Become an ENCYCLOPAEDIST
...contribute to Wikipedia
Thanks to the internet, you can play a part in creating the world's most ambitious information project.
Wikipedia is an internet encyclopedia ('wiki' means 'quick' in Hawaiian), which is being created entirely by volunteers, who contribute new articles and update and revise existing ones.
Contributions have to comply with Wikipedia's 'neutral point of view' policy, so that there is no bias in what is published. Articles can be edited by anyone (except by banned users and there are a few protected pages). The entries in the encyclopedia develop, as amendments and additions are made, and flaws are quickly repaired.
Everything is copyright free.
More about Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the world's largest and fastest-growing encyclopaedia. It was started in 2001 and in its first year over 20,000 entries were created.
By September 2004, over 1 million articles had been completed (350,000 of which are in English). There are articles under active development in over 100 languages.
Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles. Wikipedia is one of the ten most popular internet reference sites.
The Wikimedia Foundation
There are a number of related projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, including:
- Wiktionary (a dictionary and thesaurus)
- Wikiquote (a compendium of famous quotations)
- Wikibooks (a collection of manuals and textbooks
- Wikisource (a repository of public domain documents)
All of these projects are being developed using similar principles to Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation is funded by appeals on its websites, which have raised $150,000 for this work. Compare this with the cost of creating a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Take Action
Write an article for Wikipedia on some obscure subject that you are an expert on.
Start by finding out whether the subject already has an entry and what related subjects have entries.
Open your article with a concise paragraph, defining the topic and mentioning the most important points. The reader should be able to get a good overview by only reading this first paragraph. Then write the rest of the article. Guidance for contributors is published on the Wikipedia website.
Or, take a subject that you are really interested in and know something about, find the article in Wikipedia, and then edit it, adding all the bits that are missing.
Find Out More
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org
Wikimedia Foundation: www.wikimediafoundation.org
Translators wanted
In France, between 1751 and 1772, a remarkable book was published that attempted to put all human knowledge between two covers. This was the Encyclopédie.
Compiled largely under the direction of Denis Diderot, it comprised 28 volumes, 71,818 articles and 2,885 illustrations.
A second, edition, in 66 volumes, was published from 1782 to 1832.
If your French is good enough, ou can help translate the Encyclopédie into English: www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/call.html
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Ever heard of Wikipedia?
It is an internet encyclopaedia which is open source. This means that you can write an article for it, or amend or add to an existing article.
Use Wikipedia to find out more about the Make Poverty History Campaign by going to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Poverty_History_campaign
Or about global warming by going to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming
