Dear Editor,

Anyone who has access to the Internet must have gone to Wikipedia at some point.

As the most popular online reference source around, the online encyclopedia is powered by a wiki application, a robust collaboration software designed to maximise teamwork by providing a central platform on which employees can openly share knowledge, data, and documents to solve specific business problems or complete creative projects together. Team members interact from any location on the cloud, sparking innovation and driving progress to boost profits and company growth.

Beyond its powerful engine, Wikipedia is run by volunteer contributors from all over the globe. These volunteers are responsible for information gathering, content creation, editing, and publishing of Wikipedia articles and more. Over the years, Wikipedia has had significant impact. The English version, with almost 6.9 million articles, is the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 63 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about five edits per second on average) as of April 2024.

The reliability of Wikipedia has been a topic of debate due to the nature of its content creation, which involves uncredited contributors. While some articles may contain inaccuracies, studies suggest that Wikipedia has an overall accuracy rate of around 80 per cent but lower than Britannica. Just like any other source, when using Wikipedia as an information source, it is highly recommended to also check the sources cited in the page or articles. Also, verifying information by checking multiple sources should be a habit when conducting research. Of note, Cocoa Cola, Pepsi, KFC as well as the prestigious
Forbes magazine, for example, are referenced on Wikipedia in addition to popular social media platforms. Interestingly, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tends to get information from the online encyclopedia.

In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) partnered with Wikimedia Foundation to help ensure critical information about COVID-19 would be easily accessible to everyone. Under this partnership, the WHO utilises Wikimedia’s open-source and licence-free portals, so anyone, including Wikipedia editors and contributors, could use and share all videos, infographics, images, etc from the WHO for free. Data showed that there are currently 5,200 COVID-19-related articles that were viewed 84 million times and are still available in 175 languages to readers globally. At that time, 250,000 Wikipedia editors worked on expanding the coverage of the data provided by the health organisation.

Some data are highlighted below to show the undertakings of the electronic encyclopedia:

*In the US, Wikipedia is the most visited website thus far in 2021, with monthly traffic of more than 1.134 billion. It is accessed from more than 46.4 million mobile devices and over 23.4 million desktops on a daily basis.

*Wikipedia pages have been edited a total of 1.016 billion times since it was established. As of February 2021, Wikipedia ranked 13th in Alexa’s top 50 most popular global sites.

*In terms of Wikipedia statistics by language, there are 319 versions of Wikipedia in different languages as of 2021.

*In March 2021, Wikipedia has accumulated a total of 5.72 billion visits. Most recent data showed that in December 2023 the platform has approximately 4.23 billion unique global visitors, down from 4.4 billion in August of the same calendar year.

Owen Mckenzie

Policy analyst

mckenzieowen28@yahoo.com