Misplaced Pages

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105-483: In 2008, it went to several other locations, including the Connoisseur Room at 127 E Ohio St, The Columbia Club 121 Monument Circle, Suite 516, 401 East Michigan Street, and The Metzger Building at 9th and Pennsylvania, where it has been located since July 10, 2017. According to its website, dated February 1, 00-9, "In the face of a change in leadership and financial pressures due to a national economic recession

210-469: A trader focusing on futures contracts and options . Wales was adept at determining future movements of foreign currencies and interest rates ; he was successful in Chicago , became independently wealthy, and was director of research at Chicago Options Associates from 1994 to 2000. He became acquainted with Tim Shell from email lists discussing philosophy. Wales wanted to participate in

315-515: A wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored "creative construction" over "creative destruction". Any change that deliberately compromises Misplaced Pages's integrity is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and other types of spam. Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking

420-462: A for-profit business. Misplaced Pages gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end 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. The English Misplaced Pages passed

525-548: 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 its projects (Misplaced Pages and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Misplaced Pages, and it maintains

630-401: A given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the article's underlying code, or use images disruptively. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Misplaced Pages articles;

735-530: A list of articles every Misplaced Pages should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. 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 be available only in English, even when they meet

840-515: A month, "according to the ratings firm comScore". As of March 2023 , it ranked 6th in popularity, according to Similarweb . Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Misplaced Pages follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through " stigmergic accumulation". On January 18, 2012, the English Misplaced Pages participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in

945-485: A new website redesign, called "Vector 2022". It featured a redesigned menu bar , moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar , and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool. The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Misplaced Pages unanimously voted to revert the changes. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Misplaced Pages follows

1050-601: A number of ideas (including serving as an access point for information about Chicago). It later focused on male-oriented content, including information on sporting activities, automobiles, and women. Working from the Open Directory Project , Bomis created and maintained hundreds of webrings on topics related to lad culture . In 1999 the company introduced the Bomis Browser, which helped users block online pop-up ads . Its webring on Star Wars

1155-539: A professor and scientist, said that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior". Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Misplaced Pages editors. Distribution of the 64,014,823 articles in different language editions (as of November 28, 2024) There are currently 339 language editions of Misplaced Pages (also called language versions , or simply Wikipedias ). As of November 2024,

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1260-401: A sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references". Editors who do not log in are in some sense " second-class citizens " on Misplaced Pages, as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation", but

1365-438: A tedious, slow review process. Misplaced Pages was initially launched by Bomis to provide content for Nupedia, and was a for-profit venture (a Bomis subsidiary) through the end of 2002. As the costs of Misplaced Pages rose with its popularity, Bomis' revenues declined; these losses were compounded by the dot-com crash . Since Misplaced Pages was a drain on Bomis' resources, Wales and philosophy graduate student Larry Sanger decided to fund

1470-460: A topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style. A topic should also meet Misplaced Pages's standards of "notability" , which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject. Further, Misplaced Pages intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized. It must not present original research. A claim that

1575-447: A total of 24 finalized articles. Misplaced Pages had about 20,000 articles and versions in 18 languages by the end of 2001. Bomis originally planned to make Misplaced Pages profitable, providing staffing and hardware for its initial structure; Misplaced Pages would not have survived without this early support. Bomis provided web servers and bandwidth for the projects, owning key items such as domain names. Wales used money from Bomis to maintain

1680-513: A volunteer basis and a dearth of "the habit or tradition of respect for expertise" from high-ranking Misplaced Pages members. He continued contributing to community discussions, optimistic about Misplaced Pages's future success. After Sanger's departure, Misplaced Pages was managed by Wales and a burgeoning online community. Although Wales thought advertising was a possibility, the Misplaced Pages community was opposed to business development and Internet marketing

1785-457: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Indianapolis , Indiana -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Misplaced Pages Misplaced Pages is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers , known as Wikipedians , through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki . Misplaced Pages is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and

1890-488: Is a social faux pas to write about yourself." Larry Sanger said, "It does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history", and began a discussion on the talk page of Wales' biography about historical revisionism . Wales called his actions fixing mistakes, but after Cadenhead publicized the edits to his biography he expressed regret for his actions. In The Times Wales said that individuals should not edit their own Misplaced Pages biographies, telling The New Yorker that

1995-618: Is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites ; as of August 2024 , it was ranked fourth by Semrush , and seventh by Similarweb . Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Misplaced Pages has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation , an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Initially only available in English, editions of Misplaced Pages in more than 300 other languages have been developed. The English Misplaced Pages , with its over 6.9 million articles,

2100-495: Is done by "insiders". A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small. According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Misplaced Pages community to new content". Several studies have shown that most Misplaced Pages contributors are male. Notably,

2205-415: Is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source, as do all quotations. Among Misplaced Pages editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations. This can at times lead to the removal of information which, though valid,

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2310-734: Is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. Each article and each user of Misplaced Pages has an associated and dedicated "talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. Misplaced Pages's community has been described as cultlike , although not always with entirely negative connotations. Its preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials , has been referred to as " anti-elitism ". Misplaced Pages does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. As Misplaced Pages grew, "Who writes Misplaced Pages?" became one of

2415-463: Is not properly sourced. Finally, Misplaced Pages must not take sides. As Misplaced Pages policies changed over time, and became more complex, their number has grown. In 2008, there were 44 policy pages and 248 guideline pages; by 2013, scholars counted 383 policy pages and 449 guideline pages. Misplaced Pages's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by

2520-491: Is quite unique in organization studies, though there has been some recent interest in consensus building in the field. Joseph Reagle and Sue Gardner argue that the approaches to consensus building are similar to those used by Quakers . A difference from Quaker meetings is the absence of a facilitator in the presence of disagreement, a role played by the clerk in Quaker meetings. The Arbitration Committee presides over

2625-496: Is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. colour versus color ) 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

2730-497: Is the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 64 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5   edits per second on average) as of April 2024 . As of November 2024 , over 25% of Misplaced Pages's traffic was from the United States, followed by Japan at 6.2%, the United Kingdom at 5.6%, Russia at 5.0%, Germany at 4.8%, and

2835-625: The Columbia Journalism Review identified Misplaced Pages's page-protection policies as "perhaps the most important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas". In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Misplaced Pages maintains "stable versions" of articles which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion,

2940-614: The St. Petersburg Times he no longer controlled Bomis' day-to-day operations, but retained ownership as a shareholder. In 2005, Tim Shell was CEO of Bomis and one of the board members overseeing Misplaced Pages. Shell remained CEO of Bomis in 2006, becoming vice-president of the Wikimedia Foundation and continuing to sit on its board. Bomis co-founder Michael Davis became treasurer of the Wikimedia Foundation that year. Wales told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2007 that although he retained partial ownership of Bomis, "It's pretty much dead." According to

3045-914: The Internet Archive , the Bomis website was last accessible with content in 2010; when accessed in 2013 by the archive, it had a welcome message for PetaBox . When accessed in 2014 by the archive, the website featured a blank white page with a line of text saying "Hello, world!". In 2005, Wales made 18 changes to his Misplaced Pages biography. He removed references to Bomis Babes as softcore pornography and erotica , and Larry Sanger as co-founder of Misplaced Pages. Wales' actions were publicized by author Rogers Cadenhead , attracting attention from US and UK media. In 2011, Time listed Wales' 2005 edits in its "Top 10 Misplaced Pages Moments". Misplaced Pages policy warned users not to edit their own biography pages, with its rules on autobiographical editing quoting Wales: "It

3150-519: The Philippines . In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each ( Russian , Spanish , Italian , Polish , Egyptian Arabic , Chinese , Japanese , Ukrainian , Vietnamese , Waray , Arabic , and Portuguese ), seven more have over 500,000 articles ( Persian , Catalan , Indonesian , Serbian , Korean , Norwegian , and Turkish ), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000. The largest,

3255-816: The United States Congress —the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours . More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content. In January 2013, 274301 Misplaced Pages , an asteroid , was named after Misplaced Pages; in October 2014, Misplaced Pages was honored with the Misplaced Pages Monument ; and, in July 2015, 106 of

The Cabaret - Misplaced Pages Continue

3360-466: The deletion of articles on Misplaced Pages , with roughly 500,000 such debates since Misplaced Pages's inception. Once an article is nominated for deletion, the dispute is typically determined by initial votes (to keep or delete) and by reference to topic-specific notability policies. Content in Misplaced Pages is subject to the laws (in particular, copyright laws) of the United States and of the US state of Virginia , where

3465-830: The procrastination principle regarding the security of its content, meaning that it waits until a problem arises to fix it. Due to Misplaced Pages's increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. For instance, on the English Misplaced Pages and some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article. On the English Misplaced Pages, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. A frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or "extended confirmed protected", meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended confirmed" editors can modify it. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes. A 2021 article in

3570-455: The 2000 Nupedia venture. Larry Sanger met Jimmy Wales through an e-mail communication group about philosophy and objectivism, and joined Bomis in May, 1999. Sanger was a graduate student working towards a PhD degree in philosophy, with research focused on epistemology ; he received his degree from Ohio State University , moving to San Diego to help Bomis with its encyclopedia venture. At

3675-436: The 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward while becoming an important fact-checking site . Misplaced Pages has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before

3780-566: The 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen . Wales considered the " Playboy of the Internet" nickname inappropriate, although he was asked in interviews if his time at Bomis made him a "porn king". The 2010 documentary film about Misplaced Pages, Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Misplaced Pages , discussed this characterization of Wales by journalists. Wales, interviewed in

3885-698: The 7,473 700-page volumes of Misplaced Pages became available as Print Misplaced Pages . In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander , Beresheet , crash landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Misplaced Pages engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Misplaced Pages had been encoded into synthetic DNA . On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Misplaced Pages's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There

3990-563: The American Cabaret Theatre is restructured into The Cabaret. The Cabaret’s new business model is unveiled, with the goal of being sustainable in the new economic climate while raising the quality of productions and educational programming." The website currently quotes Misplaced Pages 's definition of cabaret. 39°46′47.8″N 86°09′21.5″W  /  39.779944°N 86.155972°W  / 39.779944; -86.155972 This United States theatre–related article

4095-465: The Babe Engine, which helped users find erotic material online through a web search engine . According to Bomis advertising director Terry Foote, 99 percent of searches on the site related to nude women. Bomis is best known for supporting the creation of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Misplaced Pages. Tim Shell and Michael Davis continued their partnership with Wales during

4200-622: The Bomis Babes section was the Bomis Babe Report, begun in 2000, with pictures of porn stars in a blog format. The Bomis Babe Report produced original erotic material, including reports on pornographic film actors and celebrities who had posed nude. It was referred to as The Babe Report for short. Wales referred to the site's softcore pornography as "glamour photography", and Bomis became familiar to Internet users for its erotic images. During this period Wales

4305-652: The English Misplaced Pages introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012. Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. Although changes are not systematically reviewed, Misplaced Pages's software provides tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. Each article's History page links to each revision. On most articles, anyone can view

The Cabaret - Misplaced Pages Continue

4410-499: The English Misplaced Pages, has over 6.9 million articles. As of January 2021, the English Misplaced Pages receives 48% of Misplaced Pages's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. The top 10 editions represent approximately 85% of the total traffic. Since Misplaced Pages is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as

4515-543: The Internet and How to Stop It , legal scholar Jonathan Zittrain wrote that "Bomis helped people find 'erotic photography', and earned money through advertising as well as subscription fees for premium content." The Guardian described the site as on "the fringes of the adult entertainment industry", and The Edge called Bomis.com an "explicit-content search engine". Business 2.0 Magazine described it as "a search portal... which created and hosted Web rings around popular search terms – including, not surprisingly,

4620-597: The Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Misplaced Pages was launched on January 15, 2001 as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia . Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended for it to be

4725-555: The Wikimedia Foundation, and Wales transferred Misplaced Pages-related copyrights from Bomis to the foundation. It was first headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida , where Bomis was located. The foundation shifted Misplaced Pages's dependence away from Bomis, allowing it to purchase hardware for expansion. The Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees was initially composed of Bomis' three founders: Jimmy Wales and his two business partners, Michael Davis and Tim Shell. Shell and Davis were appointed to

4830-696: The Misplaced Pages servers in Tampa, Florida . As the cost of Misplaced Pages rose with its popularity, Bomis' revenues declined as a result of the dot-com crash . In late 2000 Bomis had a staff of about 11 employees, but by early 2002 layoffs reduced the staff to its original size of about five. Sanger was laid off in February 2002; from January 15, 2001, through March 1, 2002, he was the sole paid editor of Misplaced Pages. Sanger stepped down from his dual roles as chief organizer of Misplaced Pages and editor-in-chief of Nupedia on March 1, 2002, feeling unable to commit to these areas on

4935-480: The automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Misplaced Pages editors. Over time, Misplaced Pages has developed a semiformal dispute resolution process. To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a "request for comment". Misplaced Pages encourages local resolutions of conflicts, which Jemielniak argues

5040-477: The board by Wales, but after Misplaced Pages community members complained that the board was composed of appointed individuals, the first elections were held in 2004. Two community members, Florence Devouard and Angela Beesley, were elected to the board of trustees. In August 2004 Wales was chief executive officer of Bomis, and on September 20 Misplaced Pages reached the million-article mark on an expenditure of $ 500,000 (most directly from Wales). In November 2004 he told

5145-506: The committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Misplaced Pages policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased). Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Misplaced Pages (16%). Complete bans from Misplaced Pages are generally limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior . When conduct

5250-515: The company maintained nekkid.com and nekkid.info, which featured pictures of nude women. About ten percent of Bomis' revenue was derived from pornographic films and blogs. The website included a segment devoted to erotic images, "Bomis Babes", and a feature enabled users to submit recommended links to other sites appealing to a male audience. Peer-to-peer services provided by the site helped users find other websites about female celebrities, including Anna Kournikova and Pamela Anderson . In

5355-402: The company subsequently relocated). The staff at Bomis was originally about five employees. Its 2000 staff included programmer Toan Vo, Andrew McCague and system administrator Jason Richey; Wales employed his high-school friend and best man in his second wedding, Terry Foote, as advertising director. In June 2000, Bomis was one of five network partners of Ask Jeeves . The majority of

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5460-440: The company was inactive, with its Misplaced Pages-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation . The company initially tried a number of ideas for content, including being a directory of information about Chicago . The site subsequently focused on content geared to a male audience, including information on sporting activities, automobiles, and women. Bomis became successful after focusing on pornography. "Bomis Babes"

5565-442: The contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty. 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". Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all

5670-431: The decision to shift the encyclopedia to non-profit status. Wales stepped down from his role as CEO of Bomis in 2004. Shell was CEO of the company in 2005, while on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. Wales edited Misplaced Pages in 2005 to remove the characterizations of Bomis as providing softcore pornography , which attracted media attention; Wales expressed regret for his actions. The Atlantic gave Bomis

5775-700: The edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor. The results were tabulated for several language versions of Misplaced Pages. The English Misplaced Pages's three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush , anarchism , and Muhammad . By comparison, for the German Misplaced Pages, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia , Scientology , and 9/11 conspiracy theories . In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Misplaced Pages. Editors also debate

5880-454: The edits are done by just 0.7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Misplaced Pages content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting

5985-453: The film, called the characterization inaccurate and explained that his company responded to content demand from customers. In later interviews, he responded to "porn king" questions by telling journalists to look at a page on Yahoo! about pornography related to dwarfism . According to a 2007 article in Reason , "If he was a porn king, he suggests, so is the head of the biggest Web portal in

6090-406: The firm, he noted the successful 1995 initial public offering of Netscape Communications . Wales co-founded Bomis in 1996, with business associates Tim Shell, and his then-manager Michael Davis, as a for-profit corporation with joint ownership. Wales was its chief manager. In 1998 he moved from Chicago to San Diego to work for Bomis, and then to St. Petersburg, Florida (where

6195-587: The founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University , called Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced. After the incident, Seigenthaler described Misplaced Pages as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool". The incident led to policy changes at Misplaced Pages for tightening up

6300-550: The growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called " low-hanging fruit "—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain found that the English Misplaced Pages had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during

6405-636: The growth rate of the English Misplaced Pages in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. The edition reached 3 million articles in August 2009. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to "increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits". Others suggest that

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6510-521: The influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources. Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive work behavior at Misplaced Pages. He relied instead on "mutually reverting edit pairs", where one editor reverts

6615-414: The latest changes and undo others' revisions by clicking a link on the article's History page. Registered users may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes. "New pages patrol" is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems. In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in

6720-538: The majority of Misplaced Pages's servers are located. By using the site, one agrees to the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use and Privacy Policy ; some of the main rules are that contributors are legally responsible for their edits and contributions, that they should follow the policies that govern each of the independent project editions, and they may not engage in activities, whether legal or illegal, that may be harmful to other users. In addition to

6825-849: The mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Misplaced Pages forked from Misplaced Pages to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Misplaced Pages would not display advertisements, and changed Misplaced Pages's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org . After an early period of exponential growth,

6930-491: The median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect and repair. In the Seigenthaler biography incident , an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy . It remained uncorrected for four months. Seigenthaler,

7035-414: The nickname " Playboy of the Internet", and the term caught on in other media outlets. Scholars have described Bomis as a provider of softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales left a study track at Indiana University as a PhD candidate to work in finance before completing his doctoral dissertation . In 1994 Wales was hired by Michael Davis , CEO of finance company Chicago Options Associates , as

7140-460: The notability criteria of other language Misplaced Pages projects. Bomis Bomis, Inc. ( / ˈ b ɒ m ɪ s / , from Bitter Old Men in Suits ; rhyming with "promise") was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Misplaced Pages . It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales , Tim Shell, and Michael Davis . By 2007,

7245-456: The office.bomis.com server created the first edit to the website, the creation of HomePage with the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" It was originally intended only to generate draft articles for Nupedia, with finished articles moved to the latter. Misplaced Pages became a separate site days after the Nupedia advisory board opposed combining the two. In September 2001, Wales was simultaneously CEO of Bomis and co-founder of Misplaced Pages; Sanger

7350-461: The online-based entrepreneurial ventures which were increasingly popular and successful during the mid-1990s. His experience (from gaming in his youth) impressed on him the importance of networking. Wales was interested in computer science , experimenting with source code on the Internet and improving his skill at computer programming . In his spare time after work at Chicago Options Associates, Wales constructed his own web browser . While at

7455-456: The page-view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]." By the end of December 2016, Misplaced Pages was ranked the fifth most popular website globally. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Misplaced Pages articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page. On January 18, 2023, Misplaced Pages debuted

7560-408: The past 30 days. Editors who fail to comply with Misplaced Pages cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Misplaced Pages outsiders, increasing the odds that Misplaced Pages insiders may target or discount their contributions. Becoming a Misplaced Pages insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Misplaced Pages-specific technological codes, submit to

7665-492: The peer-review process on the site, most with doctorates in philosophy or medicine. Scholars wishing to contribute to Nupedia were required to submit their credentials via fax for verification. At that time, Bomis was attempting to obtain advertising revenue for Nupedia and the company was optimistic that it could fund the project with ad space on Nupedia.com. Misplaced Pages began as a feature of Nupedia.com on January 15, 2001, later known as Misplaced Pages Day . Someone working from

7770-421: The process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship. Misplaced Pages has delegated some administrative functions to bots , such as when granting privileges to human editors. Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though

7875-443: The program. Sheila Jeffreys noted in her Beauty and Misogyny that in 2004 Bomis maintained "The Lipstick Fetish Ring", which helped users with a particular attraction to women in makeup. Bomis became successful after it focused on X-rated and erotic media. Advertising generated revenue which enabled the company to fund other websites, and the site published suggestive pictures of professional models . In addition to Bomis

7980-433: The project as a nonprofit . Sanger was laid off from Bomis in 2002. Nupedia content was merged into Misplaced Pages, and it ceased in 2003. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation began in 2003 with a board of trustees composed of Bomis' three founders (Wales, Davis, and Shell) and was first headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida , Bomis' location. Wales used about US$ 100,000 of revenue from Bomis to fund Misplaced Pages before

8085-460: The project. With Misplaced Pages a drain on the company's resources, Wales and Sanger decided to fund the project on a non-profit basis. Bomis laid off most of its employees to continue operating, since Misplaced Pages was not generating revenue. The company owned Misplaced Pages from its creation through 2003, and Wales used about $ 100,000 of Bomis' revenue to fund Misplaced Pages before the decision to shift the encyclopedia to non-profit status. In June 2003 Misplaced Pages

8190-476: The questions frequently asked there. 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". In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Misplaced Pages users are responsible for about half of

8295-482: The remaining 53.3% split among other countries. Misplaced Pages has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge , extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias , particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against the Global South ( Eurocentrism ). While the reliability of Misplaced Pages was frequently criticized in

8400-429: The results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Misplaced Pages editors were female. Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Misplaced Pages contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown , gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. Andrew Lih ,

8505-506: The revenue that came in to Bomis was generated through advertising. The most successful time for Bomis was during its venture as a member of the NBC web portal NBCi; this collapsed at the end of the dot-com bubble . Although Bomis is not an acronym, the name stemmed from "Bitter Old Men in Suits" (as Wales and Shell called themselves in Chicago). The site began as a web portal , trying

8610-409: The same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Misplaced Pages", questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Misplaced Pages had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators

8715-479: The same period in 2008. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology. Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In

8820-439: The site's edits." 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. The English Misplaced Pages has 6,917,003 articles, 48,331,004 registered editors, and 122,331 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in

8925-582: The six largest, in order of article count, are the English , Cebuano , German , French , Swedish , and Dutch Wikipedias. The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot , which as of 2013 had created about half the articles on the Swedish Misplaced Pages , and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias . The latter are both languages of

9030-422: The standard applied to himself as well. Wales warned that the activity should be discouraged because of the potential for bias: "I wish I hadn't done it. It's in poor taste." Bomis was called the " Playboy of the Internet" by The Atlantic , and the sobriquet was subsequently used by publications including The Sunday Times , The Daily Telegraph , MSN Money , Wired , The Torch Magazine , and

9135-449: The start of Misplaced Pages, but with limited success. 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. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis , a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger , editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Misplaced Pages. Nupedia

9240-796: The subject of the article. Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights , granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. In particular, editors can choose to run for " adminship ", which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes. Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive editors from making unproductive edits. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Misplaced Pages's earlier years, in part because

9345-524: The terms, the Foundation has developed policies, described as the "official policies of the Wikimedia Foundation". The fundamental principles of the Misplaced Pages community are embodied in the "Five pillars", while the detailed editorial principles are expressed in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately shape content. The five pillars are: The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Misplaced Pages editors write and revise

9450-406: The time Sanger joined Bomis the company had a total workforce of two employees with help from programmers. Sanger and Wales began Nupedia with resources from Bomis; at the beginning of 2000, the company agreed to provide early financing for Nupedia from its profits. Nupedia went live in March, when Wales was CEO of Bomis; Sanger was Nupedia's editor-in-chief. Nupedia's reading comprehension

9555-692: The ultimate dispute resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the English Misplaced Pages committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore,

9660-548: The verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Misplaced Pages editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages. Disputes may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit warring". It is widely seen as a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added, and criticized as creating a competitive and conflict-based editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles . Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes,

9765-428: The website's policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Editors can enforce the rules by deleting or modifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Misplaced Pages were based on a translation of the rules for the English Misplaced Pages. They have since diverged to some extent. According to the rules on the English Misplaced Pages community, each entry in Misplaced Pages must be about

9870-598: The world." The Chronicle of Philanthropy characterized Bomis as "an Internet marketing firm... which also traded in erotic photographs for a while." Jeff Howe wrote in his 2008 book, Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business , about "one of Wales's less altruistic ventures, a Web portal called Bomis.com that featured, among other items, soft-core pornography." In his 2008 book, The Future of

9975-800: Was a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Misplaced Pages declined by twelve percent, those of German version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost 9 percent." Varma added, "While Misplaced Pages's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Misplaced Pages users." When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky , associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said that he suspected much of

10080-519: Was also in decline. In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Misplaced Pages, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis." The number of active English Misplaced Pages editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. In January 2007, Misplaced Pages first became one of the ten most popular websites in the United States, according to Comscore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, it

10185-456: Was chief organizer of Misplaced Pages and editor-in-chief of Nupedia. Nupedia was encumbered by its peer-review system, a seven-step process of review and copyediting, and Misplaced Pages grew at a faster rate. In November 2000, Nupedia had 115 potential articles awaiting its peer-review process. By September 2001, after a total investment of US$ 250,000 from Bomis, Nupedia produced 12 articles; from 2000 through 2003, Nupedia contributors produced

10290-640: Was considered a useful resource for information on Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). Additional webrings included sections helping users find information on the 1942 film Casablanca , Hunter S. Thompson , Farrah Fawcett , Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls , and the 1998 film Snake Eyes . "Bomis: The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Ring", devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer , organized over 50 sites related to

10395-454: Was devoted to erotic images; the "Bomis Babe Report" featured adult pictures. Bomis Premium, available for an additional fee, provided explicit material . "The Babe Engine" helped users find erotic content through a web search engine . The advertising director for Bomis noted that 99 percent of queries on the site were for nude women. Bomis created Nupedia as a free online encyclopedia (with content submitted by experts) but it had

10500-477: Was difficult in 2002. Misplaced Pages remained a for-profit venture (under the auspices of Bomis) through the end of 2002. By then it had moved from a .com domain name to .org , and Wales said that the site would not accept advertising. Material from Nupedia was folded into Misplaced Pages and it was discontinued by 2003. By 2003 Misplaced Pages had grown to 100,000 articles in its English-language version, and it became difficult for Bomis to continue financially supporting

10605-490: Was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Misplaced Pages was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman . Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on

10710-399: Was intended for high-school graduates, and Bomis set its goal: "To set a new standard for breadth, depth, timeliness and lack of bias, and in the fullness of time to become the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the history of humankind." Although Bomis began a search for experts to vet Nupedia articles, this proved tedious. In August 2000 Nupedia had more than 60 academics contributing to

10815-512: Was photographed steering a yacht with a peaked cap , posing as a sea captain with a female professional model on either side of him. In the photograph, the women were wearing panties and T-shirts advertising Bomis. A subscription section, Bomis Premium, provided access to adult content and erotic material; A three-day trial was US$ 2.95. While Bomis Babes provided nude images of females to subscribers, Bomis Premium featured lesbian sexual practices and female anatomy. Bomis created

10920-411: Was ranked #9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Misplaced Pages ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 million unique visitors. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month. On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Misplaced Pages had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors

11025-404: Was transferred to a nascent non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation , which was formed as a charitable institution to supervise Misplaced Pages and its associated wiki-based sites. When the foundation was established, its staff began to solicit public funding and Bomis turned Misplaced Pages over to the non-profit. All Bomis-owned hardware used to run Misplaced Pages-associated websites was donated to

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