Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is the product of collaboration of its users, has become a major force on the Internet, but faces a crisis after a false biography raised questions about its credibility.
The Web site, created as a free, "open source" multilingual encyclopedia for the world, has reached a crossroads after phenomenal growth along with a scandal that has forced the site to tighten up monitoring of its content.
Wikipedia was started in 2001 as an experiment in "wiki" software. Wiki means quick in Hawaiian, but the software enables multiple users in different locations to edit a document.
Wikipedia has more than two million articles, including over 850,000 in English. It has sites in 200 languages, with 10 of them having over 50,000 articles -- English, German, French, Jap-anese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish.
Nielsen/Netratings found that Wikipedia had over 12.7 million US users in September, up nearly 300 percent from a year ago. It was ranked as the 35th most popular global Web site by Alexa.com.
As open-source encyclopedia, Wikipedia can be revised and edited in real time by any of its users.
Although that might be seen by some as a recipe for disaster, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said the give-and-take helps create a better product.
Wales told reporters that users often find a common ground that helps the site maintain its stated policy of "neutral point of view," or NPOV.
"That process of debate and dialogue is what generates some of the best work on Wikipedia," said Wales, a former options trader whose past projects have included a pornographic Web site.
"Some of the best articles come out of a dialogue of people who don't agree -- you end up with a really solid representation."
Wikipedia strives for "Britannica or better quality," Wales said, but admits it has not yet achieved that.
Wales acknowledged a breakdown in the process in a biography posted earlier this year of John Siegenthaler, a retired journalist who was an aide in the 1960s to former US attorney general Robert Kennedy.
A Wikipedia article that went largely unnoticed for several weeks said, "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."
"I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious `biography' that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia," Siegenthaler wrote in a column in USA Today.
Wales said Wikipedia tightened up its monitoring after the incident and will require users to register before making any changes or new postings. But he said the site will remain anonymous and that the overall policy will remain unchanged.
Wikipedia has spawned a lot of critics, including a Web site called Wikipedia Watch.
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