Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:50, 27 March 2010

Misplaced Pages

Screenshot of Misplaced Pages's multilingual portal.
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Available in	240 active editions (272 in total)
Headquarters	Miami, Florida
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
Created by	Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger
URL	http://wikipedia.org/
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

Misplaced Pages (/ˌwɪkˈpiːdi.ə/ or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau from wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia (from ancient Greek meaning "the circle of arts and sciences"). Misplaced Pages's 15 million articles (3.2 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. It was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.

Critics of Misplaced Pages accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture), and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted. Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information, though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived, and an investigation in Nature found that the material they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".

Misplaced Pages's departure from the expert-driven style of the encyclopedia building mode and the large presence of unacademic content have been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Misplaced Pages as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Some noted the importance of Misplaced Pages not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.

History

Misplaced Pages began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Misplaced Pages. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Misplaced Pages's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Misplaced Pages. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Misplaced Pages was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Misplaced Pages's policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Misplaced Pages operated independently of Nupedia.

Misplaced Pages gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004. Nupedia and Misplaced Pages coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Misplaced Pages. English Misplaced Pages passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.

Citing fears 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 its website was moved to wikipedia.org. Various other projects have since forked from Misplaced Pages for editorial reasons. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Misplaced Pages-inspired projects – such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol – have been started to address perceived limitations of Misplaced Pages, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising.

Though the English Misplaced Pages reached 3 million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007. In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009, that average is 1,300. A team led by Ed H Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project. New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal". This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others simply point out that the low-hanging fruit, the obvious articles like China, already exist, and believe that the growth is flattening naturally.

In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, found that the English Misplaced Pages had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. The finding was disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.

Nature of Misplaced Pages

Editing model

In departure from the style of traditional encyclopedias, Misplaced Pages consistently employs the open editing model called "wiki". Except for a few vandalism-prone pages that can be edited only by established users, or in extreme cases only by administrators, every article may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article (only in English edition). No article is owned by its creator or any other editor, or is vetted by any recognized authority; rather, the articles are collectively owned by a community of editors.

Most importantly, when changes to an article are made, they become available immediately before undergoing any review, no matter if they contain an error, are somehow misguided, or even patent nonsense. The German edition of Misplaced Pages is an exception to this rule: it has been testing a system of maintaining "stable versions" of articles, to allow a reader to see versions of articles that have passed certain reviews. The English edition of Misplaced Pages plans to trial a related approach. Another proposal is the use of software to create "trust ratings" for individual Misplaced Pages contributors and using those ratings to determine which changes will be made visible immediately.

Contributors, registered or not, can take advantage of features available in the software that powers Misplaced Pages. The "History" page attached to each article records every single past revision of the article, though a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards. This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors. Regular contributors often maintain a "watchlist" of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles. Computer programs called Internet bots have been used widely to remove vandalism as soon as it was made, to correct common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.

Articles in Misplaced Pages are organized roughly in three ways according to: development status, subject matter and the access level required for editing. The most developed state of articles is called "featured article": they are precisely ones that someday get featured in the main page of Misplaced Pages. Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach the FA status via intensive works of few editors. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English-language Misplaced Pages introduced an assessment scale against which the quality of articles is judged; other editions have also adopted this.

A WikiProject is a place for a group of editors to coordinate works on a specific topic. The discussion pages attached to a project are often used to coordinate changes that take place across articles. Misplaced Pages also maintains a style guide called the Manual of Style or MoS for short, which stipulates, for example, cases in which an article must start with the article title in bold in the first sentence.

In 2008, two researchers theorized that the growth of Misplaced Pages is sustainable.

Defenses against undesirable edits

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Misplaced Pages. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been compromised by the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:

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. Misplaced Pages faith-based encyclopedia.

In practice, obvious vandalism is fairly easy to remove from wikis, and the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is typically very low, usually a few minutes, but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months. John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not. This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

Misplaced Pages's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push. The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups has been noted, and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles. These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Misplaced Pages by anonymous editors without Misplaced Pages accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.

In practice, the Misplaced Pages is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), filters that warn users making undesirable edits, blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them, or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.

Coverage of topics

As an encyclopedia building project, Misplaced Pages seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge: all of the topics covered by a conventional print encyclopedia plus any other "notable" (therefore verifiable by published sources) topics, which are permitted by unlimited disk space. In particular, it contains materials that some people, including Misplaced Pages editors, may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic. It was made clear that this policy is not up for debate, and the policy has sometimes proved controversial. For instance, in 2008, Misplaced Pages rejected an online petition against the inclusion of Muhammad's depictions in its English edition, citing this policy. The presence of politically sensitive materials in Misplaced Pages had also led the People's Republic of China to block access to parts of the site. (See also: IWF block of Misplaced Pages)

Content in Misplaced Pages is subject to the laws (in particular copyright law) in Florida, where Misplaced Pages servers are hosted, and several Wikipedian editorial principles, policies and guidelines that are intended to ensure that Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia. Each entry in Misplaced Pages must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and thus is worthy of inclusion. A topic is deemed encyclopedic if it is "notable" in the Misplaced Pages jargon; i.e., if it has received significant coverage in secondary reliable sources (i.e., mainstream media or major academic journals) that are independent of the subject of the topic. Second, Misplaced Pages must expose knowledge that is already established and recognized. In other words, it must not present, for instance, new information or original works. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to reliable sources. Within the Misplaced Pages community, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers are left themselves to check the truthfulness of what appears in the articles and to make their own interpretations. Finally, Misplaced Pages does not take a side. All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy appropriate share of coverage within an article. Misplaced Pages editors as a community write and revise those policies and guidelines and enforce them by deleting, annotating with tags, or modifying article materials failing to meet them. (See also deletionism and inclusionism)

As of September 2009, Misplaced Pages articles cover about half a million places on Earth. However, research conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute has shown that the geographic distribution of articles is highly uneven. Most articles are written about North America, Europe, and East Asia, with very little coverage of large parts of the developing world, including most of Africa.

A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to Jan 2008) in each field:

• Culture and Arts 30% (210%)
• Biographies and persons: 15% (97%)
• Geography and places: 14% (52%)
• Society and social sciences: 12% (83%)
• History and events: 11% (143%)
• Natural and Physical Sciences: 9% (213%)
• Technology and Applied Science: 4% (−6%)
• Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%)
• Health: 2% (42%)
• Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%)
• Thought and Philosophy: 1% (160%)

Quality

Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Critics sometimes argue that non-expert editing undermines quality, for example historian Roy Rosenzweig claimed that: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Misplaced Pages. Committees rarely write well, and Misplaced Pages entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."

Reliability

As a consequence of the open structure, Misplaced Pages "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it. Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, the insertion of spurious information, vandalism, and similar problems.

Misplaced Pages has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; additionally, critics argue that Misplaced Pages's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Misplaced Pages is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear. Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Misplaced Pages citations. Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.

However, an investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Misplaced Pages came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors." These claims have been disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.

Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Misplaced Pages or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Misplaced Pages." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Misplaced Pages in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Misplaced Pages. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Misplaced Pages, along with Google, stating that academics who endorse the use of Misplaced Pages are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything". He also said that "a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Misplaced Pages, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way."

Community

The Misplaced Pages community has established "a bureaucracy of sorts", including "a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control." Misplaced Pages's community has also been described as "cult-like", although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users. Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship; this begins with "administrator", a group of privileged users who have the ability to delete pages, lock articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes, and block users from editing. Despite the name, administrators do not enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead they are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to block users making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).

As Misplaced Pages grows with an unconventional model of encyclopedia building, "Who writes Misplaced Pages?" has become one of the questions frequently asked on the project, often with a reference to other Web 2.0 projects such as Digg. Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Misplaced Pages and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". Wales performed a study finding that over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users (at the time: 524 people). This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Misplaced Pages ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site." Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Misplaced Pages requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labeled "anti-elitism".

In a 2003 study of Misplaced Pages as a community, economics Ph.D. student 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. In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society cites Misplaced Pages's success as a case study in how open collaboration has fostered innovation on the web. A 2008 study found that Misplaced Pages users were less agreeable and open, though more conscientious, than non-Misplaced Pages users. A 2009 study suggested there was "evidence of growing resistance from the Misplaced Pages community to new content."

At OOPSLA 2009, Wikimedia CTO and Senior Software Architect gave a presentation entitled "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site" in which he discussed the challenges of handling the contributions from a large community and compared the process to that of software development.

The Misplaced Pages Signpost is the community newspaper on the English Misplaced Pages, and was founded by Michael Snow, an administrator and the current chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons.

Notable users of Misplaced Pages include film critic Roger Ebert and University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.

Operation

Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters

Misplaced Pages is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Misplaced Pages-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The Wikimedia chapters, local associations of users and supporters of the Wikimedia projects, also participate in the promotion, the development, and the funding of the project.

Software and hardware

The operation of Misplaced Pages depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Misplaced Pages began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Misplaced Pages by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Misplaced Pages shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005 a Lucene extension was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Misplaced Pages switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. Currently Lucene Search 2.1, which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3, is used.

Misplaced Pages currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu), with a few OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam. Misplaced Pages employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache HTTP Server, and seven Squid cache servers.

Misplaced Pages receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. Page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Further statistics are available based on a publicly-available 3-months Misplaced Pages access trace. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Misplaced Pages. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Two larger clusters in the Netherlands and Korea now handle much of Misplaced Pages's traffic load.

Delivery media

Misplaced Pages's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed internet connection. However, Misplaced Pages content is now also accessible through offline media, and through the mobile web.

On mobile devices access to Misplaced Pages from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), through the Wapedia service. In June 2007, Misplaced Pages launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009 a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices, or the Palm Pre. Several other methods of mobile access to Misplaced Pages have emerged (See Help:Mobile device). Several devices and applications optimise or enhance the display of Misplaced Pages content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Misplaced Pages metadata (See Misplaced Pages:Metadata), such as geoinformation.

Collections of Misplaced Pages articles have been published on optical disks. An English version, 2006 Misplaced Pages CD Selection, contained about 2,000 articles. The Polish version contains nearly 240,000 articles. There are also German versions.

License and language editions

All text in Misplaced Pages was covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work, up until June 2009, when the site switched to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-by-SA) 3.0. Misplaced Pages had been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses were incompatible. In response to the Wikimedia Foundation's request, in November 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of GFDL designed specifically to allow Misplaced Pages to relicense its content to CC-BY-SA by August 1, 2009. Misplaced Pages and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum to decide whether or not to make the license switch. The referendum took place from April 9 to 30. The results were 75.8% "Yes", 10.5% "No", and 13.7% "No opinion". In consequence of the referendum, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees voted to change to the Creative Commons license, effective June 15, 2009. The position that Misplaced Pages is merely a hosting service has been successfully used as a defense in court.

The handling of media files (e.g., image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Misplaced Pages, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to. This is in part because of the difference in copyright laws between countries; for example, the notion of fair use does not exist in Japanese copyright law. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g., Creative Commons' cc-by-sa) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are currently 262 language editions of Misplaced Pages; of these, 24 have over 100,000 articles and 81 have over 1,000 articles. According to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Misplaced Pages) receives approximately 54% of Misplaced Pages's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Japanese: 10%, German: 8%, Spanish: 5%, Russian: 4%, French: 4%, Italian: 3%). As of July 2008, the five largest language editions are (in order of article count) English, German, French, Polish, and Japanese Wikipedias.

Since Misplaced Pages is web-based and therefore worldwide, contributors of a same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, (e.g. color vs. colour) or points of view. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view," they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.

Jimmy Wales has described Misplaced Pages as "an effort to create and distribute a 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all of its projects (Misplaced Pages and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Misplaced Pages, and it maintains a list of articles every Misplaced Pages should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, foodstuffs, and mathematics. As for the rest, it is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might only be available in English.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because automated translation of articles is disallowed. Articles available in more than one language may offer "InterWiki" links, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.

Cultural significance

In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles, Misplaced Pages has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. According to Alexa and comScore, Misplaced Pages is among the ten most visited websites worldwide. Of the top ten, Misplaced Pages is the only non-profit website. The growth of Misplaced Pages has been fueled by its dominant position in Google search results; about 50% of search engine traffic to Misplaced Pages comes from Google, a good portion of which is related to academic research. In April 2007 the Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Misplaced Pages. In October 2006, the site was estimated to have a hypothetical market value of $580 million if it ran advertisements.

Misplaced Pages's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Misplaced Pages's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the Civil Marriage Act. The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the U.S. Federal Courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization – though mainly for supporting information rather than information decisive to a case. Content appearing on Misplaced Pages has also been cited as a source and referenced in some U.S. intelligence agency reports. In December 2008, the scientific journal RNA Biology launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Misplaced Pages.

Misplaced Pages has also been used as a source in journalism, often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Misplaced Pages. In July 2007, Misplaced Pages was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4 which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Misplaced Pages in popular culture is such that the term is one of a select band of 21st-century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation and are on a par with such 20th-century terms as Hoovering or Coca-Cola. Many parody Misplaced Pages's openness, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles. Notably, comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Misplaced Pages on numerous episodes of his show The Colbert Report and coined the related term "wikiality".

Some media sources satirize Misplaced Pages's susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies. An example can be found in a front-page article in The Onion in July 2006, with the title "Misplaced Pages Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence". Others draw upon Misplaced Pages's motto, such as in "The Negotiation," an episode of The Office, where character Michael Scott says "Misplaced Pages 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". More rarely, Misplaced Pages's internal policies are parodied, such as in the xkcd strip "Wikipedian Protester."

On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the Minister of Cultural Resources and Activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Misplaced Pages, "the seventh most consulted website" to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.

On September 16, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Misplaced Pages had become a focal point in the 2008 U.S. election campaign, saying, "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Misplaced Pages page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day." An October 2007 Reuters article, titled "Misplaced Pages page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Misplaced Pages article vindicates one's notability.

Misplaced Pages won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) 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. On January 26, 2007, Misplaced Pages was also awarded the fourth highest brand ranking by the readers of brandchannel.com, receiving 15% of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"

In September 2008, Misplaced Pages received Quadriga A Mission of Enlightenment award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadić, Eckart Höfling, and Peter Gabriel. The award was presented to Jimmy Wales by David Weinberger.

In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called Bigipedia, which was set on a website which was a parody of Misplaced Pages. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Misplaced Pages and its articles.

Related projects

A number of interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Misplaced Pages was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from over 1 million contributors in the UK, and covering the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user-interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008. One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams and is run by the BBC. The h2g2 encyclopedia was relatively light-hearted, focusing on articles which were both witty and informative. Both of these projects had similarities with Misplaced Pages, but neither gave full editorial freedom to public users. A similar non-wiki project, the GNUPedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Misplaced Pages.

Misplaced Pages has also spawned several sister projects, which are also run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", created in October 2002, detailed the September 11 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, including Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. None of these sister projects, however, has come to meet the success of Misplaced Pages.

Some subsets of Misplaced Pages's information have been developed, often with additional review for specific purposes. For example, Misplaced Pages for Schools, the Misplaced Pages series of CDs/DVDs, produced by Wikipedians and SOS Children, is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Misplaced Pages targeted around the UK National Curriculum and intended to be useful for much of the English speaking world. The project is available online; an equivalent print encyclopedia would require roughly 20 volumes. There has also been an attempt to put a select subset of Misplaced Pages's articles into printed book form.

Other websites centered on collaborative knowledge base development have drawn inspiration from or inspired Misplaced Pages. Some, such as Susning.nu, Enciclopedia Libre, Hudong, Baidu Baike, and WikiZnanie likewise employ no formal review process, whereas others use more traditional peer review, such as Encyclopedia of Life, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Scholarpedia, h2g2, and Everything2. The online wiki-based encyclopedia Citizendium was started by Misplaced Pages co-founder Larry Sanger in an attempt to create an "expert-friendly" Misplaced Pages.

See also

• Academic studies about Misplaced Pages
• Democratization of knowledge
• Interpedia, an early proposal for a collaborative Internet encyclopedia
• GNUPedia
• List of online encyclopedias
• List of wikis
• Nupedia
• Open content
• USA Congressional staff edits to Misplaced Pages
• User-generated content
• Misplaced Pages Review
• Wikitruth
• Network effects
• Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge, philosophical background

Notes

1. Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 2006-10-15.
2. ^ "Five-year Traffic Statistics for Misplaced Pages.org". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
3. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages is a work in progress". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2008-07-03.
4. Some versions, such as the English language version, contain non-free content.
5. In some parts of the world, the access to Misplaced Pages had been blocked.
6. Mike Miliard (2008-03-01). "Wikipediots: Who Are These Devoted, Even Obsessive Contributors to Misplaced Pages?". Salt Lake City Weekly. Retrieved 2008-12-18.
7. Bill Tancer (2007-05-01). "Look Who's Using Misplaced Pages". Time. Retrieved 2007-12-01. The sheer volume of content is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the U.S., Misplaced Pages is #1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) Cf. Bill Tancer (Global Manager, Hitwise), "Misplaced Pages, Search and School Homework", Hitwise: An Experian Company (Blog), March 1, 2007. Retrieved December 18, 2008.
8. Alex Woodson (2007-07-08). "Misplaced Pages remains go-to site for online news". Reuters. Retrieved 2007-12-16. Online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. {{cite news}}: External link in |quote= (help)
9. ^ "Top 500". Alexa. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
10. ^ Larry Sanger, Why Misplaced Pages Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, Kuro5hin, December 31, 2004.
11. ^ Danah Boyd (2005-01-04). "Academia and Misplaced Pages". Many 2 Many: A Group Weblog on Social Software. Corante. Retrieved 2008-12-18. an expert on social media ... a doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society
12. ^ Simon Waldman (2004-10-26). "Who knows?". Guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2007-02-11.
13. ^ Ahrens, Frank (2006-07-09). "Death by Misplaced Pages: The Kenneth Lay Chronicles". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2006-11-01.
14. ^ Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave (2004). "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations" (PDF). Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Vienna, Austria: ACM SIGCHI: 575–582. doi:10.1145/985921.985953. ISBN 1-58113-702-8. Retrieved 2007-01-24.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
15. ^ Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl (GroupLens Research, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota) (2007-11-04). "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Association for Computing Machinery GROUP '07 conference proceedings. Sanibel Island, Florida. Retrieved 2007-10-13.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
16. ^ Jim Giles (2005). "Internet encyclopedias go head to head". Nature. 438: 900–901. doi:10.1038/438900a. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) The study (that was not in itself peer reviewed) was cited in several news articles, e.g.,
    • "Misplaced Pages survives research test". BBC News. BBC. December 15, 2005.
17. "Time's Person of the Year: You". TIME. Time, Inc. 2006-12-13. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
18. Jonathan Dee (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2007-12-01.
19. Andrew Lih (2004-04-16). "Misplaced Pages as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for Evaluating Collaborative Media as a News Resource" (PDF). 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 2007-10-13.
20. ^ Richard M. Stallman (2007-06-20). "The 💕 Project". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2008-01-04.
21. Jonathan Sidener (2004-12-06). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 2006-10-15.
22. Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2007-11-22.  'I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph,' said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Misplaced Pages with Mr. Wales.
23. ^ Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir". Slashdot. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
24. Sanger, Larry (January 17, 2001). "Misplaced Pages Is Up!". Internet Archive. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
25. "Misplaced Pages-l: LinkBacks?". Retrieved 2007-02-20.
26. Sanger, Larry (2001-01-10). "Let's Make a Wiki". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2003-04-14. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
27. "Misplaced Pages: HomePage". Archived from the original on 2001-03-31. Retrieved 2001-03-31.
28. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view, Misplaced Pages (January 21, 2007)
29. "statistics "Multilingual statistics". Misplaced Pages. March 30, 2005. Retrieved 2008-12-26. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
30. "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. Vol. 18. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. pp. 257–286.
31. " Enciclopedia Libre: msg#00008". Osdir. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
32. Clay Shirky (February 28, 2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The Penguin Press via Amazon Online Reader. p. 273. ISBN 1-594201-53-6. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
33. BBC News
34. Bobbie Johnson. "Misplaced Pages approaches its limits".
35. The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Misplaced Pages (PDF). the International Symposium on Wikis. Orlando, Florida. 2009.
36. Evgeny Morozov. "Edit This Page; Is it the end of Misplaced Pages". Boston review.
37. New York Times
38. Jenny Kleeman. "Misplaced Pages falling victim to a war of words". Guardian.
39. "Misplaced Pages: A quantitative analysis" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
40. "Misplaced Pages's Jimmy Wales denies site is 'losing' thousands of volunteer editors". Telegraph.
41. UX and Usability Study
42. Misplaced Pages:Ownership of articles
43. Birken, P. (2008-12-14). "Bericht Gesichtete Versionen". Wikide-l (Mailing list) (in German). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 2009-02-15. {{cite mailing list}}: Unknown parameter |mailinglist= ignored (|mailing-list= suggested) (help)
44. "Wikimedia blog » Blog Archive » A quick update on Flagged Revisions". Retrieved 2009-08-30.
45. "Misplaced Pages:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions – Misplaced Pages, the 💕". Retrieved 2009-08-25.
46. Giles, Jim (2007-09-20). "Misplaced Pages 2.0 – now with added trust". NewScientist.com news service. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
47. ^ Kleinz, Torsten (February, 2005). "World of Knowledge" (PDF). The Misplaced Pages Project. Linux Magazine. Retrieved 2007-07-13. The Misplaced Pages's open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles, get other people tied up in endless discussions, and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
48. The Japanese Misplaced Pages, for example, is known for deleting every mention of real names of victims of certain high-profile crimes, even though they may still be noted in other language editions.
49. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jesse Kriss, Frank van Ham (2007-01-03). "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved 2008-06-27. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
50. First Monday
51. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon (2007-07-22). "The Hidden Order of Misplaced Pages" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved 2007-10-30. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
52. "Misplaced Pages:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment". Retrieved 2007-10-28.
53. Diomidis Spinellis and Panagiotis Louridas (2008): The collaborative organization of knowledge. In Communications of the ACM, August 2008, Vol 51, No 8, Pages 68–73. DOI:10.1145/1378704.1378720. Quote: "Most new articles are created shortly after a corresponding reference to them is entered into the system". See also: Inflationary hypothesis of Misplaced Pages growth
54. Caslon.com
55. Robert McHenry (2004-11-15). "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia". TCS Daily. Retrieved 2009-09-10.
56. ^ Seigenthaler, John (2005-11-29). "A False Misplaced Pages 'biography'". USA Today. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
57. Thomas L. Friedman The World is Flat, p. 124, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 ISBN 978-0-374-29278-2
58. "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (longer version)". Citizendium.org. Retrieved 2006-10-10.
59. Kane, Margaret (2006-01-30). "Politicians notice Misplaced Pages". CNET. Retrieved 2007-01-28.
60. Bergstein, Brian (2007-01-23). "Microsoft offers cash for Misplaced Pages edit". MSNBC. Retrieved 2007-02-01.
61. ^ Stephen Colbert (2006-07-30). "Wikiality". Comedycentral.com. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
62. Hafner, Katie (2007-08-19). "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints From the Editing of Misplaced Pages". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
63. Misplaced Pages signpost: Abuse Filter is enabled
64. English Misplaced Pages's semi-protection policy
65. English Misplaced Pages's full protection policy
66. "The 50 most-viewed Misplaced Pages articles in 2009 and 2008". The Daily Telegraph. 2009-08-17.
67. Misplaced Pages:PAPER
68. Schliebs, Mark (2008-09-09). "Misplaced Pages users divided over sexual material". news.com.au. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
69. "Misplaced Pages is not censored". Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2008-04-30.
70. Sophie Taylor (2008-04-05). "China allows access to English Misplaced Pages". Reuters. Retrieved 2008-07-29.
71. "Misplaced Pages:Notability". Retrieved 2008-02-13. A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.
72. "Misplaced Pages:No original research". Retrieved 2008-02-13. Misplaced Pages does not publish original thought
73. "Misplaced Pages:Verifiability". Retrieved 2008-02-13. Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source.
74. "Misplaced Pages:Neutral_point_of_view". Retrieved 2008-02-13. All Misplaced Pages articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias.
75. Eric Haas (2007-10-26). "Will Unethical Editing Destroy Misplaced Pages's Credibility?". AlterNet.org. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
76. "Who's behind Misplaced Pages?". PC World. 2008-02-06. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
77. "The battle for Misplaced Pages's soul". The Economist. 2008-03-06. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
78. "Misplaced Pages: an online encyclopedia torn apart". Daily Telegraph. 2007-11-10. Retrieved 2008-03-11.
79. "Mapping the Geographies of Misplaced Pages Content". Mark Graham Oxford Internet Institute. ZeroGeography. Retrieved 2009-11-16.
80. ^ Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B. 2009. What’s in Misplaced Pages? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1509–1512.
81. Roy Rosenzweig. "Can History be Open Source? Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past". The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117–46. Retrieved 2007-10-29.
82. "Misplaced Pages:General disclaimer". English Misplaced Pages. Retrieved 2008-04-22.
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84. Raphel, JR. "The 15 Biggest Misplaced Pages Blunders". PC World. Retrieved 2009-09-02.
85. Stacy Schiff (2006-07-31). "Know It All". The New Yorker.
86. Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, November 15, 2004.
87. "Wide World of Misplaced Pages". The Emory Wheel. April 21, 2006. Retrieved 2007-10-17.
88. Jaschik, Scott (2007-01-26). "A Stand Against Misplaced Pages". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 2007-01-27.
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90. Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., March 2006
91. Encyclopaedia Britannica and Nature: a response
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111. Wikipedians are 'closed' and 'disagreeable'
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179. "Inquiry prompts reporter's dismissal", Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 13, 2007.
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189. "Interview With Nick Doody and Matt Kirshen". British Comedy Guide. Retrieved 31 July 2009.
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194. "Our projects", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-01-24
195. Misplaced Pages CD Selection. Accessed 2009 September 8
196. "Misplaced Pages turned into book". Telegraph.co.uk. Telegraph Media Group. 2009-06-16. Archived from the original on 2009-09-08. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
197. Misplaced Pages Selection for Schools. Accessed 2009 September 8.
198. Frith, Holden (March 26, 2007,). "Misplaced Pages founder launches rival online encyclopedia". London: The Times. Retrieved 2007-06-27. Misplaced Pages's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, stood by the site's format. – Holden Frith. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
199. Orlowski, Andrew (September 18, 2006). "Misplaced Pages founder forks Misplaced Pages, More experts, less fiddling?". The Register. Retrieved 2007-06-27. Larry Sanger describes the Citizendium project as a "progressive or gradual fork", with the major difference that experts have the final say over edits. – Andrew Orlowski.
200. Lyman, Jay (September 20, 2006). "Misplaced Pages Co-Founder Planning New Expert-Authored Site". LinuxInsider. Retrieved 2007-06-27.

Further reading

Academic studies

• Nielsen, Finn (2007). "Scientific Citations in Misplaced Pages". First Monday. 12 (8). Retrieved 2008-02-22. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Pfeil, Ulrike (2006). "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Misplaced Pages". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 12 (1): 88. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00316.x. Retrieved 2008-12-26. {{cite journal}}: More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Priedhorsky, Reid, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Misplaced Pages". Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: 1316624.131663.
• Reagle, Joseph (2007). "Do as I Do: Authorial Leadership in Misplaced Pages" (PDF). WikiSym '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis. Montreal, Canada: ACM. Retrieved 2008-12-26. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
• Wilkinson, Dennis M. (2007). "Assessing the Value of Cooperation in Misplaced Pages". First Monday. 12 (4). Retrieved 2008-02-22. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Goldman, Eric (2010). "Misplaced Pages's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences". Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law. 8. (a blog post by the autor)

Books

• Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates (2008). How Misplaced Pages Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Broughton, John (2008). Misplaced Pages - The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-51516-2. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help) (See book rev. by Baker, as listed below.)
• Broughton, John (2008). Misplaced Pages Reader's Guide. Sebastopol: Pogue Press. ISBN 059652174X.
• Lih, Andrew (2009). The Misplaced Pages Revolution. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 1401303714.
• Dalby, Andrew (2009). The World and Misplaced Pages: How We are Editing Reality. Siduri. ISBN 978-0956205209.

Book reviews and other articles

• Crovitz, L. Gordon. "Misplaced Pages's Old-Fashioned Revolution: The online encyclopedia is fast becoming the best." (Originally published in Wall Street Journal online – April 6, 2009, 8:34 A.M. ET)
• Baker, Nicholson. "The Charms of Misplaced Pages". The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008. Accessed December 17, 2008. (Book rev. of The Missing Manual, by John Broughton, as listed above.)
• Rosenzweig, Roy. Can History be Open Source? Misplaced Pages and the Future of the Past. (Originally published in Journal of American History 93.1 (June 2006): 117–46.)

Learning resources

• Wikiversity list of learning resources. (Includes related courses, Web-based seminars, slides, lecture notes, text books, quizzes, glossaries, etc.)

Other media coverage

• Dee, Jonathan (2007-07-01). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
• "For Music Fans: Misplaced Pages; MySpace". Houston Chronicle (Blog). March 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-17. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |first name= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |last name= ignored (help)
• Freeman, Sarah (2007-08-16). "Can We Really Trust Misplaced Pages?". Yorkshire Post. yorkshirepost.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-09-20.
• Giles, Jim (2007-09-20). "Misplaced Pages 2.0 – Now with Added Trust". New Scientist. Retrieved 2008-01-14.
• Miliard, Mike (2007-12-02). "Misplaced Pages Rules". The Phoenix. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
• Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2008-03-22.
• Taylor, Chris (2005-05-29). "It's a Wiki, Wiki World". Time. Time, Inc. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
• "Technological Quarterly: Brain Scan: The Free-knowledge Fundamentalist". The Economist Web and Print. 2008-06-05. Retrieved 2008-06-05. Jimmy Wales changed the world with Misplaced Pages, the hugely popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. What will he do next? .
• "Hoaxers force Wiki to weigh pre-checks Misplaced Pages". Metro Boston edition. 2009-01-28.
• Is Misplaced Pages Cracking Up?, The Independent, February 3, 2009
• The Wiki-snobs Are Taking Over, The Sunday Times, timesonline.co.uk, February 8, 2009
• Runciman, David (2009-05-28). "Like Boiling a Frog". London Review of Books. Retrieved 2009-06-03.
• Rosenwald, Michael S. (2009-10-23). "Gatekeeper of D.C.'s entry: Road to city's Misplaced Pages page goes through a DuPont Circle bedroom". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2009-10-22.

External links

2. Part 2

• Misplaced Pages – multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
  • Press coverage of Misplaced Pages at the English Misplaced Pages
• Misplaced Pages at the Open Directory Project
• Misplaced Pages topic page at The New York Times
• Video of TED Talk by Jimmy Wales on the birth of Misplaced Pages
• Audio of interview with Jimmy Wales about Misplaced Pages in general on the EconTalk podcast
• Misplaced Pages and why it matters – Larry Sanger's 2002 talk at Stanford University about Misplaced Pages. video archive and transcript of the talk
• "Intelligence in Misplaced Pages" Google TechTalk on YouTube, describing an intelligence project utilizing Misplaced Pages, and how Misplaced Pages articles could be auto-generated from web content

Template:Link FA ak:Misplaced Pages

• Ill-formatted IPAc-en transclusions
• Misplaced Pages
• Advertising-free websites
• Collaborative projects
• 💕s
• General encyclopedias
• Internet properties established in 2001
• Multilingual websites
• Online encyclopedias
• Open content projects
• Social information processing
• Virtual communities
• Web 2.0
• Wikimedia projects
• Wikis
• Internet history
• Hypertext
• Human-computer interaction
• Scientific revolution
• New encyclopedism