La Poste

After the government, La Poste is the second biggest employer in France. Here is a list of alternate spellings for Wikipedia according to the language editions:. In addition to postal services, it also offers banking services and, via Chronopost, courier services. These include:. It also operates the postal service in Monaco, while in Andorra, it operates postal services alongside those of Spain. All of them are multilingual, free-content wikis and administered by the Wikimedia Foundation. La Poste postage stamps are valid for use in the Overseas Departments, but not in the Territorial Collectivities, which issue their own stamps, separate from metropolitan France. Wikipedia has several sister projects that fulfill non-encyclopedic roles.

La Poste is the mail service of France, which also operates postal services in the French Overseas Departments of Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, and the territorial collectivities of Saint Pierre and Miquelon and Mayotte. Its founder has replied that it is not intended as one, though that is a consequence.^[26]. Former Wikipedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger has said that having the GFDL license as a "guarantee of freedom is a strong motivation to work on a free encyclopedia."^[24] In a study of Wikipedia as a community, Economics professor Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in wiki software create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that a "creative construction" approach encourages participation.^[25] Wikipedia has been viewed as a social experiment in anarchy or democracy. Vandalism or the minor infraction of policies may result in a warning or temporary block, while long-term or permanent blocks for prolonged and serious infractions are given by Jimmy Wales or, on its English edition, an elected Arbitration Committee. Many users have been temporarily or permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia.

Administrators are the largest such group, privileged with the ability to prevent articles from being edited, delete articles, or block users from editing in accordance with community policy. Maintenance tasks are performed by a group of volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators, which number in the hundreds. According to Wikimedia, one-quarter of Wikipedia's traffic comes from users without accounts, who are less likely to be editors.^[23]. During January 2005, Wikipedia had about 13,000 or more users who made at least five edits that month; 9,000 of these active users worked on its three largest language editions.^[22] A more active group of about 3,000 users made more than 100 edits per month, over half of these users having worked in the three largest editions.

Awards to the Wikipedia project and press clippings are listed by Wikimedia contributors on its website. Wikipedia has received plaudits from sources including BBC News, Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Science, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Irish Times, Reader's Digest and The Daily Telegraph. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project. In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded a Web Creation Award from the Japan Advertisers Association.

Wikipedia was also nominated for a "Best Practices" Webby. The second was a Judges' Webby award for the "community" category. Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004^[21]: The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities, awarded by Prix Ars Electronica; this came with a 10,000 euro grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. Wikipedia related communities, such as The Wikipedia Review, whose members tend to dislike Wikipedia, also exist.

Also see Asking questions and Getting in touch. That is, authors can be asked to defend or clarify their work, and disputes are readily seen.^[20] Wikipedia editions also often contain reference desks in which the community answers questions. In a page on researching with Wikipedia, its authors argue that Wikipedia is valuable for being a social community. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing.^[18] Its community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article.^[19].

The Wikipedia community consists of users who are proportionally few, but highly active. While limited to science-based articles, the study reveals the substantial effectiveness of the peer-reviewed system utilized by Wikipedia. Of eight "serious errors" found — including misinterpretations of important concepts — four came from each source. The average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

However, in a study conducted by the journal Nature, making side-by-side comparisons of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum contained in Wikipedia with those found in Encyclopædia Britannica, found that the accuracy of the two databases is essentially the same. This led to the decision to restrict the ability to start articles to registered users. found that his biography had been vandalized. At the end of 2005, controversy erupted after journalist John Seigenthaler Sr.

The journal Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Wikipedia are comparable in accuracy to those in Encyclopedia Britannica (Wikipedia has an average of four mistakes per article; Britannica contains three) ^[17] (Nature, 438, pp 900-901, 15 December 2005). In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points ("B-"), Brockhaus Premium 3.3, and Microsoft Encarta 3.1.^[15] In an analysis of online encyclopedias, Indiana University professors Emigh and Herring wrote that "Wikipedia improves on traditional information sources, especially for the content areas in which it is strong, such as technology and current events."^[16]. The German computing magazine c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Premium, Microsoft Encarta, and Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. Encarta Feedback allows any user to propose revisions for review by their staff.^[14].

Microsoft Encarta has started to solicit comments from readers in attempt to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its encyclopedia. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.^[13]. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. It has been praised for, as a wiki, allowing articles to be updated or created in response to current events.

These problems have had a negative impact on Wikipedia's desired image as a fast and reliable source of information. The English-language website also suffers from frequent timeouts, server errors and occasional downtime due to heavy user traffic. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."^[11] (Note that this is not true anymore as of December 2005.) Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven."^[12]. Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg has argued that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail.

Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Referencing Linus' law of open-source development, Sanger stated earlier: "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."^[8] Technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived."^[9] Conversely, in an informal test of Wikipedia's ability to detect misinformation, its author remarked that its process "isn't really a fact-checking mechanism so much as a voting mechanism", and that material which did not appear "blatantly false" may be accepted as true.^[10]. Wikipedia's editing process assumes that exposing an article to many users will result in accuracy. Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having, according to Sanger, an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise.^[7].

Aaron Krowne wrote a rebuttal article in which he criticized McHenry's methods, and labeled them "FUD," the marketing technique of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt."^[6]. In this way a reader can know "who has used the facilities before him" and how long the community has had to process the information in an article to provide calibration on the "sense of security." However, these proposals for provenance are quite controversial (see Wikipedia talk:Provenance). The idea is to provide source provenance on each interval of text in an article and temporal provenance as to its vintage. In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in Wikipedia articles; see for example Wikipedia:Provenance.

In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," former Britannica editor Robert McHenry criticized the wiki approach, writing,. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in Science.

Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Discussing Wikipedia as an academic source, danah boyd said in 2005 that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes"^[4]. That premise is completely unproven."^[3] On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article "Can you trust Wikipedia?" where a group of experts critically reviewed entries for their fields. Similarly, Encyclopædia Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection.

But with something like this, all that goes out the window"(Waldman, 2004). With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. The main problem is the lack of authority. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, librarian Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and is "not aware of a single librarian who would.

Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. Some argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. An entire website called Wikipedia Watch has been created to denounce Wikipedia as having "...a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information.". It is considered to have no or limited utility as a reference work among many librarians, academics, and the editors of more formally written encyclopedias.

Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority. Proponents contend that open editing improves quality over time while critics allege that non-expert editing undermines quality. Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Wikipedia is criticised on the following issues:.

Notable criticisms include that its open nature makes Wikipedia unauthoritative and unreliable, that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of the articles. Criticism of Wikipedia has increased with its prominence. Information related to evaluations of Wikipedia, including individual opinions, quality control, and awards are discussed below.

This is seen in articles and discussion venues both within Wikipedia and elsewhere. Wikipedia's claimed status as an encyclopedia has been increasingly controversial as it has gained prominence. Bomis, an on-line advertising company that hosts mostly adult-oriented web-rings, played a significant part in the early development of Wikipedia. [2].

It's 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 dollars with hardware making up almost 60% of the budget. Wikipedia is funded through the Wikimedia Foundation . The ongoing status of Wikipedia's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts. In spite of all this, Wikipedia page load times remain quite variable.

A new Dutch cluster is also online now. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias.

Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to two load-balancing servers running the Perlbal software, which then pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page-rendering from the database. Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to around 100 servers in four locations around the world. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers.

In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. Wikipedia was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into an n-tier distributed architecture. It was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki.

Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske. Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002.

At first it required CamelCase for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida and three other locations around the world.

Publication will begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. There are currently plans to license the usage of the Wikipedia trademark for some products like books or DVDs.^[25] The German Wikipedia will be printed in its entirety by Directmedia, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Technically a servicemark, the scope of the mark is for: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet". Trademark protection was accorded by Japan on December 16, 2004 and in the European Union on January 20, 2005.

The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. The Wikimedia Foundation applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark Wikipedia® on September 17, 2004. Wikipedia reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on September 20, 2004,^[23] while the English edition alone reached its 500,000th on March 18, 2005^[24]. The English Wikipedia reached a 100,000 article milestone on January 22, 2003^[22].

In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or fewer new articles per day; by 2004, this had accelerated to 1,000 to 3,000 per day across all editions. Wikipedia has traditionally measured its status by article count. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below. Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki" had been created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotes, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month.

From Wikipedia and Nupedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was created on June 20, 2003.^[21] Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Projects have since forked from Wikipedia's content for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo, which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view.". Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and moved its website to wikipedia.org. Citing fear of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.

It subsequently became inactive and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Wikipedia.^[20]. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki production, the GNUPedia project existed alongside Nupedia early in its history. Wales mentioned that he heard the concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld, an employee of Bomis who showed him the same wiki, in December 2000,^[19] but it was after Sanger heard of its existence from Ben Kovitz, a regular at this wiki, in January 2001,^[17] and proposed a creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales that Wikipedia's history started. Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository.

It had 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.^[18] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles among 18 language editions by the end of its first year. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. There were otherwise few rules initially.

Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbias" policy. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model.^[17] Wikipedia thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.^[16] It had been, from 10 January, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. So there's little downside, as far as I can see."^[15].

They're also a potentially great source for content. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. (...) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content.

Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. "No, this is not an indecent proposal. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:.