*SOLVED* Virtual Camera not showing up in Zoom Discord OBS Forums
The quality of content is more important than the expertise of who contributes it. Other community news publications include the “WikiWorld” web comic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like The Bugle from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines.
The publication covers news and events from vegas casino the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 86 Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.W 75 According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government. These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups. Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the “superprotection” feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted,W 61 Katherine Maher became the third executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.W 62 Maher stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks.W 57 The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.W 58 The foundation’s 2020 Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million, with assets of about $191.2 million and liabilities of almost $11 million.W 59
Compatible list or advice on a camera that works well with OBS Studio.
The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by “sharp” comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. These ideas include “featured articles”, the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short “stub” articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations. Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages. In November 2022, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 20 gigabytes.
Thousands of “mirror sites” exist that republish content from Wikipedia; two prominent ones that also include content from other reference sources are Reference.com and Answers.com. Wikimedia’s online newspaper The Signpost was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who would join the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees in 2008. In 2019, the level of contributions were reported by the Wikimedia Foundation as being at $120 million annually,W 85 updating the Jaffe estimates for the higher level of support to between $3.08 million and $19.2 million annually. She stated that one of her focuses would be increasing diversity in the Wikimedia community. A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University’s College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University found significant gender differences in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. Her exclusion from Wikipedia led to accusations of sexism, but Corinne Purtill writing for Quartz argued that “it’s also a pointed lesson in the hazards of gender bias in media, and of the broader consequences of underrepresentation.” Purtill attributes the issue to the gender bias in media coverage.
Latest updates
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.W 24 In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views. According to the foundation, this growth is largely attributed to automated programs, or “scraper” bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use in training large language models and related applications. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.W 17
Some user rights are granted automatically, such as the autoconfirmed and extended confirmed groups, when thresholds for account age and edits are met. This is accomplished through summarizing reliable sources, using impartial language, and ensuring that multiple points of view are presented based on their prominence. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. For example, the project namespace uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-governance related discussions. 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. He relied instead on “mutually reverting edit pairs”, where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor.
Editors
- Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation.
- Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine,W 94 while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law).
- A frequently vandalized article can be “semi-protected” or “extended confirmed protected”, meaning that only “autoconfirmed” or “extended confirmed” editors can modify it.
- English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia, accounting for 48% of Wikipedia’s cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages.
A 2013 study from Oxford University found that the most disputed articles on the English Wikipedia tend to address broader, global issues. A notable discussion within the English Wikipedia community concerns the preference for national variety of the English language, particularly American English and British English. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by British and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%.
Language
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and millions already have. Of the about 6.5 million articles and lists assessed as of April 2022, more than 6,000 (0.09%) are featured articles, and fewer than 4,000 (0.06%) are featured lists. In 2007, in preparation for producing a print version, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. Research published in 2024 determined that several groups of connected accounts had coordinated to promote Russian propaganda narratives and state-controlled media sources in articles, related to Russian-Ukrainian relations and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Internal news publications
- One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia.
- Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women’s topics.
- The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia.
- In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views.
- A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University’s College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University found significant gender differences in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback.
- Jimmy Wales once argued that only “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore “much like any traditional organization”.
Some studies suggest that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a “western cultural bias” (or “pro-western bias”) or “Eurocentric bias”, reiterating, says Anna Samoilenko, “similar biases that are found in the ‘ivory tower’ of academic historiography”. In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appeared to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics. In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism and having too much “leftist bias”. A 2008 article in Education Next journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.
One principal concern cited by The New York Times for the “worry” is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment. Wikipedia’s open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.W 48In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down.
Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. The trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month. The encyclopedia is home to 10.7% of articles in all Wikipedias (down from more than 50% in 2003).
English Wikipedia has been characterized as having less cultural bias than other language editions due to its broader editor base. Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE).W 119 One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g. Creative Commons’ CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.W 95 Wikipedia’s accommodation of varying international copyright laws regarding images has led some to observe that its photographic coverage of topics lags behind the quality of the encyclopedic text. The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.
References
Wikipedia’s community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations. Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.W 31 When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. 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. If the result of a discussion is not obvious, a closer—an uninvolved editor usually in good standing—may render a verdict from the strength of the arguments presented and then the numbers of arguers on each side. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate’s anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.
Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva, and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children.W 51 The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles. The October 22, 2013, essay by Tom Simonite in MIT’s Technology Review titled “The Decline of Wikipedia” discussed the effect of systemic bias and policy creep on the downward trend in the number of editors. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.W 49 The exact degree and manner of coverage on Wikipedia is under constant review by its editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see deletionism and inclusionism). Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article. In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of “fake news” because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. For use in templates, correct URLs can be constructed using certain magic words and parser functions such as fullurl, urlencode and others. However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. Wikipedia’s content must conform with its policies, including being verifiable by published reliable sources.
On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled “The Future of Wikipedia”, cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that “the number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years.” The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). Articles available in more than one language may offer “interwiki links”, which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.W 46 The English Wikipedia has 7,118,730 articles, 50,949,695 registered editors, and 267,535 active editors. Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages. Under this system, new and unregistered users’ edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published. Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly 50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia content across its projects.
Parser function urlencode
A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, “The Decline of Wikipedia”, questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. The English Wikipedia passed 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. Wikipediac is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Other projects may also use different strings in place of “/w/” and “/wiki/” in URLs. Since Wikipedia is continually updated, encyclopedic articles on major news events appear within minutes.
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.W 40 The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians, is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that “one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of 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. Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased).f Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%). Wikipedia 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.
Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger’s accusation, saying that Wikipedia did not have “material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it.” Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom after the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) decided the album cover was a potentially illegal indecent image and added the article’s URL to a “blacklist” it supplies to British internet service providers. The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from the German rock band Scorpions—features a picture of the album’s original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven, with Africa being the most underrepresented.
Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month.W 16 On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, “according to the ratings firm comScore”. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.W 5W 6 Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former’s servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The name, proposed by Sanger to forestall any potential damage to the Nupedia name, originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world’s seventh or ninth most visited website, according to differing sources on internet traffic.