Wikipedia Encyclopedia For Research

Learning Resource For The Community

Wikipedia is used for the typical research most encyclopedias are used for, but has several major advantages, including it's

• online search engine for very fast article retrieval
• in depth and extremely accurate and up to date nature
• online environment being accessed by anyone, anywhere, with just an Internet connection
• free nature which assists grade schools, high schools & universities in student learning

Wikipedia entries have an evolving life cycle. Often new topics are posted that cover things in a very brief fashion, almost dictionary like, before they are added to and improved by either the original author or another member of the community. Authors are commonly some of the most respected figures in their chosen interest.

Wikipedia has even come under recent attack by disgruntled small-time webmasters due to the influence it is believed to have with search engine results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN are considered to view Wikipedia articles as authoritive sources, and boost rankings for it's pages and the pages and ones it links to. Generally this is a very small minority of visitors who are typically overwhelming in their support for the project.

The free and open article contributions by Wikipedia visitors are not it's only source of support. The massive popularity of the encyclopedia brings with it very expensive costs such as web hosting servers and necessary legal expenses, which are offset by financial contributions by grateful visitors. No advertising is served on the site which keeps thing both more pleasant for the visitor, and Wikipedia more independent from advertiser influence.

In addition to the Wikipedia encyclopedia articles, the code behind the website is also free and worked on collaboratively by programmers around the world. In exchange for this assistance the code is then made free for people to use with their own websites under the conditions of the GPL license. Many people have gone on to use the Wikipedia code to create similar websites such as:

• Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus
• Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals
• Wikiquote Collection of quotations
• Wikisource The free library
• Wikispecies Directory of species
• Wikinews Free content news source
• Commons Shared media repository
• Meta-Wiki Wikimedia project coordination

Wikipedia News   Wikipedia Learning