The Free Encyclopedia Wikipedia as an Information Resource, its Creation, Content and Services

The master thesis provides analysis and evaluation of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) as an information resource and the resulting opportunities and proposals for its usage with a focus on a subject field of information science and librarianship. The thesis focuses mainly on English language version of Wikipedia with significant overlaps in its Czech language version, too. -- The introductory part deals with an introduction to basic matters, terminology and historical introduction and the basic features and qualities of Wikipedia (its history, goals, principles, operator, software, funding, size and popularity), including detailed analysis of related fields (the license terms, responsibility for its content, privacy policy, users and their categorization and motivation). -- The core part of thesis provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis and evaluation of Wikipedia's content, its content-organization tools, quality-management tools, communication tools and its services. Significant part of the core part is devoted to a detailed analysis of the most important tool of hierarchical organization of the content of Wikipedia - its categorial system - focusing on a categorial system of the Czech language version. -- The following chapters deal with qualitative aspects of..