Source:Wikipedia

Source Wikipedia
The Free Encyclopedia
Publication information
Type Website
Citation
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
Repositories
http://www.wikipedia.orgFree website

Contents

Usage Tips

As described on Wikipedia itself:


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Wikipedia ( or ) is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by the Similarweb and former Alexa; Wikipedia was ranked the 7th most popular site.[1][2] It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations.

On January 15, 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia. Sanger coined its name as a blend of "wiki" and "encyclopedia."[3][4] Wales was influenced by the "spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics, after being exposed to these ideas by Austrian economist and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Its combined editions comprise more than articles, attracting around 2billion unique device visits per month and more than 17 million edits per month (1.9edits per second) .[5] In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world."[6]

Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias; but criticism for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and alleged ideological bias. The reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has improved over time, as Wikipedia has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.[1][7] The website's coverage of controversial topics such as American politics and major events like the COVID-19 pandemic has received substantial media attention. It has been censored by world governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Nevertheless, Wikipedia has become an element of popular culture, with references in books, films, and academic studies. In April 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking links to related Wikipedia articles. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as a source of frequently updated information about those events.

Use as a Genealogy Source

Genealogy is not a area of emphasis for wikipedia, and any genealogical information taken from wikipedia should be confirmed against primary sources. Often wikipedia articles contain very naive interpretations of genealogical data, presenting them as facts when they are incorrect.

For example, the article on William Dummer says, "William Dummer (bapt. September 29, 1677 (O.S.) [= October 10, 1677 (N.S.)] – October 10, 1761)".

First, note that the baptism of William Dummer is found in the records of the Old South Church in Boston as 29 Dec 1678.

Second, note that 10 Oct 1677 is exactly 84 years before the death date of 10 Oct 1761. Since there is no record of William Dummer's birth in the Boston records, guess how this birth date was derived? From the new style death date, his supposed age at death of 84 years is subtracted to get the new style 10 Oct 1677, and that is converted incorrectly to 29 Sep 1677 (since prior to 1700, the adjustment was only 10 days, not 11, so it should have yielded 30 Sep 1677).

Third, note that William Dummer's death is reported in his 84th year, that is, age 83, not 84.

Citation Practice

Wikipedia is cited on WeRelate in two different ways. First, as a source citation and second using a template to pull in the first paragraph of the English Wikipedia article into the WeRelate page.

For detailed guidelines, see Help:Guidelines for use of Wikipedia

Source citation

Common practice:

Cite Wikipedia as the source title and place the article name in the "Record Name" field in the form [[Wikipedia:Article name|Article name]].

Advanced practice:

In general, for electronic online sources which may change at any time, it is good practice to reference the exact version of the source being cited. This can be accomplished by citing the date that the article was accessed and/or providing the permanent article link that can be created by Wikipedia (in the Toolbox located in the left margin of the page). The template {{Wikipedia article}} has been created to provide a simple means of using a permanent article link in source citations. It may be placed in the "Record name" field of the source citation. An example of its usage is provided below.

Referencing an article with the ID number from the permanent link:

Code: {{Wikipedia article|Henry VIII of England|id=404620395}}
Displays as: "Henry VIII of England"


(This practice is not commonly employed on WeRelate because the most common information used from Wikipedia are birth and death dates, which change in the underlying article fairly infrequently; in addition, the template information pulled in (see below) is updated periodically and will reflect those changes.)

Including Wikipedia content

Use the form {{source-wikipedia|Article name}} where you would like the introductory paragraph from the Wikipedia article to appear. The template will be updated with Wikipedia content the following Sunday morning.


Additional Resources

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Wikipedia. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.