CHAPTER – I INTRODUCTION Wikipedia matters. It is widely used and immensely influential in contemporary discourse. It is the ultimate paradigm of collective action on the Web, producing a large, successful resource of great value. According to Tonkin (2005), “Wikis allow all members to edit web pages so they are often used to promote collaborative content creation and editing”. Ketih explains ─ “Wikis (Internet provided private online spaces) are believed to be useful in supporting collaborative activity and improving student interaction. A Wiki provides an online space that allows members to collaboratively create and edit Web pages where content is emphasized over authorship. It could be used as a place for brainstorming or a place to archive shared content and link to other Web sites.” Moreover, Desilets et al. (2006) assert, “Wiki is a collective website where a large number of participants are allowed to modify or create pages using their Web browser (p.19)”. This introductory unit „Attitude of Information Professionals towards the Use of Wikipedia‟ consists of the background, statement of the problem, rationale of the study, objective of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitation of the study and operational definition of the key terms. 1.1 Background of the Study Over the last decade, the Web has become an essential tool for researchers. Information can be found using search tools such as Google or Yahoo quickly and/or easily. The problem is often not a lack of content, but rather the large volumes of stale and questionable information. Determining the accuracy of search, a result is a challenge for any Internet user. Moreover, Wikipedia is an Internet-based, volunteer-contributed encyclopedia that has become a popular online reference in just three years of existence. It has 1 thousands of international contributors and is the largest current example of an open content wiki. The goal of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia. Each article has an “Edit this page” button, allowing anyone, even anonymous passersby, to add or delete any content on any page. What would surely seem to create chaos has actually produced increasingly respected content, which has been evaluated and revised, by the thousands of visitors to the site over time? The project was started by Jimmy Wales resulting in only a few hundred articles. At the time, the project was called Nupedia and in March 2000 had one full-time employee, Larry Sanger. Volunteers were requested on the Internet, but there was a complex working structure, including formal positions for writers, editors, peer reviewers, copyeditors and translators. Nupedia was built on the traditional structure of peer-reviewed academic publications. After the project failed to take off, Sanger ceased being a paid staff member and the project came towards a close. 1.1.1 History of Wikipedia: On 15 January 2001, Wikipedia lunched as a sister project of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger‟s online encyclopedia (viz. Nupedia). Moreover, it was endowed by Wales and that was to be an expert-written, freely distributed, advertising-supported online reference work. Within a year, Wales and Editor-in-Chief Sanger decided to launch a wiki-based site to improve communication between contributors and experiment with online collaboration. Fig. 1 A Glimpse of Wikipedia The wiki had been invented by computer engineer Ward Cunningham in 1995 to facilitate the documentation. By 2001, the wiki was used by a number of online 2 projects, both private and public, as it featured a flexible structure that could scale with the size of a community. Wikipedia quickly gained an online buzz. By the end of the year, Wikipedia contained over 20,000 articles. Wikipedia continued to grow in size and community over the following two years, with various language versions created around the globe. Sanger was Wikipedia‟s only paid employee, who left the project in 2002. After facing community resistance to the idea of selling advertising on the site, Wales decided to create the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation in 2003 to administer the development of the project. Wikipedia continued to flourish, reaching 1 million articles in 2004 and gaining traction in the new participatory Web environment. Yet, the Wiki Media Foundation prioritized maintaining a minimal organization whose role was to support the volunteer community and the Wikimedia mission to create and freely distribute educational content in the public domain. Over the next few years, a small staff was hired, including Sue Gardner (Executive Director) in 2007, and in 2008, the WMF relocated from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco, California in order to take advantage of strategic relationships with other Silicon Valley firms. Wikipedia had emerged as a global phenomenon both online and in the offline world. Editors and contributors began holding face-to-face meeting in major cities to discuss their work, and two international conferences have been held annually since 2005 to organize workshops, present academic research, and discuss a range of issues pertaining to Wikipedia. In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites in the United States, according to Networks. With 42.9 million distinctive visitors, Wikipedia was ranked number nine. On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content. 3 Fig. 2 Number and Growth of Articles in Wikipedia Number of articles growth in the English Wikipedia (in blue) Source: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki More broadly, Wikipedia has become part of contemporary culture. Often criticized or lampooned in the popular media for its radical openness, the project calls into question established notions about truth, objectivity, and authority. Indeed, as Wikipedia turns the page on its first decade, it stands alone as the most prominent, most recognized symbol of openness and free culture in an increasingly closed, commercialized online landscape. 4 1.1.2 Wikipedia as a Sources of Information As I have already discussed, Wikipedia is a freely certified, multi-lingual, online encyclopedia written by volunteers. Its content is licensed as free; meaning that anyone could use, distribute, copy and modify it. Therefore, by its open nature, it has made many wary (i.e., distrustful) about possible vandalism, most frequently individuals intentionally adding false information to an article for a variety of reasons. In addition, another criticism of it is the possibility of authors generating errors because of lack of expertise or subject knowledge. Wikipedia not only depends on volunteers from the public to contribute with articles to the open encyclopedia, but also to edit the content that might be genuinely incorrect or vandalized. Now, Wikipedia's accuracy has been mixed. Even if, all of the authors advise exercising caution, most studies have shown that its quality is not significantly worse than that available from sources that might be considered more authoritative. Fallis (2008) pointed out “...information included in Wikipedia articles is generally accurate, reliable, and frequently overlooked, related issue”. He further writes that the most significant threat to readers posed by Wikipedia is not so much that of inaccurate information, but that of omissions, which can lead to false beliefs based on incomplete information. What can be concluded by the afore-definitions is Wikipedia articles are objective, reliable, clearly presented, reasonably accurate and complete, they objected to the poorly written nature of some content and the inclusion in some articles of unsubstantiated information. The authors also assert that while Wikipedia's topical coverage is uneven and frequently shallow, this is what one would expect of a volunteer community-generated resource. Wikipedia, hence, is being used as a source of information in the existing era. 1.1.3 Wikipedia as a Platform for Research It is needless to say that Wikipedia is internet-based encyclopedia which is widely and/or immensely use for information gathering in the present era. Nowadays, Wikipedia, in broader sense, has become a platform for research because it is constantly evolving; its entries often include unconventional sections that might never 5 have been included in a traditional encyclopedia. The article entitled “Researching with Wikipedia” asserts: Wikipedia is more like a library than like a typical reference work. The mere fact that a book is in the library is no guarantee against bias or misinformation. The same can be said of Wikipedia articles. This does not make them useless; it just means that they should be approached differently than one approaches a typical reference work. The article elaborates on what is meant by “approached differently.” Articles should be examined for their documentation, and these sources should in turn be analyzed; readers should review the discussion page and the history of changes to the article to gain insight into recent edits; related topics can be explored via hyperlinks within the article; questions or concerns can be posed to Wikipedians on the talk page. Hence what we can conclude that Wikipedia is also referred as a platform for research. 1.2 Statement of the Problem Statement of the problem specially identifies the concise and/or comprehensible