Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles, attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month. With 6.2 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 300 Wikipedia encyclopaedias. It was initially an English-language encyclopaedia, but versions in other languages were quickly developed. Sanger coined its name as a portmanteau of “wiki” (a Hawaiian word meaning quick) and “encyclopedia”. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopaedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.įeaturing no advertisements, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organisation funded primarily through donations. She adds that effects of democratisation are difficult to verify. But it turns out that this doesn’t necessarily make the political debate more democratic and participatory,” she said. “With the internet, publishing tools have been democratised. Genner, who previously taught at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, is convinced that there are many misunderstandings in the debate about digital democracy. “People had exaggerated hopes and believed that technological progress would shift political power downwards more or less automatically,” according to Sarah Genner, a media expert who researches digitalisation.
Wikipedia is therefore showing that even a democracy can always be more democratic. Given the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in Switzerland on February 7, this is topical. The coordinated action aims to include more biographies about women on the platform, since equality begins with visibility, it says. The question of diversity on the platform has led to the Women for Wikipedia project in Switzerland, supported by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, SWI swissinfo.ch’s parent company. Specific Swiss contributions do exist, however. The Swiss thus have access to content that they would not have been able to produce on their own. Some 3,700 articles are available to the 50,000 or so speakers of Romansh, Switzerland’s fourth national language. The German, French and Italian versions are among the platform’s top ten by number of articles (German – 2.52 million, French – 2.29 million, Italian – 1.67 million). The case of Switzerland highlights Wikipedia’s strength in connecting entire language areas. It has indisputably democratised knowledge but in hindsight we can also observe that democratic freedoms did not trickle down as much as its founders had hoped. In its 20 years of existence Wikipedia has become a model of a collective, cross-linguistic, non-commercial, pluralistic project – and the only one of its size to date.
English word power at your fingertips free#
The question of whether free access to knowledge promotes democracy today seems far from resolved. Twenty years down the line, its founding statement remains to be validated. Its founders believed that it was a matter of time before freedom would also spread. Wikipedia was a promise of free availability of information and limitless exchange across borders. This was a radical departure from previous encyclopaedias, which were more elitist endeavours. The website’s mission was to provide free access to knowledge for everyone, everywhere. Italiano (it) Accesso alla democrazia con un clic.Français (fr) Wikipédia, ou la démocratie par le clic.
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