Wikipedia, “The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. It’s not just the motto, it really is. Here you go with top 10 Wikimoments of life time.
10. Wikimania Meetups Begin
It is thought widely that that Wikipedia is written, edited and maintained by all who use it. But the truth is, it’s a dedicated group of volunteers who act as the site’s caretakers, defending it from hooligans and making sure its entries are as precise as probable. Thus, they needed a place to assemble, argue and share ideas about all things Wiki. The global meet-up, which began in Frankfurt, Germany, in year 2005, took what was an unorganized group of volunteers and brought them together in one place each year.
9. Study Finds Wikipedia as Accurate as Britannica
By the year 2005, Wikipedia was something worth getting information from. In a case study in the journal Nature, researchers chose articles from a wide range of topics from both Wikipedia and the knowledge standard-bearer, Encyclopedia Britannica. The specialists sent those entries to relevant field specialists for thorough review. It was said by The Journal that the specialists recovered eight serious errors in the articles, four from each side. However, they also discovered many more minor factual errors, like omissions and misleading statements — 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica.
8. Coming Up Against the Great Firewall
The Times recently published that, “Easy access to Wikipedia can’t be taken for granted in China, where the online encyclopedia, including the Chinese language version, has often been blocked. Wikipedia will tell you (depending, perhaps, on your location) that the first block came in June 2004, on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Of course, Wikipedia is far from being the only site deemed off-limits in the mainland; the authoritarian Chinese government is notorious for censoring information. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recently told TIME, “It’s never the case that we should accept censorship.”
7. Editor Found to be a Fraud
In March 2007 the jig was up for 24-year-old Kentucky man Ryan Jordan. For more than a year he had served as an editor for Wikipedia, making alterations and improvements on thousands of articles and serving as a judge on clashes amid authors. His Wikipedia profile described him as a professor of religion at a private university. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary about his work; no red flags ever came up. But following one Wikipedia user read a 2006 New Yorker outline of Jordan — who only went by the pseudonym Essjay, which the magazine also used — the truth about Jordan’s identity began to disentangle. Not only was he not a professor with expertise in theology and canon law, but he also never received a PhD, as he had claimed, and often used a book called Catholicism for Dummies as his editing supply.
6. History Professor Deemed Security Threat
On Feb. 16, 2007, Taner Akcam, a Turkish history professor at the University of Minnesota, flew to Montreal to convey a lecture at McGill University on the much dubious Armenian genocide — which some say was an organized massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in the year 1915, though the Turkish administration obstinately rebuts it. Because of his divisive posture, Akcam had been the topic of Internet nuisance, and his Wikipedia entry was sometimes abridged by Turkish nationalists calling him a terrorist.
