A Small Guide to Understanding Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free knowledge based website written by people called Wikipedians. Many people constantly improve Wikipedia, making thousands of changes every hour. All of these changes are recorded in the article history and recent changes.

Anyone can edit almost any page. “Find something that can be improved and make it better—for example, spelling, grammar, rewriting forreadability, adding content, or removing non-constructive edits.”

If you want to add new facts, try to provide references for review, or suggest them on the discussion page of the article. Changes to controversial topics and Wikipedia main pages should normally be discussed first. When you join Wikipedia, you'll get all the basics you need to use, comment, and contribute to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia can be used free of charge and is written and maintained by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay. Users may contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym or, if they so desire, with their true identity.

The basic principles that Wikipedia works on are the five pillars. Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into one of the largest reference websites, with 374 million visitors per month since September 2015. There are about 71,000 active contributors working on more than 46,000,000 articles in 299 languages. As of today, there are 5,530,829 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world making tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to expand the knowledge of the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

What is done is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What remains is dependent on whether the content is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about people or brands and whether it complies with Wikipedia's policies, including verification against a published reliable source, which publishes opinions and beliefs of publishers rather than reviews, research excluded.

In addition to the quantity, the volunteers also work on improving the quality. Wikipedia is a work-in-progress, with articles in various stages of completion. As articles evolve, they tend to become more encompassing and balanced. The quality also improves over time as misinformation and other errors are removed or repaired. However, since anyone can click "Edit" and add content at any time, any article may contain unrecognized misinformation, errors or vandalism. Being aware of this helps the reader to obtain valid information, to avoid recently added misinformation and to repair the article.

Wikipedia is a live collaboration that differs in an important way from paper-based reference sources because everyone can help to improve it and change the information on it. Wikipedia has become more comprehensive than any other encyclopedia in the world today.

And it can be a great asset for any business to especially build a stronger presence in the digital world.