How does Wikipedia make money? How Wikipedia works? Is it illegal to edit Wikipedia?

Hi friends!

Well, have you ever think How Wikipedia makes money? How does it work? Is it illegal to edit Wikipedia?

I'm sure yes.

There is not a single advertisement on Wikipedia. They also don't review or promote any product or service on their website. Affiliate marketing could not be the source. Wikipedia never sponsors any company or organization. You don't have to pay for reading articles there. So, How they're managing their website? How they're paying salaries to their employees? In short, What is the source of income of Wikipedia? All these questions will be answered in the article later on. Continue reading...

Let's talk a little bit about-

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is the online free encyclopedia that aims for sharing knowledge in the world. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. It is a free and open-source website. It is available in 312 languages. You can choose your language as per your convenience. It is based on the Wikimedia Foundation. I'll talk about it later in this article. It contains almost 54 million articles including 312 languages. But if we classify articles according to their uniqueness then there are 10-12 million English articles only. And rest of the articles are just the translation of English ones in other languages.

Now coming to the main question...

How Wikipedia makes money?

Let me first tell Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. It gets money by charity, donation, and funding by the government, businessmen, other organizations, and normal users like you. They use this money for managing their website and to pay their staff members or employees. The Wikimedia Foundation is an organization that provides hosting, server, and domain to Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia pays the Wikimedia Foundation for its website management. Now, I think you got to about what is their source of income?

Let's talk about the working mechanism of Wikipedia.

How does Wikipedia work?

Wikipedia is based on the community. It has a big community that includes editors, writers, readers, admins, moderators, language experts, etc. They all work together to maintain pages on Wikipedia. In fact, you're also a member of the Wikipedia community if you visit their website and read articles. The majority of people on Wikipedia are readers. 

• The person who edits Wikipedia is known as the editor. They can add some additional information on pages. They can correct spelling mistakes and writing errors if found. You can also edit Wikipedia.

• Writers are those people who write articles there. They write pages on different topics in which they're specialized. By the way, you can also create a Wikipedia page, But this doesn't mean that you can write about yourself or your company or your friends, etc. You've to follow their guidelines while creating pages.

• Admins are experienced writers who're contributing to Wikipedia for a long time. They've some special powers and privileges. They can delete and restore pages. They can modify the fully protected page. They can also prevent editing by blocking accounts and IP addresses of users.

Now let's talk about some other facts.

Why isn't Wikipedia full of false information, since everyone can edit articles there?

Have you ever think about this. If anyone can edit and create Wikipedia pages then why it doesn't contain fake and false information. Why doesn't it contain vulgar, irrelevant, and inappropriate content? See, the answer to this question is very simple. Whenever anybody edits or creates Wiki pages, it goes through some quality & authenticity checks. In the Wikipedia community, there is a special team that does this job. They review and check the edited and newly created articles. If they found everything correct and authenticated then they approve and publish it. Otherwise, they simply reject it. This is how it works. Due to this reason, Wikipedia is safe and secure today.

Wikipedia Edit Wars -

Sometimes edit war happens on Wikipedia. It happens when in the same community, members have different views and thinking regarding any person, place, or thing. In this, two groups form one against while others in favor of anything, place, person, etc, and Wikipedia articles get heavily edited by both groups. Sometimes two pages created by two groups of the same thing, place, person, etc. In the end, if both groups reach a common conclusion then they mention it in the common article. Edit wars mostly happen for politician pages. You can check here the list of edit wars that happened in the history - List of Edit Wars.

That's it for now!

This was a short article regarding Wikipedia in which I've mentioned working mechanism, source of income, and some facts about Wikipedia.

How was the blog? tell me in the comment section below.

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Author - Aman Tiwari

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