Notes on Wikipedia

At least three definitions of Wikipedia can be made. These are: • A wiki website. The term wiki refers to a peculiar form of content publish- wiki ing on Internet. A wiki website is usually equipped with a set of scripts 1 and a database that stores not the mere content of any given page, but the whole history of edits it underwent to. Users can freely 2 edit the content of a page, or rollback a change of another user to a precedent state. • An on line encyclopædia. This is probably the most common definition on line encyclopædia for Wikipedia. The project is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation 3, that provides hosting to it, as well as to other community projects based on the wiki technology 4. Both the encyclopædic entries and the facilities used by the editors are accessible through the mechanisms of the wiki technology. The most striking difference here, is that users of Wikipedia are editor and readers of the encyclopædia at the same time. This means that there is no editorial board, and any given entry of the encyclopædia is open to the contribution of every user