Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:18, 24 July 2009

Misplaced Pages is an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone and that aims to provide free encyclopedic information to its readers. The pioneering concept and technology of Wiki comes from Ward Cunningham, the concept of a free online encyclopedia from Richard Stallman. It was formally launched on 15 January 2001. Initially it was created as a complement and 'feeder' to the expert-written English-language encyclopedia project 'Nupedia', in order to provide an additional source of draft articles and ideas. It quickly overtook Nupedia, growing to become a large global project, and originating a wide range of additional reference projects. Today Misplaced Pages includes several million freely usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors.

History overview

Background

The concept of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to librarian Charles Ammi Cutter's article "The Buffalo Public Library in 1983" (Library Journal, 1883, p. 211–217), Paul Otlet's book Traité de documentation (1934; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum institution, 1910), H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu in 1973.

With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. One little-acknowledged predecessor was the Interpedia (initiated in 1993). Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. His published document "aims to lay out what the 💕 needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On 17 January 2001, two days after the start of Misplaced Pages, the Free Software Foundation's GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia, but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to ".

Formulation of the concept

Misplaced Pages was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project to produce a free online encyclopedia, founded by Bomis, a web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate multi-step peer review process. Despite its mailing-list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger, a graduate philosophy student hired by Wales, the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.

Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz. Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on 2 January 2001. Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software", though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.

Wales set one up and put it online on 10 January 2001.

Founding of Misplaced Pages

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Misplaced Pages, and Misplaced Pages was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on 15 January 2001.

The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by Bomis. Many current and past Bomis employees have contributed some content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and current CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.

The first edits ever made on Misplaced Pages are believed to be test edits by Wales. However, the oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.

The project received many new participants after being mentioned three times on the Slashdot website, with two minor mentions in March 2001. It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July. Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in the New York Times on 20 September 2001.

The project passed 1,000 articles around 12 February 2001, and 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created—a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000. The rate of growth has more or less steadily increased since the inception of the project, except for a few software- and hardware-induced slow-downs.

Namespaces and internationalization

Early in Misplaced Pages's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first domain created for a non-English Misplaced Pages was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC), followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC). The Japanese Misplaced Pages, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period, and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language, although statistics of that early period are imprecise. The French Misplaced Pages was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that included also Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These languages were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Misplaced Pages, notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.

In January 2002, 90% of all Misplaced Pages articles were in English. By January 2004, less than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase. As of 2007, around 75% of all Misplaced Pages articles are contained within non-English Misplaced Pages versions.

Development

In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Misplaced Pages. Initially amicable, by 2004 differences between Sanger and Wales had driven a wedge between them, centering upon Sanger's criticism of Misplaced Pages's approach, his role in Misplaced Pages's success, and their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias (see Early roles of Wales and Sanger). Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but the two differed on how best to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.

Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management, went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Misplaced Pages. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day to day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects.

Sanger advocated a "two tier" expert-led culture and more "hands on" executive management, with final editorial control by chief editors closer to the traditional model. He returned briefly to academia, then after joining the Digital Universe Foundation, went on to found Citizendium, an alternative open encyclopedia which uses real names for contributors in order to reduce disruptive editing, supports the specific recognition of experts, and is governed by a system of top-down management, including himself or agreed-upon editors or committees. He has stated that he intends to leave in a few years, when the project and its management are established.

Organization

The Misplaced Pages project has grown rapidly in the course of its life, at several levels. Individual wikis have grown organically through the addition of new articles, new wikis have been added in English and non-English languages, and entire new projects replicating these growth methods in other related areas (news, quotations, reference books and so on) have been founded as well.

Respectively, Misplaced Pages itself has grown, with the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation to act as an umbrella body and the growth of software and policies to address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below:

Historical overview by year

Articles summarizing each year are held within the Misplaced Pages project namespace and are linked to below. Additional resources for research are available within the Misplaced Pages records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.

2000

The Nupedia project is started with Larry Sanger running the daily operations and formulating many of the initial policies.

2001

The Misplaced Pages.com and Misplaced Pages.org domain names are registered on 12 January 2001 and 13 January 2001, respectively, with the latter being brought online on 13 January 2001, according to Alexa; project formally opens 15 January ('Misplaced Pages Day'); the first international Wikipedias are created (March-May: French, German, Catalan, Swedish); "Neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy is formally formulated; first slashdotter wave arrives 26 July. The first media report about Misplaced Pages appears in August 2001 coincidentally by the newspaper Wales on Sunday. The September 11, 2001 attacks spur the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.

2002

Year 2002 sees: the end of funding from Bomis and the departure of Larry Sanger; the forking of the Spanish Misplaced Pages to establish the Enciclopedia Libre; and the creation of the first portable Mediawiki software (went live 25 January). Bots are introduced, Jimmy Wales confirms Misplaced Pages would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style are launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project is proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Misplaced Pages.

2003

Mathematical formulae using TeX are introduced; English Misplaced Pages passes 100,000 articles (the next largest, German, passes 10,000); the Wikimedia Foundation is established; Misplaced Pages adopts its jigsaw world logo; and the first Wikipedian social meeting is organized. The basic principles of Misplaced Pages's Arbitration system and committee (known colloquially as "Arbcom") are developed mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other key early Wikipedians.

2004

The worldwide Misplaced Pages article pool continues to grow rapidly, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles to over 1 million (English Misplaced Pages was just less than half of these) in over 100 languages. The server farms are moved from California to Florida; Categories and CSS style configuration sheets are introduced; and the first attempt to block Misplaced Pages occurs (China, June 2004, duration 2 weeks). Formal election of a board and ArbCom begin - Devouard is the only person elected who was instrumental in ArbCom. She and others begin to criticize balance and focus problems and lead efforts to fill in articles in neglected areas. The first formal projects are proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias arising from Misplaced Pages's community structure.

2005

Multilingual and subject portals are established; the first quarter's formal fundraiser raises almost US $ 100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand; Misplaced Pages becomes the most popular reference website on the Internet according to Hitwise; China again blocks Misplaced Pages (October); English Misplaced Pages passes 750,000 articles. The first Misplaced Pages scandal occurs, when a well known figure is found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months (the "Seigenthaler incident"). In the wake of this and other concerns, the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse are established. These include a new Checkuser privilege policy update (checkuser is a Mediawiki tool that assists in sock puppetry investigations), a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and tagging of such articles for stricter review, and restriction of new article creation to registered users only.

2006

English Misplaced Pages gains its 1½ millionth article; the first approved Misplaced Pages article selection is made freely available to download; "Misplaced Pages" becomes registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation; The congressional aides biography scandals come to public attention: multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager are caught trying to covertly alter Misplaced Pages biographies, the campaign manager resigns.

Jimmy Wales indicates, at Wikimania 2006, that Misplaced Pages has achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles; A new privilege "oversight" is created allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable; Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proves more popular than anticipated, with over 1,000 pages semi-protected at any given time; Misplaced Pages is rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.

2007

Misplaced Pages continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts; the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages; the English Misplaced Pages gains a steady 1,700 articles a day, with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked at around the 10th busiest on the Internet (See Misplaced Pages Statistics); Misplaced Pages continues to garner visibility in the press and to slowly but steadily gain traction as a tertiary source both in serious legal decision-making and as a source of collated information on current events; the Essjay controversy breaks when a prominent member of Misplaced Pages is found to have lied about his credentials; Citizendium launches publicly; a trend develops that the encyclopedia addresses people whose notability stems from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creation of a distinct biographical article.

2008

Various WikiProjects in many areas continue to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April, the 10 millionth Misplaced Pages article was created, an article within the Hungarian Misplaced Pages, and, only several months later, the English Misplaced Pages exceeds 2.5 million articles.

2009

The English Misplaced Pages reached 2.8 million articles on March 20, 2009 and 2.9 million articles on June 4, 2009. Three million articles should be reached on or around August 17. There are 6,942,792 English articles as of 21 January.

The Arbitration Committee of the Misplaced Pages internet encyclopedia decided in May 2009 to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists. A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were topic-banned as well. The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties".

A usability study commenced in 2009.

History by subject area

Hardware and software

The software that runs Misplaced Pages, and the hardware, server farms and other systems upon which Misplaced Pages relies.

• In January 2001, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl by Clifford Adams. The server has run on Linux to this day, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the CamelCase convention.
• In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Misplaced Pages was introduced, replacing the older UseModWiki. Written specifically for the project by Magnus Manske, it included a PHP wiki engine.
• In July 2002, a major rewrite of the software powering Misplaced Pages went live; dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and became MediaWiki. It was written by Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the increasing demands of the growing project.
• In October 2002, Derek Ramsey started to use a "bot", or program, to add a large number of articles about United States towns; these articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data. Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics. These articles were generally well received, but some users criticized them for their initial uniformity and writing style (for example, see this version of an original bot-generated town article, and compare to current version).
• In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
• 9 June 2003 - ISBNs in articles now link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page Misplaced Pages:Book sources. Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the Misplaced Pages:ISBN page. See the edit that changed this.
• After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Misplaced Pages users were no longer hard coded, allowing Misplaced Pages administrators to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users.
• On 12 February 2004, server operations were moved from San Diego, California to Tampa, Florida.
• On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of the MediaWiki software.
• On 30 May 2004, the first instances of "categorization" entries appeared. Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed from the founding of Misplaced Pages. However, Larry Sanger had viewed the schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles, whereas the categorization effort centered on individual categorization entries in each article of the encyclopedia, as part of a larger automatic categorization of the articles of the encyclopedia.
• After 3 June, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css.
• Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was created, allowing transclusion of standard texts.
• On 7 June 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time the bulk of the Wikimedia servers were moved to a new facility across the street. All Wikimedia projects were down during this time.

Look and feel

The external face of Misplaced Pages, its look and feel, and the Misplaced Pages branding, as presented to users

• On 4 April 2002 Brilliant Prose, since renamed to Featured Articles, was moved to the Misplaced Pages Namespace from the article namespace.
• Around 15 October 2003, the current Misplaced Pages logo was installed. The logo concept was selected by a voting process, which was followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The final selection was created by David Friedland (who edits[REDACTED] under the username "nohat") based on a logo design and concept created by Paul Stansifer.
• On 22 February 2004 DYK made its first Main Page appearance.
• On 23 February 2004 a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared at 19:46 UTC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look.
• On 10 January 2005, the multilingual portal at www.wikipedia.org was set up, replacing a redirect to the English-language Misplaced Pages.
• On 5 February 2005, the Portal:Biology was created, first "portal" on the English Misplaced Pages. However, the concept was pioneered on the German Misplaced Pages where Portal:Recht (law studies) was set up in October 2003.
• On 16 July 2005, the English Misplaced Pages began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page.
• On 19 March 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English language Misplaced Pages featured its first redesign in nearly two years.

Internal structures

Landmarks in the Misplaced Pages community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies.

• April 2001, Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", Misplaced Pages's core non-negotiable editorial policy, a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Sanger for Nupedia in spring or summer 2000, which covered many of the same core principles.
• In September 2001, collaboration by subject matter in WikiProjects is introduced.
• In February 2002, concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bomis Inc (Misplaced Pages's original host) combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, led most participants of the Spanish Misplaced Pages to break away and establish it independently as the Enciclopedia Libre. Following clarification of Misplaced Pages's status and non-commercial nature later that year, re-merger talks between Enciclopedia Libre and the re-founded Spanish Misplaced Pages occasionally took place in 2002 and 2003, but no conclusion was reached. As of July 2007, the two continue to coexist as substantial Spanish language reference sources, with around 36,700 articles (EL) and 248,800 articles (Sp.W) respectively.
• Also in 2002, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the Manual of Style, along with a number of other policies and guidelines.
• November 2002 - new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce are set up, as well as other language mailing lists (eg Polish), to reduce the volume of traffic on mailing lists.
• In July 2003, the rule against editing your autobiography is introduced.
• On 28 October 2003, the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in Munich. Many cities followed suit, and soon a number of regular Wikipedian get-togethers were established around the world. Several Internet communities, including one on the popular blog website LiveJournal, have also sprung up since.
• From 10 July to 30 August 2004 the Misplaced Pages:Browse and Misplaced Pages:Browse by overview formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On 27 August 2004 the Community Portal was started, to serve as a focus for community efforts. These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad-hoc collaborations between like-minded editors.
• During September to December 2005 following the Seigenthaler controversy and other similar concerns, several anti-abuse features and policies were added to Misplaced Pages. These were:

• The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWiki extension to assist detection of abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005. but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, as a result of which there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis.
• Creation of new pages on the English Misplaced Pages was restricted to editors who had created a user account.
• The introduction and rapid adoption of the policy Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living people, giving a far tighter quality control and fact-check system to biographical articles related to living people.
• The "semi-protection" function and policy, allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit.

• In May 2006, a new "oversight" feature was introduced on the English Misplaced Pages, allowing a handful of highly trusted users to permanently erase page revisions containing copyright infringements or libelous or personal information from a page's history. Previous to this, page version deletion was laborious, and also deleted versions remained visible to other administrators and could be un-deleted by them.
• On 1 January 2007, the subcommunity named Esperanza was disbanded by communal consent. Esperanza had begun as an effort to promote "wikilove" and a social support network, but had developed its own subculture and private structures. Its disbanding was described as the painful but necessary remedy for a project that had allowed editors to "see themselves as Esperanzans first and foremost". A number of Esperanza's subprojects were integrated back into Misplaced Pages as free-standing projects, but most of them are now inactive. When the group was founded in September 2005, there had been concerns expressed that it would eventually be condemned as such.
• In April 2007 the results of 4 months policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Misplaced Pages policies into one core policy (See: Misplaced Pages:Attribution) was polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focused policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal.

The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures

Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia Foundation, its executive, and its activities as a foundation.

• In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Misplaced Pages, the URL of Misplaced Pages was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org (see: .com and .org).
• On 20 June 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded.
• Communications committee was formed in January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Misplaced Pages via the newly implemented OTRS (a ticket handling system).
• Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. During this time, Angela was active in editing content and setting policy, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation.
• On 10 January 2006, Misplaced Pages became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation.
• In July 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
• In June 2006, Brad Patrick was hired to be the first executive director of the Foundation. He resigned in January 2007, and was later replaced by Sue Gardner (June 2007).
• In October 2006, Florence Nibart-Devouard became chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation.

Projects and landmarks

Sister projects, and landmarks related to articles, user base, and other statistics.

• 16 January 2001, the first recorded edit of Misplaced Pages at UuU, although it is suspected there were earlier edits.
• In December 2002, the first sister project, Wiktionary, was created; aiming to produce a dictionary and thesaurus of the words in all languages. It uses the same software as Misplaced Pages.
• On 22 January 2003, the English Misplaced Pages was again slashdotted after having reached the 100,000 article milestone with the Hastings, New Zealand article. Two days later, the German language Misplaced Pages, the largest non-English version, passed the 10,000 article mark.
• On 20 June 2003, the same day that the Wikimedia Foundation was founded, "Wikiquote" was created. A month later, "Wikibooks" was launched. "Wikisource" was set up towards the end of the year.
• In January 2004, Misplaced Pages passed the 200,000 article milestone in English with the article on Neil Warnock, and reached 450,000 articles for both English and non-English wikis. The next month, the combined article count of the English and non-English wikis reached 500,000.
• On 20 April 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 250,000.
• On 7 July 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 300,000.
• On 20 September 2004, Misplaced Pages reached one million articles in over 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew language Misplaced Pages, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan.
• On 20 November 2004, the article count of the English Misplaced Pages reached 400,000.
• On 18 March 2005, Misplaced Pages passed the 500,000 article milestone in English, with Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union being announced in a press release as the landmark article.
• In May 2005, Misplaced Pages became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company Hitwise, relegating Dictionary.com to second place.
• On 29 September 2005, the English Misplaced Pages passed the 750,000 article mark.
• On 1 March 2006, the English language Misplaced Pages passed the 1,000,000 article mark, with Jordanhill railway station being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article
• On 8 June 2006, the English language Misplaced Pages passed the 1,000 featured article mark, with Iranian peoples.
• On 15 August 2006 the Wikimedia Foundation launches Wikiversity.
• On 24 November 2006, the English language Misplaced Pages passed the 1,500,000 article mark, with Kanab ambersnail being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.
• On 4 April 2007, the first CD selection in English was published as a free download (see 2006 Misplaced Pages CD Selection).
• On 9 September 2007, the English language Misplaced Pages passed the 2,000,000 article mark. El Hormiguero, an article which covers a Spanish TV comedy show, is accepted by consensus as the 2,000,000th article.
• On 12 August 2008, the English language Misplaced Pages passed the 2,500,000 article mark.

Funding

• One of the first fundraisers was held from 18 February 2005 to 1 March 2005, raising $94,000, which was $21,000 more than expected.
• On 6 January 2006, the Q4 2005 fundraiser concluded, raising a total of just over $390,000.
• In June 2007 it was announced that the German Misplaced Pages will be receiving state funding.

External impact

• In 2007, Misplaced Pages is deemed fit to be used as a major source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in the Formula One trademark case ruling.
• Over time Misplaced Pages gains recognition amongst other traditional media as a "key source" for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and related tsunami, the biographies of 2008 Presidential election candidates, and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The latter article is accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published local to the shootings adding that "Misplaced Pages has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event."
• On 21 February, Noam Cohen of the New York Times publishes A History Department Bans Citing Misplaced Pages as a Research Source
• On 27 February, An article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Misplaced Pages in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Misplaced Pages.

Effect of biographical articles

Because Misplaced Pages biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Misplaced Pages articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Misplaced Pages biography.

• November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy. Someone, who later admitted that he wanted to make a joke, wrote into the article that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy murder of 1963.
• December 2006: German comedian "Atze Schröder", who does not want his real name published, sued Arne Klempert, secretary of Wikimedia Deutschland, because of the Misplaced Pages article. Then the artist drew back his complaint, but wanted his attorney's costs to be paid by Klempert. Trial decided that the artist had to cover those costs by himself.
• 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport because of false information on his biography that he was a terrorist.
• September 2008: Changes or "manipulations" at the Sarah Palin article in English Misplaced Pages have been noticed by the media.
• November 2008: Germany's Left Party politician Lutz Heilmann believed that some remarks in "his" article caused damage to his reputation. He succeeded in getting a court order to make Wikimedia Deutschland stop linking from its page www.wikipedia.de to German Misplaced Pages de.wikipedia.org. The result was a huge national support for Misplaced Pages, more donations to Wikimedia Deutschland, a rise from several dozen page views of "Lutz Heilmann" daily to half a million the two days after, and after a couple of days Heilmann asked the court to withdraw the court order.
• December 2008: Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch chapter, won a preliminary injunction. An entrepreneur was linked in "his" article with the criminal Willem Holleeder and wanted the article deleted. The judge in Utrecht did not follow him but believed the chapter that it has no influence on the content of Dutch Misplaced Pages.

Controversies

• January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, attempted to promote itself on its Misplaced Pages page.
• October 2005: Alan Mcilwraith was exposed as a fake war hero with a Misplaced Pages page.
• November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy caused Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity was ascertained by Daniel Brandt of Misplaced Pages Watch. Following this, the scientific journal Nature undertook a peer reviewed study to test articles in Misplaced Pages against their equivalents in Encyclopædia Britannica, and concluded they are comparable in terms of accuracy. Britannica rejected their methodology and their conclusion. Nature refused to make any apologies, asserting instead the reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms. (For studies like this, see Reliability of Misplaced Pages. For traffic impact see Misplaced Pages history in images)
• Early-to-mid 2006: The congressional aides biography scandals came to public attention, in which several political aides were caught trying to influence the Misplaced Pages biographies of several politicians to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replace the article in part or whole by staff authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden, Gil Gutknecht. In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Misplaced Pages entries of political opponents. Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006.
• July 2006: Joshua Gardner was exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Misplaced Pages page.
• January 2007: English-language Wikipedians in Qatar were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP address. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Misplaced Pages was banning Qatar from the site.
• On 23 January 2007, a Microsoft employee offered to pay Rick Jelliffe to review and change certain Misplaced Pages articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format.
• In February 2007, The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent English Misplaced Pages editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials. The editor, Ryan Jordan, became a Wikia employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Misplaced Pages Watch, and communicated to the original article author. (See: Essjay controversy)
• February 2007: Fuzzy Zoeller sued a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Misplaced Pages biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network.
• 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist.
• In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site Wikinews.
• In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently-deceased TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the S Club 7 song "Reach". In fact, he hadn't, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Misplaced Pages article.
• In February 2007, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. In Bauer v. Glatzer, Bauer claimed that information on Misplaced Pages critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Misplaced Pages and moved to dismiss the case on May 2, 2008. The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on 1 July 2008.

Notable forks and derivatives

See Misplaced Pages:Mirrors and forks for a partial list of Misplaced Pages mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is maintained. A significant number of sites utilize the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Misplaced Pages.

Specialized foreign language forks using the Misplaced Pages concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Misplaced Pages, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.

In 2006, Larry Sanger founded Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki. It has expert-led top-down culture, the absence of which in Misplaced Pages he views as a major concern. (see also Nupedia).

Publication on other media

The German Misplaced Pages was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139 page book explaining Misplaced Pages, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Misplaced Pages. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Misplaced Pages in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.

In September 2008, Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Misplaced Pages articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.

The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Misplaced Pages was published in April 2006 by SOS Children as the 2006 Misplaced Pages CD Selection. In April 2007, "Misplaced Pages Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles. The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file or Torrent file, or accessed online at the project's website.

A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of Misplaced Pages available for use on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.

Lawsuits

In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In the defamation action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer due to the provisions of this section. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.

Other notable occurrences

Early roles of Wales and Sanger

Both Wales and Sanger played important roles in the early stages of Misplaced Pages. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. To Wales is ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Misplaced Pages; Sanger wrote, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine" (emphasis in original text). He also wrote, "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Misplaced Pages." Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software." Sanger coined the portmanteau "Misplaced Pages" as the project name. In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems. In terms of project roles, Sanger spearheaded and pursued the project as its leader in its first year, and did most of the early work in formulating policies (including "Ignore all rules" and "Neutral point of view") and building up the community. Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of Bomis' funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and his changing personal priorities, however by 2004 the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger criticized Misplaced Pages, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair."

Wales claims to be the founder of Misplaced Pages, however, as explained by Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder." There is evidence that Sanger was called co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Misplaced Pages press releases and Misplaced Pages articles, and in a September 2001 The New York Times article for which both were interviewed. Wales later disputed this, stating, "He used to work for me I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title." There is no evidence from before January 2004 of Wales disputing Sanger's status as co-founder, indeed, Wales identified himself as "co-founder" as late as August 2002.

Today, Wales emphasizes this employer-employee relation and the fact that he was therefore the ultimate authority, to assert that this makes him the "sole founder," and Sanger cites earlier versions of Misplaced Pages pages (2004, 2006) and press releases (2002–2004), to demonstrate that media coverage articles from the time of his involvement routinely represent them as co-founders.

Blocking of Misplaced Pages

Misplaced Pages has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities. To date these have related to the People's Republic of China, Iran, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Syria.

Mainland China (multiple occasions)

The People's Republic of China and internet service providers in Mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking contentious Web sites in mainland China, and Wikimedia sites have been blocked multiple times in its history, sometimes all articles, and sometimes selectively by topic, region, language version, or ISP. Notable blocks include:

1. June 2004: Access to the Chinese Misplaced Pages from Beijing blocked on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Possibly related to this, on May 31 an article from the IDG News Service was published, discussing the Chinese Misplaced Pages's treatment of the protests.
2. September 2004: A second and less serious outage. Access to Misplaced Pages was erratic or unavailable to some users in mainland China — this block was not comprehensive and some users in mainland China were never affected. The exact reason for the block is unknown, but it may have been linked with the closing down of YTHT BBS, a popular Peking University-based BBS that was shut down a few weeks earlier for hosting overtly radical political discussions.
3. October 2005 to around mid October 2006: For the first few days the English Misplaced Pages seems to have been unblocked in most provinces in China, while users were still unable to access the Chinese version in certain provinces, varying by ISP. By November, both versions seemed to be accessible in all provinces and by all ISPs. The end of the block coincided with the Chinese Misplaced Pages's 100,000th article milestone.

The first block had an effect on the vitality of Chinese Misplaced Pages, which suffered sharp dips in various indicators such as the number of new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. In some cases, it took anywhere from six to twelve months in order to recover to the levels of May 2004.

On 31 July 2008, the BBC reported that the Chinese Misplaced Pages had been unblocked that day in China; it had still been blocked the previous day. This came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the upcoming Olympic Games, and websites such as the Chinese edition of the BBC were being unblocked following talks between the International Olympic Committee and the Games' Chinese organisers.

Syria

Access to Arabic Misplaced Pages was blocked between 30 April 2008 and February 13, 2009 . (Other languages were accessible).

Tunisia

Wikimedia website was blocked for a few days in Tunisia (23 November 2006 - 27 November 2006).

United Kingdom

On 5 December 2008, users in the United Kingdom were affected by a block of a page (Virgin Killer) and associated picture (Image:Virgin Killer.jpg), following a claim that the image was "potentially illegal" under the Protection of Children Act 1978. An estimated 95% of British users were affected by the block, which was put in place on the recommendation of the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF's recommendation was rescinded on 9 December 2008.

Uzbekistan

Access to Uzbek Misplaced Pages was blocked in Uzbekistan on 10 January 2008; the block was lifted 5 March 2008. This was the second time Misplaced Pages had been blocked in Uzbekistan; the first case was in 2007.

See also

• History of wikis
• The Misplaced Pages Revolution

References

This section may require cleanup to meet Misplaced Pages's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this section if you can. (November 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

1. "The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource".
3. "The 💕 Project".
4. Sidener, Jonathan (6 December 2004). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 25 March 2007. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
5. ^ "The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir - Part I" and "Part II", Slashdot, April 2005. Retrieved on 25 March 2007. "The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on. So I arrived in San Diego in early February, 2000, to get to work. One of the first things I asked Jimmy is how free a rein I had in designing the project. What were my constraints, and in what areas was I free to exercise my own creativity? He replied, as I clearly recall, that most of the decisions should be mine; and in most respects, as a manager, Jimmy was indeed very hands-off. Nevertheless, I always did consult with him about important decisions, and moreover, I wanted his advice. Now, Jimmy was quite clear that he wanted the project to be in principle open to everyone to develop, just as open source software is (to an extent). Beyond this, however, I believe I was given a pretty free rein. So I spent the first month or so thinking very broadly about different possibilities." —Larry Sanger.
6. ^ My resignation: Larry Sanger (meta.wikimedia.com) - "I was more or less offered the job of editing Nupedia when I was, as an ABD philosophy graduate student, soliciting Jimbo's (and other friends') advice on a website I was thinking of starting. It was the first I had heard of Jimbo's idea of an open content encyclopedia, and I was delighted to take the job."
7. Cite error: The named reference Jonathan Sidener was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
8. ^ "Ben Kovitz". WikiWikiWeb. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
9. ^ Moody, Glyn (13 July 2006). "This time, it'll be a Misplaced Pages written by experts". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2007.-- While casting around for a way to speed up article production, Sanger met with Ben Kovitz, an old friend, in January 2001. Kovitz introduced Sanger to the idea of the wiki, invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham: web pages that anyone could write and edit. "My first reaction was that this really could be what would solve the problem," Sanger explains, "because the software was already written, and this community of people on WikiWikiWeb" - the first wiki - "had created something like 14,000 pages". Nupedia, by contrast, had produced barely two dozen articles. Sanger took up the idea immediately: "I wrote up a proposal and sent it that evening, and the wiki was then set up for me to work on." But this was not Misplaced Pages as we know it. "Originally it was the Nupedia Wiki - our idea was to use it as an article incubator for Nupedia. Articles could begin life on this wiki, be developed collaboratively and, when they got to a certain stage of development, be put it into the Nupedia system."
10. ^ Sidener, Jonathan (23 September 2006). "Misplaced Pages co-founder looks to add accountability, end anarchy". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 25 March 2007. The origins of Misplaced Pages date to 2000, when Sanger was finishing his doctoral thesis in philosophy and had an idea for a Web site.
11. Poe, Marshall (2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. p. 3. Retrieved 25 March 2007. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)-- Over tacos that night, Sanger explained his concerns about Nupedia’s lack of progress, the root cause of which was its serial editorial system. As Nupedia was then structured, no stage of the editorial process could proceed before the previous stage was completed. Kovitz brought up the wiki and sketched out “wiki magic,” the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all over the project. With Kovitz in tow, Sanger rushed back to his apartment and called Wales to share the idea. Over the next few days he wrote a formal proposal for Wales and started a page on Cunningham’s wiki called “WikiPedia.”
12. ^ Wales, Jimmy (30 October 2001). "LinkBacks?" (Email). wikipedia-l archives. Bomis. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
13. "Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness". Wired News. 3 May 2007. Retrieved 1 November 2007.Wired.com states: "Wales offered the following on-the-record comment in an e-mail to NewAssignment.net editor Jay Rosen ...'Larry Sanger was my employee working under my direct supervision during the entire process of launching Misplaced Pages. He was not the originator of the proposal to use a wiki for the encyclopedia project -- that was Jeremy Rosenfeld'."
14. Rogers Cadenhead. "Misplaced Pages Founder Looks Out for Number 1". Retrieved 15 October 2006.
15. Also stated on Misplaced Pages, on December 2, 2005 permanent reference
16. Larry Sanger (10 January 2001). "Let's make a wiki". Nupedia mailing list. {{cite news}}: line feed character in |publisher= at position 16 (help)
17. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages's oldest articles", Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 30 January 2007.
18. Nupedia and Project Gutenberg Directors Answer 5 March 2001
19. Everything2 Hits One Million Nodes 29 March 2001
20. Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of 💕s 25 July 2001
21. "Fact driven? Collegial? This site wants you", New York Times, 20 September 2001
22. Alternative language wikipedias
23. History of the Catalan Homepage
24. The Wayback Machine: An early Japanese Misplaced Pages HomePage (revision #3), dated 20 March 2001 23:00. Accessed 4 November 2008.
25. An Internet Archive's snapshot of English Misplaced Pages HomePage, dated 30 March 2001, showing links to the three first sister projects, "Deutsch (German)", "Catalan", and "Nihongo (Japanese)".
26. Multilingual monthly statistics
27. First edition in the Catalan Misplaced Pages
28. This table, for instance, misses Japanese and German articles such as this one and this one, both dated 6 April 2001.
29. The Documentation on the French Misplaced Pages mentions the date of 23 March 2001, but this date is not supported by Misplaced Pages snapshots on the Internet Archive, nor by Jason Richney's letter, which was dated 11 May 2001 (see below).
30. Letter of Jason Richey to wikipedia-l mailing list 11 May 2001
31. HomePage from the Internet Archive
32. Misplaced Pages:Announcements May 2001
33. International_Wikipedia
34. Misplaced Pages: Announcements 2001
35. International wikipedias statistics
36. Anderson, Nate (25 February 2007). "Citizendium: building a better Misplaced Pages". Ars Technica. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
37. Network Solutions (2007) WHOIS domain registration information results for wikipedia.com from Network Solutions Accessed 27 July 2007.
38. Network Solutions (2007) WHOIS domain registration information results for wikipedia.org from Network Solutions Accessed 27 July 2007.
39. Wales on Sunday (26 August 2001) Knowledge at your fingertips. Game On : Internet Chat.(writing, "Both Encarta and Britannica are official publications with well-deserved reputations. But there are other options, such as the homemade encyclopaedias. One is Misplaced Pages (www. wikipedia. com) which uses clever software to build an encyclopaedia from scratch. Wiki is software installed on a web server that allows anyone to edit any of the pages. At the Misplaced Pages, anyone can write about any subject they know about. The idea is that over time, enough experts will offer their knowledge for free and build up the world's ultimate hand-built database of knowledge. The disadvantage is that it's still an ongoing project. So far about 8,000 articles have been written and the editors are aiming for 100,000.")
40. October, 2001 snapshot of the homepage shows the "Breaking News" header up top as well as the September 11, 2001 block of articles under "Current events"; the 9/11 page shows the activist nature of the page, as well as the large number of subtopics created to cover the event.
41. ^ WP:BLP started 17 December 2005 with narrative "I started this due to the Daniel Brandt situation".
42. Similar Search Results: Google Wins 29 January 2007
43. See the special page: Special:Statistics: 5,078,036 registered user accounts as at 13 August 2007, excluding anonymous editors who have not created accounts.
44. Source: Misplaced Pages:Size comparisons as at 13 August 2007
45. From around Q3 2006 Misplaced Pages's growth rate has been approximately linear, source: Misplaced Pages:Statistics - new article count by month 2006-2007.
46. E.g., cases such as Crystal Gail Mangum and Daniel Brandt.
47. Telegraph 30 May 2009 20:30: Church of Scientology members banned from editing Misplaced Pages
48. ^ Shea, Danny (2009-05-29). "Misplaced Pages Bans Scientology From Site". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 2009-05-29.
49. ^ Metz, Cade (2009-05-29). "Misplaced Pages bans Church of Scientology". The Register. Retrieved 2009-05-29.
50. http://usability.wikimedia.org/UX_and_Usability_Study
51. "Server swapping soon". Retrieved 10 February 2007.
52. "Misplaced Pages:Categorization", Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 30 January 2007.
53. "Misplaced Pages:Template namespace", Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 17 September 2007.
54. "Misplaced Pages:Featured articles", Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 30 January 2007.
55. "International logo vote/Finalists". Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia. Retrieved 2006-07-08.
56. "Portal:Biology", English Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 31 January 2007.
57. Portals on German Misplaced Pages ordered by date of creation.
58. NeutralPointOfView
59. "A few things are absolute and non-negotiable, though. NPOV for example." in statement by Jimbo Wales in November 2003 and, in this thread reconfirmed by Jimbo Wales in April 2006 in the context of lawsuits.
60. Nupedia.com editorial policy guidelines. Version 3.31 (16 November 2000). Retrieved 7 September 2007.
61. "Nupedia articles are, in terms of their content, to be unbiased. There may be respectable reference works that permit authors to take recognizable stands on controversial issues, but this is not one of them ... "On every issue ... is it very difficult or impossible for the reader to determine what the view is to which the author adheres?" ... for each controversial view discussed, the author of an article (at a bare minimum) mention various opposing views that are taken seriously by any significant minority of experts (or concerned parties) on the subject ... In a final version of the article, every party to the controversy in question must be able to judge that its views have been fairly presented, or as fairly as is possible in a context in which other, opposing views must also be presented as fairly as possible."
62. http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_proposal
63. 'Why we are here and not in Misplaced Pages (in Spanish, under GFDL)
64. http://es.wikipedia.org/Especial:Statistics
65. First substantial edit to Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style, Misplaced Pages (23 August 2002). Retrieved on 30 January 2007.
66. http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Misplaced Pages:Autobiography&oldid=1220207
67. "Misplaced Pages:Community Portal", Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 30 January 2007.
68. "CheckUser policy", Meta-Wiki. Retrieved on 2007-01-25. Checkuser function had previously existed, but was known as Espionage -- for example, in the Arbitration Committee case of JarlaxleArtemis.
69. Checkuser proposal
70. "Page creation restrictions", Misplaced Pages Signpost / English Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 31 January 2007.
71. "Semi-protection policy", Misplaced Pages Signpost / English Misplaced Pages. Retrieved on 30 January 2007.
72. Esperanza organization disbanded after deletion discussion 2 January 2007
73. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/WP:MFD/EA
74. New group aims to promote Wiki-Love 19 September 2005
75. Riehle, Dirk. "How and Why Misplaced Pages Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko", www.riehle.org, 2006.
76. "Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2006-01-16/Trademark registered". Misplaced Pages. 16 January 2006. Retrieved 14 January 2007.
77. "Angela Beesley resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board", Wikimedia Foundation press release, 7 July 2006.
78. One million Misplaced Pages articles
79. Misplaced Pages Publishes 500,000th English Article
80. ^ While this article was announced as the milestone on the Main Page, multiple articles qualified due to the continuous creation and deletion of pages on the site. Cite error: The named reference "milestone_articles" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
81. Wikimedia Foundation: English Misplaced Pages Announces Thousandth Featured Article
82. Welcome speech, Jimbo Wales, Wikimania 2006 (audio)
83. A Schools Global Citizen Resource from SOS Children
84. "Fund drives/2005/Q1", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 25 January 2007.
85. "Fund drives/2005/Q4", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 25 January 2007.
86. German Misplaced Pages receives state funding 26 June 2007
87. In deciding the trademark of F1 racing, the UK Intellectual Property Office considered both the reliability of Misplaced Pages, and its usefulness as a reliable source of evidence:

    "Misplaced Pages has sometimes suffered from the self-editing that is intrinsic to it, giving rise at times to potentially libellous statements. However, inherently, I cannot see that what is in Misplaced Pages is any less likely to be true than what is published in a book or on the websites of news organisations. did not express any concerns about the Misplaced Pages evidence . I consider that the evidence from Misplaced Pages can be taken at face value."

    The case turned substantively upon evidence cited from Misplaced Pages in 2006 as to the usage and interpretation of the term "F1".
88. On Misplaced Pages, Debating 2008 Hopefuls' Every Facet, Washington Post, 17 September 2007; Page A01 -- "...at the same time, it's hard to find a more up-to-date, detailed, thorough article on Obama than Misplaced Pages's. As of Friday, Obama's article -- more than 22 pages long, with 15 sections covering his personal and professional life -- had a reference list of 167 sources."
89. Source: Misplaced Pages emerges as key source for Virginia Tech shootings - cyberjournalist.net citing the New York Times , stating: "Even The Roanoke Times, which is published near Blacksburg, Va., where the university is located, noted on Thursday that Misplaced Pages 'has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event'."
90. Child, Maxwell L.,"Professors Split on Wiki Debate", The Harvard Crimson, by: Maxwell L. Child, Monday, 26 February 2007.
91. "Atze muss zahlen", Klemperts blog "recent changes" on 27 June 2007: http://recentchanges.de/blog/2007/06/atze-muss-zahlen/.
92. "Caught in the deadly web of the internet", Robert Fisk, The Independent, 21 April 2007. Retrieved 24 July 2007.
93. "A question of authority", by Paul Jay, 22 June 2007, CBC News. Retrieved 24 July 2007.
94. News release of Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland, retrieved 10 December 2008.
95. Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
96. The (Nature) peer review
97. Britannica: Fatally Flawed. Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature (PDF)
98. Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature (23 March 2006). Retrieved on 25 January 2007.
99. See for example: this article on the scandal. The activities documented were:

    Politician	Editing undertaken	Sources
    Marty Meehan	Replacement with staff-written biography	Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Misplaced Pages
    Norm Coleman	Rewrite to make more favorable, claimed to be "correcting errors")	"Web site's entry on Coleman revised Aide confirms his staff edited biography, questions Misplaced Pages's accuracy". St. Paul Pioneer Press(Associated Press). {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
    Conrad Burns Montana	Removal of quoted pejorative statements the Senator had made, and replacing them with "glowing tributes" as "the voice of the farmer")	Williams, Walt (2007-01-01). "Burns' office may have tampered with Misplaced Pages entry". Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved 2007-02-13.
    Joe Biden	Removal of unfavorable information	Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Misplaced Pages
    Gil Gutknecht	Staff rewrite and removal of information evidencing broken campaign promise. (Multiple attempts)	On August 16 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reported that the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht tried twice — on 24 July 2006 and 14 August 2006 — to remove a 128-word section in the Misplaced Pages article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography. Most of the removed text was about the 12-year term-limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995 (Gutknecht ran for re-election in 2006, breaking his promise). A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Misplaced Pages entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia. ("Gutknecht joins Misplaced Pages tweakers", Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, 16 August 2006, accessed 17 August 2006) . Multiple attempts, first using a named account, then an anonymous IP account.

100. Information included the mention of an opponent's son's arrest in a fatal drunk driving accident, and the allegation of questionable business practices of another . See article Morton Brilliant for detailed citations.
101. "Misplaced Pages Founder Refutes Claims That It Banned Qatar" by Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek, 2 January 2007
102. Bergstein, Brian (23 January 2007). "Microsoft offers cash for Misplaced Pages edit". MSNBC. Retrieved 1 February 2007.
103. Schiff, Stacy (24 July 2006). "Annals of Information: Know It All: Can Misplaced Pages conquer expertise?". The New Yorker. Retrieved 16 April 2007.
104. Finkelstein, Seth (8 March 2007). "Read me first". Technology. The Guardian. Retrieved 16 April 2007.
105. Braindead obituarists hoaxed by Misplaced Pages Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 3 October 2007
106. Docket number L-001169-07 in Monmouth Court, New Jersey. Records may be searched here.
107. Bauer v. Wikimedia et al. | Electronic Frontier Foundation
108. EFF and Sheppard Mullin Defend Misplaced Pages in Defamation Case | Electronic Frontier Foundation
109. http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/wikimedia/motiontoquashmemo-wikimedia.pdf
110. http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/bauer-v-wikimedia
111. Misplaced Pages founder forks Misplaced Pages 18 September 2006
112. "Misplaced Pages, Die freie Enzyklopädie" (in German). Retrieved 25 April 2007.
113. "Neue Misplaced Pages-DVD im Handel und zum Download" (in German). Retrieved 25 April 2007.
114. "Misplaced Pages wird noch nicht gedruckt" (in German). Retrieved 25 April 2007.
115. Titelinformationen, Bertelsmann site. Retrieved 7 October 2008.
116. "SOS Children releases 2006 Misplaced Pages CD Selection". SOS Children. 4 June 2006. Retrieved 25 April 2007.
117. "Misplaced Pages 0.5 available on a CD-ROM". 2007. Retrieved 25 April 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
118. "Misplaced Pages maakt cd voor internetlozen" (in Dutch). tweakers.net. 25 April. Retrieved 25 April 2007. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
119. Encyclopodia site "Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod". Sourceforge. Retrieved 25 April 2007. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
120. Judge tosses Matawan literary agent's defamation lawsuit against Misplaced Pages - Asbury Park Press
121. Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2007-11-05/French lawsuit 5 November 2007
122. ^ Bergstein, Brian (25 March 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Misplaced Pages". msnbc.com. Associated Press. Retrieved 28 March 2007. The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Misplaced Pages, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it. — Brian Bergstein.
123. "Rules To Consider". Ignore all rules. Internet Archive. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
124. Schiff, Stacy (24 July 2006). "Know It All". Can Misplaced Pages conquer expertise?. The New Yorker. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
125. Thomson, Iain (13 April 2007). "Misplaced Pages 'broken beyond repair' says co-founder". Information World Review. Retrieved 15 April 2007.
126. Mitchell, Dan (24 December 2005). "Insider Editing at Misplaced Pages". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 March 2007. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |quotes= (help)
127. ^ Peter Meyers (20 September 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". The New York Times. Retrieved 18 April 2007. It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work," said Jimmy Wales, Misplaced Pages's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project. "There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things." Instead, he said, "there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like.
128. James Niccolai, Misplaced Pages taking on the vandals in Germany, PC Advisor, 26 September 2006.
129. Bishop, Todd. (January 26, 2004) Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Microsoft Notebook: Wiki pioneer planted the seed and watched it grow. Section: Business; Page D1.
130. Wales, Jimmy (August 06, 2002). "3apes open content web directory". Yahoo! Tech Groups forum post. WebCite. Archived from the original on 2009-04-01. Retrieved 2009-04-03. I'm Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, the open content encyclopedias. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
131. Heim, Judy (4 September 2001). "Free the Encyclopedias!". Technology Review. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
132. Sanger, Larry. "My role in Misplaced Pages (links)". larrysanger.org. Larry Sanger. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
133. Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia
134. Chart: Misplaced Pages access in China
135. Chinese Misplaced Pages now fully unblocked?
136. Friend in high place unblocks Misplaced Pages, Fortune Magazine
137. "Beijing unblocks BBC Chinese site", BBC, 31 July 2008
138. Satter, Raphael G. (7 December 2008). "Misplaced Pages article blocked in U.K. for nude photo of a girl". Associated Press. Retrieved 7 December 2008.
139. "IWF statement regarding Misplaced Pages webpage". Internet Watch Foundation. 9 December 2008. Retrieved 10 December 2008.
140. Oʻzbekcha[REDACTED] yana yopildimi?

External links

Misplaced Pages records and archives

Misplaced Pages's project files contain a large quantity of reference and archive material. Useful resources on Misplaced Pages history within Misplaced Pages are:

Historical summaries

Category:Misplaced Pages years - historical events by year
Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages's oldest articles
History of Misplaced Pages - from the Misplaced Pages:Meta
Misplaced Pages:Historic debates
Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages records
meta:Wikimedia News - news and milestones index from all Wikipedias
Misplaced Pages:History of Misplaced Pages bots

Size and statistics

stats.wikimedia.org - the Mediawiki Foundation's main interface for all project statistics, including the various and combined Misplaced Pages's.Misplaced Pages:Milestones
Misplaced Pages:Statistics
Misplaced Pages:Size of Misplaced Pages

Discussion and debate archives

Misplaced Pages:Announcements

Misplaced Pages:Mailing lists

Misplaced Pages:Announcement archive

Other

Misplaced Pages:CamelCase and Misplaced Pages
Nostalgia Misplaced Pages - a snapshot of Misplaced Pages from 20 December 2001, running the current version of MediaWiki for security reasons but using a skin that looks like the software of the time.
Larry Sanger about the origins of Misplaced Pages
Misplaced Pages:Volunteer Fire Department - handling of major editorial influx. Disbanded when no longer needed (2004)
Misplaced Pages:Magnus Manske Day - mediawiki software goes live into production

"Truth in Numbers: The Misplaced Pages Story", a 2007 documentary.

Third party

• The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource — Free Software Foundation endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Misplaced Pages) 1999.
• Even older Misplaced Pages snapshot - 28 February 2001
• Early Misplaced Pages snapshot - 30 March 2001
• New York Times on Misplaced Pages, September 2001
• Larry Sanger, The Early History of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages: A Memoir and Part II Slashdot (18 April 2005 - 19 April 2005)
• Giles, Jim, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature comparison between Misplaced Pages and Britannica, 14 December 2005
• Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., March 2006
• Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature, 23 March 2006

• Articles with failed verification from February 2007
• Articles with disputed statements from December 2007
• Articles needing cleanup from November 2007
• Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field from November 2007
• Misplaced Pages pages needing cleanup from November 2007
• History of Misplaced Pages
• Internet censorship