Episode 822
Wikipedia
Sat, 2019-Aug-03 01:32 UTC
Length - 2:58
Direct Link
Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.
With 518,555 views on Friday, 2 August 2019 our article of the day is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia ( (listen), (listen) WIK-kee-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual online encyclopedia, based on open collaboration through a wiki-based content editing system. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web, and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of June 2019. It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads, and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name, as a portmanteau of "wiki" (the Hawai'ian word for "quick") and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 5,903,298 articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month. In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica, although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues. The following year, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods", and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial topics. However, Facebook announced that by 2017 it would help readers detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:32 UTC on Saturday, 3 August 2019.
For the full current version of the article, see Wikipedia on Wikipedia.
This podcast is produced by Abulsme Productions based on Wikipedia content and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Visit wikioftheday.com for our archives, sister podcasts, and swag. Please subscribe to never miss an episode. You can also follow @WotDpod on Twitter.
Abulsme Productions produces the current events podcast Curmudgeon's Corner as well. Check it out in your podcast player of choice.
This has been Russell. Thank you for listening to popular Wiki of the Day.
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