SUBSCRIBE

Ask the ChatbotGames & QuizzesHistory & SocietyScience & TechBiographiesAnimals

& NatureGeography & TravelArts & CultureProConMoneyVideos
LiteratureLibraries & Reference Works

A women-in-STEM “edit-a-thon” organized by Wikipedia in Nova Scotia, Canada, 2018 In

response to the persistent gender gap in authorship, Wikipedia began to organize edit-
a-thons to expand coverage about specific issues, such as feminism and women's
history.

Wikipedia
encyclopaedia
Written and fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Feb 23, 2025 • Article History
Table of ContentsAsk the Chatbot
News •
Smithsonian Marks Women’s History Month With Exhibits and Events • Feb. 20, 2025, 8:14 AM ET
(Smithsonian Institution) ...(Show more)
Wikipedia, free Internet-based encyclopedia, started in 2001, that operates
under an open-source management style. It is overseen by
the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses
collaborative software known as a wiki that facilitates the creation and
development of articles. Although some highly publicized problems have
called attention to Wikipedia’s editorial process, they have done little to
dampen public use of the resource, which is one of the most visited sites on
the Internet.
Origin and growth
In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, to
establish Bomis, Inc., a web portal company. In March 2000 Wales
founded Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in
chief. Nupedia was organized like existing encyclopedias, with an advisory
board of experts and a lengthy review process. By January 2001 fewer than
two dozen articles were finished, and Sanger
advocated supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopedia based
on wiki software. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature
of Nupedia.com, but, following objections from the advisory board, it was
relaunched as an independent website a few days later. In its first
year Wikipedia expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including
French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto. In
2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into Wikipedia.

By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than

1,000,000 articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had
surpassed 3,500,000. However, while the encyclopedia continued to expand
at a rate of millions of words per month, the number of new articles created
each year gradually decreased, from a peak of 665,000 in 2007 to 374,000
in 2010. In response to this slowdown, the Wikimedia Foundation began to
focus its expansion efforts on non-English versions of Wikipedia, which by
2011 numbered more than 250. Some versions had already amassed
hundreds of thousands of articles; indeed, the French and German versions
both boasted more than a million. Consequently, the foundation paid
particular attention to languages of the developing world, such as Swahili
and Tamil, in an attempt to reach populations otherwise underserved by the
Internet. One impediment to Wikipedia’s ability to reach a truly global
audience, however, was the Chinese government’s periodic restrictions of
access to some or all of the site’s content within China.
Principles and procedures
In some respects, Wikipedia’s open source production model is
the epitome of the so-called Web 2.0, an egalitarian environment where the
web of social software enmeshes users in both their real and virtual-reality
workplaces. The Wikipedia community is based on a limited number of
standard principles. One important principle is neutrality. Another is the
faith that contributors are participating in a sincere and deliberate fashion.
Readers can correct what they perceive to be errors, and disputes over
facts and over possible bias are conducted through contributor discussions.
Three other guiding principles are to keep within the defined parameters of
an encyclopedia, to respect copyright laws, and to consider any other rules
to be flexible. The last principle reinforces the project’s belief that the open-
source process will make Wikipedia the best product available, given its
community of users. At the very least, one by-product of the process is that
the encyclopedia contains a number of publicly accessible pages that are
not necessarily classifiable as articles. These include stubs (very short
articles intended to be expanded) and talk pages (which contain discussions
between contributors).

The central policy of inviting readers to serve as authors or editors creates

the potential for problems as well as at least their partial solution. Not all
users are scrupulous about providing accurate information,
and Wikipedia must also deal with individuals who deliberately deface
particular articles, post misleading or false statements, or add obscene
material. Wikipedia’s method is to rely on its users to monitor and clean up
its articles. Moreover, trusted contributors can receive administrator
privileges that provide access to an array of software tools to speedily fix
web graffiti and other serious problems.
Issues and controversies
Reliance on community self-policing has generated some problems. In 2005
the American journalist John L. Seigenthaler, Jr., discovered that
his Wikipedia biography falsely identified him as a potential conspirator in
the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and that
these malicious claims had survived Wikipedia’s community policing for 132
days. The author of this information could not be easily identified, since all
that is known about unregistered contributors is
their computers’ IP (Internet protocol) addresses, many of which are
dynamically generated each time a user goes online. (The contributor later
confessed and apologized, saying that he wrote the false information as a
joke.) The Seigenthaler case prompted Wikipedia to prohibit unregistered
users from editing certain articles. Similar instances of vandalism later led
site administrators to formulate a procedure, despite protests from some
contributors, by which some edits would be reviewed by experienced
editors before the changes could appear online.

Although Wikipedia has occasionally come under fire for including

information not intended to be widely disseminated—such as images of the
10 inkblots used by psychologists in the Rorschach Test—it has also adapted
its philosophy of openness in certain cases. For instance, after The New
York Times reporter David S. Rohde was kidnapped by Taliban militants in
Afghanistan in 2008, his employer arranged with Wikipedia for news of the
incident to be kept off the website on the grounds that it could endanger
Rohde’s life. The site’s administrators complied, in the face of repeated
attempts by users to add the information, until after Rohde’s eventual
escape. Additionally, in 2010 it was revealed that there was a cache of
pornographic images, including illegal depictions of sexual acts involving
children, on Wikimedia Commons, a site maintained by the Wikimedia
Foundation that served as a repository of media files for use in all
Wikimedia products. Although there were no such illegal images
on Wikipedia itself, the ensuing scandal prompted Jimmy Wales, who
personally deleted many of the Commons files, to encourage administrators
to remove any prurient content from Wikimedia sites.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.
Subscribe
Wikipedia administrators also have the power to block particular IP
addresses—a power they used in 2006 after it was found that staff members
of some U.S. congressional representatives had altered articles to eliminate
unfavorable details. News of such self-interested editing inspired Virgil
Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech), to create Wikipedia Scanner, or WikiScanner, in
2007. By correlating the IP addresses attached to all Wikipedia edits with
their owners, Griffith constructed a database that he made available on the
Internet for anyone to search through. He and other researchers quickly
discovered that editing Wikipedia content from computers located within
corporations and in government offices was widespread. Although most of
the edits were innocuous—typically, individuals working on subjects
unrelated to their positions—a pattern did seem to emerge of many articles
being edited to reflect more favorably on the editors’ hosts.

Debates about the utility of Wikipedia proliferated especially among

scholars and educators, for whom the reliability of reference materials was
of particular concern. While many classrooms, at nearly all grade levels,
discouraged or prohibited students from using Wikipedia as a research tool,
in 2010 the Wikimedia Foundation recruited several public policy professors
in the United States to develop coursework wherein students contributed
content to the Wikipedia site. As Wikipedia became a seemingly inescapable
part of the Internet landscape, its claims to legitimacy were
further bolstered by an increasing number of citations of the encyclopedia
in U.S. judicial opinions, as well as by a program administered by the
German government to work with the German-language site to improve its
coverage of renewable resources.
A Wikipedia editor teaching students how to edit Wikipedia pagesEditing articles
requires knowledge of a specific markup language, something that may present a
hurdle to new editors.
The number of active editors—i.e., those who edit more than 100 articles a
month—peaked in 2007 and as of 2017 had declined by about a third.
Various factors were blamed for this
decline. Wikipedia’s bureaucratic culture, with its complex norms and its
reliance on automated procedures that tended to reject new edits, were
seen as discouraging to new editors. Editing the articles requires
knowledge of a specialized markup language that is difficult to edit
on smartphones and tablets. Surveys of Wikipedia editors have revealed a
persistent gender gap: only about 10–20 percent of the editors are women.
In response to concerns about this gender gap and how it is reflected in the
encyclopedia, Wikipedia began about 2012 to encourage “edit-a-thons,” in
which editors come together at events devoted to increasing the site’s
coverage of such subjects as feminism and women’s history. Whether or
not Wikipedia can solve these demographic problems, it has undoubtedly
become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and
cannot do.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
This article was most recently revised and updated by Tara Ramanathan.
Lifestyles & Social IssuesHuman Rights
Martin Luther King, Jr., at the March on Washington Martin Luther King, Jr. (centre), with
other leaders and supporters of the American civil rights movement at the March on
Washington, August 28, 1963.

American civil rights movement

Written by

Clayborne Carson
Fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jan 31, 2025 • Article History
Table of ContentsAsk the Chatbot
Quick Facts
Date:

c. 1950 - present
Location:

United States
Context:

civil rights

nonviolence
Major Events:

Brown v. Board of Education

Freedom Rides

Loving v. Virginia

Medical Committee for Human Rights

Watts Riots of 1965

Key People:

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Henry MacNeal Turner

Diane Nash

Pauli Murray

Claudette Colvin
See all related content
Top Questions
When did the American civil rights movement start?
Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?
What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?
News •
How "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama, marked the Civil Rights Movemet • Mar. 8, 2025, 1:20 AM ET
(CBS) ...(Show more)
American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial
segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to
national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in
the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to
resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although
enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil
War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution,
struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the
next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the
1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated
by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in
equal-rights legislation for African Americans since
the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and
1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by
then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or
liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead
confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of
past racial oppression.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)
Abolitionism to Jim Crow

Declaration of IndependenceImage of the Declaration of Independence (1776) taken

from an engraving made by printer William J. Stone in 1823.
American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to
expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for
all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of
the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved
Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to
justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among
the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order
to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by
allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for
the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples

resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most
of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white
property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or
serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender
distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside
the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial
discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons
violently rebelled against their enslavement (see slave rebellions), African
Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—
protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government
officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to
achieve gradual improvements in their status.

1 of 5

Nat TurnerWood engraving depicting Nat Turner (left), who in 1831 led the only
effective slave rebellion in U.S. history.
2 of 5

William Lloyd GarrisonAmerican abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

3 of 5

Frederick DouglassAmerican abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, 1862.

4 of 5

Dred Scott decisionNewspaper notice for a pamphlet on the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred
Scott decision.
5 of 5

Abraham Lincoln campaign bannerThis American flag banner promoted Abraham

Lincoln for the U.S. presidency in 1860.
During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights
to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of
most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was
accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing
restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted
to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to
discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved
people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number
of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or
negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By
the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become
sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where
Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial
advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black
antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the
leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Britannica Quiz

Pop Quiz: 15 Things to Know About Martin Luther King, Jr.

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved
persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography—one of
many slave narratives—and his stirring orations heightened public
awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became
increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of
racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major
setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African
American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the
country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights
which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring
unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through
which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories
—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered
many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s
political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential
campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican
Party. Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to
secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.
Emancipation ProclamationEmancipation Proclamation, 1863.
Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination
to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers
in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property.
After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the
Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to
abolish slavery (Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of
formerly enslaved persons (Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of
male ex-slaves (Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional
guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation
would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those
rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military
forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white
leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “Jim Crow” system
of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision
(1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities for
African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring
evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for
whites.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.
Subscribe
The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the
expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people
in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean
regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the
world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights,
such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races
everywhere were also denied suffrage rights (see woman suffrage).
Load Next Page
Information from your device can be used to personalize your ad experience.

Do not sell or share my personal information.