KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS 02

Wikipedia as a Knowledge-Based System

Wikipedia History

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors during 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested the idea that a wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001. There were Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, the domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new parent organization.

Exploring Wikipedia

 

Many visitors come to Wikipedia to acquire knowledge, others to share knowledge. At this very instant, dozens of articles are being improved, and new articles are also being created. Changes can be viewed at the recent changes page and a random page at random articles. Over 2,000 articles have been designated by the Wikipedia community as featured articles, exemplifying the best articles in the encyclopedia. Another 7,000 articles are designated as good articles. Some information on Wikipedia is organized into lists; the best of these are designated as featured lists. Wikipedia also has portals, which organize content around topic areas; our best portals are selected as featured portals. Articles can be found using the search box.

Wikipedia is available in languages other than English. Wikipedia has more than two hundred languages and related projects include a dictionary, quotations, books, manuals, and scientific reference sources, and a news service. All of these are maintained, updated, and managed by separate communities, and often include information and articles that can be hard to find through other common sources.

Basic navigation in Wikipedia

 

Wikipedia articles are all linked, or cross-referenced. When highlighted text like this is seen, it means there is a link to some relevant article or Wikipedia page with further in-depth information elsewhere. Holding the mouse over the link will often show to where the link will lead. The reader is always one click away from more information on any point that has a link attached. There are other links towards the ends of most articles, for other articles of interest, relevant external websites and pages, reference material, and organized categories of knowledge which can be searched and traversed in a loose hierarchy for more information. Some articles may also have links to dictionary definitions, audio-book readings, quotations, the same article in other languages, and further information available on our sister projects. Further links can be added if a relevant link is missing, and this is one way to contribute.

Using Wikipedia as a research tool

 

As wiki documents, articles are never considered complete and may be continually edited and improved. Over time, this generally results in an upward trend of quality and a growing consensus over a neutral representation of information. Users should be aware that not all articles are quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information. Indeed, many articles start their lives as displaying a single viewpoint, and, after a long process of discussion, debate, and argument, they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus. Others may, for a while, become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint which can take some time months perhaps to achieve better balanced coverage of their subject. 

The ideal Wikipedia article is well-written, balanced, neutral, and encyclopedic, containing comprehensive, notable, verifiable knowledge. An increasing number of articles reach this standard over time, and many already have. Our best articles are called Featured Articles (and display a small star in the upper right corner of the article), and our second best tier of articles are designated Good Articles. However, this is a process and can take months or years to be achieved, as each user adds their contribution in turn. Some information will be considered by later contributors to be insufficiently founded and, therefore, may be removed or expunged.

While the overall trend is toward improvement, it is important to use Wikipedia carefully if it is intended to be used as a research source, since individual articles will, by their nature, vary in quality and maturity. Guidelines and information pages are available to help users and researchers do this effectively, as is an article that summarizes third-party studies and assessments of the reliability of Wikipedia.

How Wikipedia Work As a Knowledge-Base System

·        How User Input Document / Image / Video

If some knowledge expert who wants to publish knowledge document about some special area that he studied deeply, he can simply use Wikipedia. For that first he wants to create an account in the Wikipedia and then he can select the category that he is going to publish. Main topic and the sub topic areas are not essential to fill, but if there are any he should. Finally he can store data successfully. Wikipedia has billions of knowledge documents and final document is the knowledge that we can get from it for our usage.

      

How User Retrieve Document / Image / Video

If someone needs to find some knowledge document he can use the same way that he used before. But for that he don’t want to login, reason for that is all the documents are freely available to use. So type the required topic to search will show us available categories under the topic he want to find, then select one. Then several main topic will show us, now he can select one to retrieve data. But if there are more data under sub categories he can select one of them again. Finally he is having the required knowledge document.