Community knowledge sharing and online graffiti – frequentlyasked questions about the ten-year-old Wikipedia

Abstract

On its 10th birthday, on January 15, 2011 Wikipedia existedin 270 languages. At this time the English version included cca. 3.5 million, the Hungarian –186 thousand articles. Wikipedia – as the most frequently used information source of theworld – has been in the focus of debates ever since its inception. Some cannot accept that itsarticles can be written by anyone, while others trust the efficiency of community knowledgesharing. Some refrain from Wikipedia referring to vicious comments, while others do notattribute great importance to this. All in all, Wikipedia has been growing thanks to the workof voluntary collaborators, and is visited by 440 million users a month who wish to obtaininformation about a great variety of themes from the pages of this encyclopaedia on theweb.