Wikipedia - what it is, its history, wiki engines, markup and creation of articles in the popular encyclopedia Wikipedia
Hello, dear readers of the blog site. You probably all know what it is Wikipedia. But do you know how it works from the inside? Who created it and continues to create it? How to take part in filling out the most popular of all encyclopedias?
Everybody knows, that Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia, the materials for which are created not by professional editors, but by all Internet users who are interested in relevant issues. It would seem that this approach should lead to complete spamming and its quick demise, but the principles of the Wiki engine allow this to be avoided.
Besides the fact that this online encyclopedia is simply interesting to read (you can’t tear yourself away because of its comprehensiveness), no one is stopping you from participating in filling it out. For example, in the Russian-language part of Wikipedia there are a lot of topics that are not sufficiently covered or not addressed at all. Well, since you and I are still optimizers, we can try to extract a small benefit from this for our resource (without spam, of course).
Wikipedia - what is it and what is behind its popularity
Until 2004, Wikipedia was all hosted on one single server, but now it has spread across hundreds, and possibly thousands of machines. All this requires material resources, which are drawn from from voluntary donations from individuals and large organizations (the creator recently donated a large sum to this project).
A non-profit organization was created to support the work of the world's largest encyclopedia and a number of related projects WikiMedia, which resolves all organizational and financial issues.
In general, the creation of a folk encyclopedia is not a new thing. The first such experiment can be considered a reference publication published by Denis Diderot in the mid-eighteenth century. It consisted of three dozen volumes and the readers themselves took part in its writing and editing, who sent their comments and judgments on certain issues to the editors by mail. With some stretch, it can be considered a distant predecessor of Wikipedia.
What is Wikipedia today? Her story begins in 2001. Although the idea of creating an encyclopedia accessible to everyone (distributed under the GNU GPL license) came to the authors’ minds a little earlier and their first project was called Nupedia. As conceived by the founding fathers, it should have consisted of strictly verified articles written by professionals in their field. But there were not so many such professionals willing to work for free for the benefit of society.
During the existence of Nupedia (from 2000 to 2003), only a little more than seven dozen articles were completed. Of course, by continuing to develop this idea, rather than switching to Wikipedia, its authors would not have achieved such stunning success. But what was the key that allowed this project to become the largest, most voluminous and most popular knowledge haven in the world at the moment?
Yes, in fact, it was a case due to which the authors decided to create a kind of draft on one of the Wiki engines, where experts could add and correct their articles before adding them to Nupedia. Well, in 2001 this draft acquired its own domain name (read about that, and) Wikipedia.org and became an independent project where anyone could correct, edit or create new articles, regardless of their education, academic degrees, citizenship and other attributes.
This encyclopedia has become so popular and so significant for millions of Internet users that a rather educational film was made about it, which you can watch with a Russian translation. From it you can get the most comprehensive answer to the question: What is Wikipedia and why is it so good?
Wiki is very sensitive to the disclosure of personal data in order to avoid possible showdowns in real life. Even unregistered users can edit articles, which at first glance should lead to severe spamming, as, for example, on forums or blogs without appropriate moderation.
Wikipedia from the inside - what it is and how it works
However, cases of vandalism, which, of course, occur, go almost unnoticed for visitors to this virtual knowledge base. It's all about how Wikipedia works. It keeps a history of all changes and rolling back the page to its pre-vandal form is not difficult.
This can be done even by an unregistered user who notices something is wrong, or by a person specially designated for this, for whom this process will take even less time.
The existence of Wikipedia in its current form is primarily due to the fact that spoiling articles is even more labor-intensive than restoring them, and few people will have time to notice the changes made by a vandal, which completely discourages the vandal from continuing (after all, no one will even argue with him - they will simply ignore and return everything back, which is much more offensive and kills the interest in continuing to crap in the bud).
The high speed with which vandalism is removed from the pages of the virtual encyclopedia is largely due to the active use of so-called bots (programs) for this task.
The same goes for spam- placing links to your website. As a rule, after some time (minutes or hours) these links will no longer be there, and in some articles, especially popular among SEOs, editing is generally prohibited (only the Administrator or a wider range of users from the author category can make changes). However, not everything is so sad.
If your article (to which you put a link) really seems useful and complements the material presented there, then it can remain hanging there for a very long time. The link that you put as additional material to the Wikipedia publication that you write yourself will have an even higher chance of gaining a foothold.
Will this be beneficial? It seems to me that it will happen, but everything is not so clear. Of course, backlinks from Wiki, which, in theory, devalues them in the eyes of Yandex and Google. But search, in my opinion, now takes such backlinks into account, taking them into account in some special way.
Secondly, each language group (state) has its own effective system of governance and relationships. The most common anonymous ( not registered user) still has the right to create and make changes to already created articles (the IP address of his computer will be indicated as the author), but not to those that are partially blocked. Such protection can be imposed by the administrator in the event of increasing cases of vandalism.
The registered user receives his personal page on Wikipedia, over time and as he makes reasonable edits, his capabilities expand somewhat, he will be able to make changes to partially blocked articles, as well as upload files to this virtual encyclopedia.
Well, if we take it higher (administrators, arbitrators, patrol officers, bureaucrats, etc.), then you can only get one of these positions by election if your services to the encyclopedia are noticed and appreciated (this work, of course, is not paid).
If you are wondering what functions are assigned and what capabilities are delegated by this to higher officials from Wikipedia, then there is a rather brief but succinct description of this entire cuisine - the category of participants in the Russian-language Wiki. In addition to living people, bots that are created to sort out the routine also have their own personal pages. Apparently, it’s easier to take them into account this way.
If you are interested in a real list of all members of the Russian-speaking community, then you can look at this page by simply selecting “Group” from the drop-down list:
So, before you start creating, you should use the built-in search (its form is located in the upper right corner) to make sure that such material does not yet exist in this encyclopedia. You should also explore possible topic options.
Registration and creation of a new article in Wikipedia
Let us assume that this topic has not been covered or fully disclosed. Thus, your article will be in place. But how to create it? It turns out to be quite simple. Type the following URL into the address bar of your browser:
Http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article title
What is an address space on Wikipedia? It is designed in such a way that there are no names of sections or categories in the URLs, and immediately after the standard construction http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ the title of the article follows, and in Russian. This is a kind of implementation of human-readable Urls.
In fact, this is not great if you implement it on your project, because when you copy such a link from the Chrome address bar, you will find a monstrously long URL, where instead of Russian letters there will be strange symbols:
Http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%9D%D0%B0%D0%9D%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0 %BD%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE
But that's not the point. If your article can have several alternative titles, then it will be possible to create them all, but then make a redirect to the main one (actually a 301 redirect) so as not to multiply duplicates.
The second way to create a new article is to find a publication on a related topic and link from it to your page, which does not yet exist. Wikipedia allows you to do this and such a link will be highlighted in red, and not blue, like usual ones. A link in Wiki engines is created in a trivial way (actually the following principles are used):
[[article title]]
If you want to create it with an anchor (link text) different from the title of the article, then use the following construction:
After that, just follow it and see the same window as if you entered an URL like http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article title into the address bar of your browser:
As you can see, in addition to information about the absence of the page you are looking for, you will be asked to quickly create it, having first read the guide on how to quickly master the intricacies of Wiki markup.
By clicking on the link “create such a page”, you will be taken to the window for editing it (in this case, creating it), where you will view a short course for a young fighter with footnotes for a more detailed presentation of the material, and you will also have the opportunity to immediately begin creativity by entering text and markup into the designated area of the editor there:
To practice creating articles, I advise you to use your personal address space. For this you will need register on the Wikipedia website(Create an account link in the upper right corner of the screen):
When registering, you can enter your name in Russian characters, and you can also switch to a secure mode for working with the site (with encryption via the https protocol). After filling out and submitting the registration form data, you will immediately be automatically authorized on the Wiki site and the traditional greeting will be displayed:
Get at your disposal a personal page with an address like:
Http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant:Dmitry_Ivanetscu
In the previous screenshot, the orange bar says that a new user (Tobish me) received a new message. By clicking on this link you will see a fairly compact version of the answers to all questions newbies have on Wikipedia:
Spend about twenty minutes learning what Wiki markup is, because it is much more convenient than directly formatting text using Html tags, however, working in visual editors or for beginners would be just the thing.
Features and nuances of creating articles on Wikipedia
But also at Wiki markup there are advantages in comparison with visual editors - all the actions performed in them are unambiguous, while in a visual editor you often find yourself in a situation where it is not clear how this happened and what to do now (you have to go into the Html code and edit it there directly what they screwed up).
You can quickly go through basic elements of Wikipedia pages which are collected in this table. For example, you need a second-level heading (in the source code of the created page it will be displayed in H2 tags) - enclose it in twice repeated equal signs:
Second level header ==
You need to start a new paragraph and end the current one (analogous to the P tag) - just leave an empty line between them (like in the WordPress editor). What about the lists? In Wiki you need to constantly write opening and closing tags, but in Wiki only an asterisk (for an unnumbered list) or a hash (for a numbered list) needs to be placed before the line. Well, for nested items it is enough to increase the number of stars or hash marks by one.
Example wiki markup for creating lists:
* First level ** Second level **# Third level with transition to a numbered list
And this is the HTML code that should be written:
- First level
- Second level
- Third level with transition to a numbered list
- Second level
It's a little more complicated in hypertext markup language than in the Wikipedia editor. Remember, which preserves the original formatting and converts everything into a monospace font? So, to implement the same thing, it will be enough to simply put a space at the beginning of the line.
Also in Wikipedia it is quite simply implemented inserting both internal and external links(see description). If you need a hyperlink with an anchor that matches the address (end of URL) of the page, then this is done like this:
[[title of Wikipedia article]]
If you need to change the anchor, then it will be enough to simply write it after the vertical bar:
[[site promotion|site promotion]]
You will need the above example when you finish writing your masterpiece for this encyclopedia and start looking for other thematic articles from which you could put a link to yours. Doesn't remind you of anything? That's right, this is the one because of which Wikipedia is in the Top for almost every information request.
In the guide for beginners, you are strongly advised to link from your article to others, which can serve as an explanation of complex terms or expressions, and also instructs, after publication, to immediately go and add links from other already existing Wiki pages so that your new creation does not stand lonely on the sidelines from the general mass of articles, stitched through with numerous internal links.
However, the link must include the title of your new article without changing its word form. This is where you will need to write an anchor, so as not to change the text of an existing article, but simply add a hyperlink to a phrase already in its text, writing it after a vertical bar.
External links on Wikipedia It is not customary to insert directly from the text (take this into account, because it won’t work either way) - for this you need to use either footnotes (read how footnotes are created and notes are formatted), or add them to a special “Links” subsection. The specific option you choose depends on whether the external link is general in nature or whether it directly explains a specific point in the article.
Its simplest design looks like this:
https://site
After uploading an image to Wikimedia Commons, you will be prompted to copy the embed code for this image into all Wikipedia projects or get the URL of this image:
The proposed code will look something like this, but you are free to change it as you wish:
[]
Instead of “Add caption here” add your own explanatory caption:
You can insert thumbnails of specified sizes, you can frame images and add explanatory notes, you can align pictures to the center, left or right edge of the page, and you can also set text to wrap around them. If you are interested in how to do this when laying out a website, then read about the tag or about .
You can also insert tables into a Wikipedia page if needed. Again, they are designed much simpler than in Html, but there is still something to puzzle over. So you should use tables only when necessary, and not for beauty ().
If you create more than four subheadings in your article, then at the top of the article there will be table of contents automatically generated. It can be moved or deleted using the appropriate tags. After creating an article, I recommend clicking on the “Wikifier” button, which will check the validity of your code and, if necessary, make the necessary changes to bring it to the standard.
It is also very convenient to see in the “Help” drop-down list how this or that markup element is formatted if you have forgotten. Before saving the document, it would be better to first use the “Preview”, and to receive notifications about changes made by other Wikipedia users to your creation, check the “Add to watchlist” box:
Well, that's all. Now you can confidently answer the question - what is Wikipedia and why do you eat it?
Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site
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