Wikipedia is king of the wikis

It’s time for another Website of the Week and this time I would like to turn the spotlight on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is basically a very large multilingual encyclopedia that is community-driven and completely free. Almost the entire site is editable by anybody (the basic idea behind wikis). You can even add new articles if you feel like it. It is described as a “massively collaborative project” and the ultimate goal is to be “the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth.” You can read more about the history and goals of the project on this FAQ page.

I use Wikipedia almost daily to look up a lot of different things for school: International Phonetic Alphabet, Russian phonology, information theory, transformational grammar, and generative semantics to name a few. Wikipedia is like a microcosm of the web itself in that every article is linked to many more related articles which are also linked to related articles and so on and so forth. Looking up the answer to a particular question can easily turn into a marathon reading session on all sorts of topics. Consider yourselves warned.

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November 15, 2005 | Filed Under Website of the Week 

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