasionally by vote. Jimmy Wales retains final judgement on Misplaced Pages policies and user guidelines.

By the nature of its openness, "edit wars" and prolonged disputes often occur when editors do not agree. A few members of its community have explained its editing process as a collaborative work, a "socially Darwinian evolutionary process", but this is not generally considered by the community to be an accurate self-description. Articles are always subject to editing, unless the article is protected for a short time due to vandalism or revert wars; therefore, Misplaced Pages does not declare any article finished. Some users attempt to enter malicious or amusing but irrelevant information but changes of this sort are normally removed quickly.

Regular users often maintain a 'watchlist' of articles of interest to them, so that they are immediately shown which of these articles have changed since their last log in. This allows monitoring of daily editing to prevent false information and spam, and also to keep up with other editors' views, or updates, of the subjects on the watchlist.

Because of the Wiki-principle, all edits of a Misplaced Pages article are kept in an edit history which can be looked at by everyone. Therefore, Misplaced Pages is also the first major encyclopedia ever where everybody can see how an article evolved over time and if, how and where the content of an article was controversial. All controversial standpoints which were once voiced and afterwards deleted and even plain page vandalism remain visible for everyone and provide additional information about the article's topic and its degree of controversy and add the dimension of time to every article.

Evaluations

Misplaced Pages's claimed status as an encyclopedia has been increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence. This is seen in articles and discussion venues both within Misplaced Pages and elsewhere. Information related to evaluations of Misplaced Pages, including individual opinions, quality control, and awards are discussed below.

Criticism in general

Main article at Criticism of Misplaced Pages

Criticism of Misplaced Pages has increased with its prominence. Critics of Misplaced Pages include Misplaced Pages editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of the articles. Notable criticisms include that its open nature makes Misplaced Pages unauthoritative and unreliable, that Misplaced Pages exhibits systemic bias and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals.

Misplaced Pages is criticised on the following issues:

• Usefulness as a reference
• Anti-elitism as a weakness
• Systemic bias in coverage
• Systemic bias in perspective
• Difficulty of fact checking
• Use of dubious sources
• Exposure to vandals
• Privacy concerns
• Quality Concerns
• Flame wars
• Fanatics and special interests
• Censorship

Quality

Misplaced Pages has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality.

Misplaced Pages has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias. An entire website called Misplaced Pages Watch has been created to denounce Misplaced Pages as having "...a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information."

Some argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Misplaced Pages an unreliable work. Misplaced Pages contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Misplaced Pages and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window"(Waldman, 2004). Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Misplaced Pages is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection. That premise is completely unproven." On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Misplaced Pages?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Discussing Misplaced Pages as an academic source, danah boyd said in 2005 that "t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes".

Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Misplaced Pages as a reference. Misplaced Pages articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Misplaced Pages was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,

"owever closely a Misplaced Pages article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler... The user who visits Misplaced Pages to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."

In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Misplaced Pages articles; see for example Misplaced Pages:Provenance. The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security." However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial (see Misplaced Pages talk:Provenance). Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."

Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Misplaced Pages in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.

Misplaced Pages's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Referencing Linus' law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow." Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Misplaced Pages's authority, "lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived." Conversely, in an informal test of Misplaced Pages's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.

Misplaced Pages has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."

The English-language website also suffers from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. These problems have had a negative impact on Misplaced Pages's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information.

It has been praised for, as a wiki, allowing articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Misplaced Pages is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.

Microsoft Encarta has started to solicit comments from readers in attempt to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its encyclopedia. Encarta Feedback allows any user to propose revisions for review by their staff.

The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Misplaced Pages in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Misplaced Pages was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-"), Brockhaus Premium 3.3, and Microsoft Encarta 3.1. In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Misplaced Pages improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events.". The journal Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Misplaced Pages are comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica.

At the end of 2005, controversy erupted after journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. found that his biography had been vandalized. This led to the decision to restrict the ability to start articles to registered users.

Community

The Misplaced Pages community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Misplaced Pages, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Misplaced Pages are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing. Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article.

In a page on researching with Misplaced Pages, its authors argue that Misplaced Pages is valuable for being a social community. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen. Misplaced Pages editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions. Also see Asking questions and Getting in touch.

Misplaced Pages related communities, such as The Misplaced Pages Review, whose members tend to dislike Misplaced Pages, also exist.

Awards

Misplaced Pages won two major awards in May 2004: The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 euro 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. Misplaced Pages was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. In September 2004, the Japanese Misplaced Pages was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.

Misplaced Pages has received plaudits from sources including BBC News, Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Science, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Irish Times, Reader's Digest and The Daily Telegraph. Awards to the Misplaced Pages project and press clippings are listed by Wikimedia contributors on its website.

Authors

During January 2005, Misplaced Pages had about 13,000 or more users who made at least five edits that month; 9,000 of these active users worked on its three largest language editions. A more active group of about 3,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the three largest editions. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Misplaced Pages's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.

Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Misplaced Pages. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee.

Former Misplaced Pages editor-in-chief Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a 💕." In a study of Misplaced Pages as a community, Economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation. Misplaced Pages has been viewed as a social experiment in anarchy or democracy. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence.

Distribution

Misplaced Pages content is being distributed in several ways. In addition to the main Web site at wikipedia.org, its content is mirrored on many other web servers.

Aside from distribution in online form, printed and print-ready versions of Misplaced Pages gain popularity. So called WikiReaders have been started by German Misplaced Pages in late February 2004 with Thomas Karcher's WikiReader about Sweden being the first. German WikiReaders about Sweden, Nauru, and Internet are available in print form from http://www.wikireader.de and several others as print-ready PDF files with printed versions in preparation for sale. Following this example, WikiReader projects have been initiated from Chinese, English, French, and Polish Wikipedians.

Also in preparation is a collection of paperback books by WikiPress with November 1 2005 as planned release date.

CD and DVD versions of Misplaced Pages are also available. The German Misplaced Pages project was the first with a shipped release in 2004, being currently in its second edition (ISBN 3-89853-020-5). The English Misplaced Pages is expected to follow at the end of 2005.

The Misplaced Pages is currently available for handhelds in the following languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Italian and Esperanto. The reader software TomeRaider required to access the Misplaced Pages data files is shareware (around $20 as of Nov. 2005). The data files themselves can be downloaded free of charge from the Misplaced Pages download area, purchased on CD, or compiled using conversion scripts. Instructions can be found on the page of the script author Erik Zachte. On most handhelds the huge size of the Misplaced Pages data files requires an extension card.

History

Misplaced Pages began as a complementary project of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on 9 March 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Misplaced Pages. Nupedia was described by Sanger as differing from existing encyclopedias in being open content; not having size limitations, as it was on the Internet; and being free of bias, due to its public nature and potentially broad base of contributors. Nupedia had a seven-step review process by appointed subject-area experts, but was later widely viewed as too slow for producing a limited number of articles. Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by the use of advertisements. It was licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License initially, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License prior to Misplaced Pages's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (...) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can see.

Misplaced Pages was formally launched on 15 January 2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. It had been, from 10 January, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model. Misplaced Pages thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbias" policy. There were otherwise few rules initially. Misplaced Pages gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles among 18 language editions by the end of its first year. It had 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Misplaced Pages coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Misplaced Pages.

Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository. Wales mentioned that he heard the concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld, an employee of Bomis who showed him the same wiki, in December 2000, but it was after Sanger heard of its existence from Ben Kovitz, a regular at this wiki, in January 2001, and proposed a creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales that Misplaced Pages's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki production, the GNUPedia project existed alongside Nupedia early in its history. It subsequently became inactive and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Misplaced Pages.

Citing fear of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Misplaced Pages, users of the Spanish Misplaced Pages forked from Misplaced Pages to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Misplaced Pages would not display advertisements, and moved its website to wikipedia.org. Projects have since forked from Misplaced Pages's content for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo, which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view."

From Misplaced Pages and Nupedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was created on June 20, 2003. Misplaced Pages and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Misplaced Pages's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki" had been created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquotes, a collection of quotes, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below.

Misplaced Pages has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or less new articles per day. The English Misplaced Pages reached a 100,000 article milestone on January 22, 2003. In 2004, its article growth rate was approximately 1,000 to 3,000 per day in all editions. In the English edition it reached 500,000 articles on February 25, 2004. Misplaced Pages reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on September 20, 2004.

Software and hardware

Misplaced Pages is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida and three other locations around the world. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required CamelCase for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Misplaced Pages began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Misplaced Pages project by Magnus Manske. Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki. It was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects.

Misplaced Pages was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into an n-tier distributed architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world.

Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to two load-balancing servers running the Perlbal software, which then pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page-rendering from the database. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France. A new Dutch cluster is also online now. In spite of all this, Misplaced Pages page load times remain quite variable. The ongoing status of Misplaced Pages's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.

Sister projects

Misplaced Pages has free content sister projects which fulfill non-encyclopedic roles. These include: Wiktionary, a free dictionary project; Wikibooks, a free textbook project; Wikisource, a free library; Wikiquote, a free compendium of quotations; and Wikinews, a free news source. The Wikimedia Commons is a shared media repository that serves all the sister projects (including Misplaced Pages). Misplaced Pages and its sister projects are administered by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Alternative spellings

Here is a list of alternate spellings for Misplaced Pages according to the language editions:

• ويكيبيديا - Arabic
• Uichipedia - Aromanian
• Vicipéid - Irish
• Vikipedio - Esperanto
• Vikipedi - Turkish
• Viquipèdia - Catalan
• Vicipaedia - Latin
• Wicipedia - Welsh
• Wikipédia - French, Portuguese, Hungarian
• Misplaced Pages - English, Finnish, German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Sicilian, Norwegian
• Wikipedio - Ido
• วิกิพีเดีย - Thai
• ウィキペディア - Japanese
• 维基百科 - Chinese
• Βικιπαίδεια - Greek
• Уикипедия - Bulgarian
• ויקיפדיה - Hebrew
• ויקיפעדיע - Yiddish
• Википедия - Русский

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items.

See also

• Internet encyclopedia project
• Uncyclopedia, parody of Misplaced Pages
• Who writes Misplaced Pages

References

1. See plots at "Visits per day", Misplaced Pages Statistics, 1 January 2005.
2. Jimmy Wales, "Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia", 8 March 2005, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>.
3. For example, see statistics and licenses on the English edition at "Misplaced Pages:Image copyright tags", Misplaced Pages (9 March 2005).
4. Andrew Lih, "Misplaced Pages as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource" (PDF), 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, April 2004.
5. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages as a press source 2005", Misplaced Pages (28 March 2005).
6. "C-38", LEGISINFO (28 March 2005).
7. Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages as a source
8. "Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta-Wiki (22 May 2005).
9. "All languages", Misplaced Pages statistics, 21 March 2005.
10. For example, "Misplaced Pages: Translation into English," Misplaced Pages. (9 March 2005).
11. "Complete list of language Wikipedias available", Meta Wikimedia (28 March 2005).
12. "Power structure", Meta-Wiki, 10:55 4 April 2005.
13. "Misplaced Pages:Edit war", Misplaced Pages (26 March 2005).
14. "Misplaced Pages sociology", Meta-Wiki, 23:30 24 March 2005.
15. Jimmy Wales, "Articles about ourselves", 5 November 2003, <wikien-l@wikimedia.org>.
16. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view", Misplaced Pages, accessed 4 March 2005. Italics original.
17. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view".
18. "Misplaced Pages:No original research", Misplaced Pages, (4 March 2005).
19. "Misplaced Pages:What Misplaced Pages is not", Misplaced Pages (4 March 2005).
20. Simon Waldman, "Who knows?", The Guardian, 26 October 2004.
21. Danah Boyd, "Academia and Misplaced Pages", Many-to-Many, 4 January 2005.
22. Hartmut Linden, "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", Science Magazine, 297 (5582). (Subscription access only).
23. Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, 15 November 2004.
24. Aaron Krowne, "The FUD-based Encyclopedia", Free Software Magazine, 1 March 2005.
25. Larry Sanger, "Why Misplaced Pages Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism", Kuro5hin, 31 December 2004.
26. Larry Sanger, "Misplaced Pages is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn't it full of nonsense?", Kuro5hin, 24 September 2001.
27. Joi Ito, "Misplaced Pages attacked by ignorant reporter", Joi Ito's Web, 29 August 2004.
28. Anonymous blogger, "How Authoritative is Misplaced Pages", Dispatches from the Frozen North, 4 September 2004.
29. "Who knows?"
30. "Why Misplaced Pages Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism".
31. "Misplaced Pages:Replies to common objections", Misplaced Pages, 22:53 13 April 2005.
32. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2005-04-11/Encarta editing", Misplaced Pages, 11 April 2005.
33. Michael Kurzidim: Wissenswettstreit. Die kostenlose Misplaced Pages tritt gegen die Marktführer Encarta und Brockhaus an, in: c't 21/2004, 4 October 2004, S. 132-139.
34. William Emigh and Susan C. Herring, "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias", paper presented at the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004.
35. "Critical views of Misplaced Pages", Wikinfo, 07:28 30 March 2005.
36. Andrew Orlowski, "Wiki-fiddlers defend Clever Big Book", The Register, 23 July 2004.
37. "Misplaced Pages:Researching with Misplaced Pages", Misplaced Pages (28 March 2005).
38. "Trophy Box", Meta-Wiki (28 March 2005).
39. Paragraph's statistics taken from "Active wikipedians" (Misplaced Pages Statistics, 21 March 2005).
40. "Misplaced Pages", Meta-Wiki, 08:02 30 March 2005.
41. Larry Sanger, "Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of 💕s", Kuro5hin, 25 July 2001.
42. Andrea Ciffolilli, "Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Misplaced Pages", First Monday December 2003.
43. Jimmy Wales, "Re: Illegitimate block", 26 January 2005, <wikien-l@wikimedia.org>.
44. Rob O'Neill, "World of knowledge in your hands", The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 2005.
45. Larry Sanger, "Q & A about Nupedia", Nupedia, March 2000.
46. Larry Sanger, "Q & A about Nupedia", Nupedia, March 2000.
47. Larry Sanger, "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir", Slashdot, 18 April 2005.
48. "Misplaced Pages:Multilingual statistics", Misplaced Pages, 30 March 2005.
49. Jimmy Wales, "Re: Sanger's memoirs", 20 April 2005,<wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org>.
50. Larry Sanger, "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir", Slashdot, 18 April 2005.
51. Richard Stallman, "The 💕 Project", Free Software Foundation, 1999.
52. Jimmy Wales, "Announcing Wikimedia Foundation", 20 June 2003, <wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org>.
53. "500,000 Misplaced Pages articles", Wikimedia Foundation, 25 February 2004.
54. See "Misplaced Pages Reaches One Million Articles", Wikimedia Foundation, 20 September 2004.

Further reading

• Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations", CHI 2004 April 24 - April 29 2004. Preliminary report "History Flow" available on the IBM website.
• Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages in academic studies
• Misplaced Pages:Introduction
• Misplaced Pages:FAQ
• Misplaced Pages:Press releases
• Misplaced Pages:Press coverage
• Misplaced Pages:Why Misplaced Pages is not so great
• Misplaced Pages:Replies to common objections
• Statistics
• Open Directory Project: Misplaced Pages
• OpenFacts: Copies of Misplaced Pages content
• SourceWatch: Misplaced Pages

External links

2. Part 2

• wikipedia.org, multi-lingual portal
• en.wikipedia.org, English language edition
• Meta-Wiki, policy-related and technical discussions regarding Wikimedia
• Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Misplaced Pages
• Larry Sanger on the origins of Misplaced Pages from MemoryWiki.org
• The Merits of Misplaced Pages
• BBC article showing flaws in wikipedia
• Guardian UK article
• "Interview with Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales," nPost, November 1 2005.
• Good example of making use of Wiki on a Pink Floyd website
• Misplaced Pages ASCII Art Collection, with rss-feed and XML serialization
• Misplaced Pages Signpost, newspaper about the English Misplaced Pages
• Misplaced Pages in the news. Aggregated news and rss-feed.(Multilingual)
• Why Misplaced Pages will survive the storm, from News.com
• How Stuff Works-Misplaced Pages, A brief guide about how Misplaced Pages works
• Nature comparison between Misplaced Pages and Britannica

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• Misplaced Pages