Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation . Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one for each language. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name Project Sourceberg , a play on Project Gutenberg . The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name .
90-1084: Alexander II may refer to: [REDACTED] Wikisource has original works by or about: Alexander II Alexander II of Macedon , king of Macedon from 370 to 368 BC Alexander II of Epirus (died 260 BC), king of Epirus in 272 BC Alexander II Zabinas , king of the Greek Seleucid kingdom in 128–123 BC Alexander (912–913), Eastern Roman emperor Pope Alexander II of Alexandria , ruled in 702–729 Patriarch Alexander II of Alexandria Pope Alexander II (died 1073), pope from 1061 to 1073 Alexander II of Scotland (1198–1249), king of Scots Alexander II of Imereti (died 1510), king of Georgia and of Imereti Alexander II of Kakheti (1527–1605), king of Kakheti Alexander II Mircea Alexander II of Russia (1818–1881), emperor of Russia Alexander II of Yugoslavia (born 1945), crown prince of Serbia See also [ edit ] King Alexander (disambiguation) [REDACTED] Topics referred to by
180-405: A PDF or DjVu file and uploaded to either Wikisource or Wikimedia Commons . This system assists editors in ensuring the accuracy of texts on Wikisource. The original page scans of completed works remain available to any user so that errors may be corrected later and readers may check texts against the originals. ProofreadPage also allows greater participation, since access to a physical copy of
270-515: 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
360-450: 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 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
450-462: 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
540-548: 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;
720-530: 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
810-515: 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
900-485: 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
990-539: 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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#17327831461961080-494: A project-specific coordination wiki, first realized at Wikisource, also took hold in another Wikimedia project, namely at Wikiversity 's Beta Wiki . Like wikisource.org, it serves Wikiversity coordination in all languages, and as a language incubator, but unlike Wikisource, its Main Page does not serve as its multilingual portal. Misplaced Pages co-founder Larry Sanger has criticised Wikisource, and sister project Wiktionary , because
1170-401: 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
1260-460: 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
1350-836: Is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, which is whatever we want it to be." The project began its activity at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood the "PS" subdomain to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg. However, this resulted in Project Sourceberg occupying the subdomain of the Pashto Misplaced Pages (the ISO language code of the Pashto language is "ps"). Project Sourceberg officially launched on November 24, 2003, when it received its own temporary URL, at sources.wikipedia.org, and all texts and discussions hosted on ps.wikipedia.org were moved to
1440-436: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Wikisource The project holds works that are either in the public domain or freely licensed ; professionally published works or historical source documents, not vanity products . Verification was initially made offline, or by trusting the reliability of other digital libraries. Now works are supported by online scans via
1530-552: 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,
1620-415: 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,
1710-734: 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
1800-463: 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
1890-491: 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
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#17327831461961980-496: 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
2070-625: 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,
2160-734: The English Wikisource passed 20,000 text-units in its third month of existence, already holding more texts than did the entire project in April (before the move to language subdomains). On May 10, 2006, the first Wikisource Portal was created. On February 14, 2008, the English Wikisource passed 100,000 text-units with Chapter LXXIV of Six Months at the White House , a memoir by painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter . In November, 2011, 250,000 text-units milestone
2250-601: The Global South ( Eurocentrism ). While the reliability of Misplaced Pages was frequently criticized in 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
2340-519: 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,
2430-816: 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
2520-687: The University of Georgia , identified errors in the translation of the Book of Genesis as of 2008. In 2010, Wikimedia France signed an agreement with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) to add scans from its own Gallica digital library to French Wikisource. Fourteen hundred public domain French texts were added to the Wikisource library as a result via upload to
2610-658: The Wikimedia Commons . The quality of the transcriptions, previously automatically generated by optical character recognition (OCR), was expected to be improved by Wikisource's human proofreaders. In 2011, the English Wikisource received many high-quality scans of documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as part of their efforts "to increase the accessibility and visibility of its holdings." Processing and upload to Commons of these documents, along with many images from
2700-673: 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, 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
2790-466: 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
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2880-830: 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
2970-698: 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
3060-652: 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
3150-499: 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
3240-511: The English Wikisource is the Wiki Bible project, intended to create a new, "laissez-faire translation" of The Bible . A separate Hebrew version of Wikisource ( he.wikisource.org ) was created in August 2004. The need for a language-specific Hebrew website derived from the difficulty of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left). In
3330-518: The NARA collection, was facilitated by a NARA Wikimedian in residence , Dominic McDevitt-Parks. Many of these documents have been transcribed and proofread by the Wikisource community and are featured as links in the National Archives' own online catalog. Wikisource About Wikisource Misplaced Pages Misplaced Pages is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by
3420-597: 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
3510-480: The ProofreadPage extension, which ensures the reliability and accuracy of the project's texts. Some individual Wikisources, each representing a specific language, now only allow works backed up with scans. While the bulk of its collection are texts, Wikisource as a whole hosts other media, from comics to film to audiobooks . Some Wikisources allow user-generated annotations, subject to the specific policies of
3600-434: The Misplaced Pages portal the Wikisource slogan appears around the logo in the project's ten largest languages. Clicking on the portal's central images (the iceberg logo in the center and the "Wikisource" heading at the top of the page) links to a list of translations for Wikisource and The Free Library in 60 languages. A MediaWiki extension called ProofreadPage was developed for Wikisource by developer ThomasV to improve
3690-673: The Wikisource in question. The project has come under criticism for lack of reliability but it is also cited by organisations such as the National Archives and Records Administration . As of November 2024, there are Wikisource subdomains active for 79 languages comprising a total of 6,243,131 articles and 3,037 recently active editors. The original concept for Wikisource was as storage for useful or important historical texts. These texts were intended to support Misplaced Pages articles, by providing primary evidence and original source texts, and as an archive in its own right. The collection
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3780-480: 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
3870-538: The capacity for annotated editions of texts. On Wikisource, the annotations are supplementary to the original text, which remains the primary objective of the project. By contrast, on Wikibooks the annotations are primary, with the original text as only a reference or supplement, if present at all. Annotated editions are more popular on the German Wikisource. The project also accommodates translations of texts provided by its users. A significant translation on
3960-422: The closed sites have 13 articles. There are 4,976,513 registered users of which 3,037 are recently active. The top ten Wikisource language projects by mainspace article count: For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics: During the move to language subdomains, the community requested that the main wikisource.org website remain a functioning wiki, in order to serve three purposes: The idea of
4050-581: The collaborative nature and technology of these projects means there is no oversight by experts and therefore their content is not reliable. Bart D. Ehrman , a New Testament scholar and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , has criticised the English Wikisource's project to create a user-generated translation of the Bible saying "Democratization isn't necessarily good for scholarship." Richard Elliott Friedman , an Old Testament scholar and professor of Jewish studies at
4140-506: 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
4230-442: 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
4320-700: 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
4410-454: 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
4500-410: The ensuing months, contributors in other languages including German requested their own wikis, but a December vote on the creation of separate language domains was inconclusive. Finally, a second vote that ended May 12, 2005, supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource by a large margin, allowing each language to host its texts on its own wiki. An initial wave of 14 languages
4590-587: 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
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#17327831461964680-550: 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
4770-583: 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
4860-463: 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
4950-414: 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
5040-538: 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
5130-905: 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,
5220-540: 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,
5310-430: The need for the project, writing "The hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? We'd want to complement Project Gutenberg—how, exactly?", and Jimmy Wales adding "like Larry, I'm interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone — I mean, Shakespeare
5400-643: The original work is not necessary to be able to contribute to the project once images have been uploaded. Within two weeks of the project's official start at sources.wikipedia.org, over 1,000 pages had been created, with approximately 200 of these being designated as actual articles. On January 4, 2004, Wikisource welcomed its 100th registered user. In early July, 2004 the number of articles exceeded 2,400, and more than 500 users had registered. On April 30, 2005, there were 2667 registered users (including 18 administrators) and almost 19,000 articles. The project passed its 96,000th edit that same day. On November 27, 2005,
5490-456: 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
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#17327831461965580-408: 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
5670-433: The picture's license was inappropriate for a Wikimedia Foundation logo and because a photo cannot scale properly—a stylized vector iceberg inspired by the original picture was mandated to serve as the project's logo. The first prominent use of Wikisource's slogan— The Free Library —was at the project's multilingual portal , when it was redesigned based upon the Misplaced Pages portal on August 27, 2005, (historical version). As in
5760-421: 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
5850-667: The project does not host " vanity press " books or documents produced by its contributors. A scanned source is preferred on many Wikisources and required on some. Most Wikisources will, however, accept works transcribed from offline sources or acquired from other digital libraries . The requirement for prior publication can also be waived in a small number of cases if the work is a source document of notable historical importance. The legal requirement for works to be licensed or free of copyright remains constant. The only original pieces accepted by Wikisource are annotations and translations. Wikisource, and its sister project Wikibooks , has
5940-476: 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
6030-429: 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 ,
6120-409: 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
6210-479: 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
6300-406: The same term This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexander_II&oldid=1214813073 " Category : Human name disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
6390-439: 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
6480-582: 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
6570-449: 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
6660-796: 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
6750-487: The temporary address. A vote on the project's name changed it to Wikisource on December 6, 2003. Despite the change in name, the project did not move to its permanent URL ( http://wikisource.org/ ) until July 23, 2004. Since Wikisource was initially called "Project Sourceberg", its first logo was a picture of an iceberg . Two votes conducted to choose a successor were inconclusive, and the original logo remained until 2006. Finally, for both legal and technical reasons—because
6840-524: 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
6930-692: 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,
7020-548: 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,
7110-446: The vetting of transcriptions by the project. This displays pages of scanned works side by side with the text relating to that page, allowing the text to be proofread and its accuracy later verified independently by any other editor. Once a book, or other text, has been scanned, the raw images can be modified with image processing software to correct for page rotations and other problems. The retouched images can then be converted into
7200-428: 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
7290-800: 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
7380-519: 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
7470-501: 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 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
7560-435: Was initially focused on important historical and cultural material, distinguishing it from other digital archives like Project Gutenberg. The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg). In 2001, there was a dispute on Misplaced Pages regarding the addition of primary-source materials, leading to edit wars over their inclusion or deletion. Project Sourceberg
7650-490: 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
7740-694: Was passed. Wikisource collects and stores in digital format previously published texts; including novels, non-fiction works, letters, speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other documents. All texts collected are either free of copyright or released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License . Texts in all languages are welcomed, as are translations. In addition to texts, Wikisource hosts material such as comics , films , recordings and spoken-word works. All texts held by Wikisource must have been previously published;
7830-411: 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
7920-550: Was reconfigured to enable the English version , along with 8 other languages that were created early that morning and late the night before. Three more languages were created on March 29, 2006, and then another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2, 2006. Languages without subdomains are locally incubated. As of September 2020 , 182 languages are hosted locally . As of November 2024, there are Wikisource subdomains for 81 languages of which 79 are active and 2 are closed. The active sites have 6,243,131 articles and
8010-399: Was set up on August 23, 2005. The new languages did not include English, but the code en: was temporarily set to redirect to the main website ( wikisource.org ). At this point the Wikisource community, through a mass project of manually sorting thousands of pages and categories by language, prepared for a second wave of page imports to local wikis. On September 11, 2005, the wikisource.org wiki
8100-553: Was suggested as a solution to this. In describing the proposed project, user The Cunctator said, "It would be to Project Gutenberg what Misplaced Pages is to Nupedia ", soon clarifying the statement with "we don't want to try to duplicate Project Gutenberg's efforts; rather, we want to complement them. Perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Misplaced Pages to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG." Initial comments were skeptical, with Larry Sanger questioning
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