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Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia was launched and is now available in 325 languages. Wikis are collaborative in nature and facilitate community-building within a course.

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The History of Wikipedia: What to Know

Wikipedia is a free digital encyclopedia that allows everyone and anyone to freely share knowledge. Wikipedia was coined from the Hawaiian word, "Wiki," meaning "Quick," and Encyclopedia. Therefore, it is safe to regard Wikipedia as the "Quick Encyclopedia."

Initially, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl. The server has run on Linux, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. In 2002 it was replaced by new software, written specifically for the project, including a PHP wiki engine. Later, a new version, MediaWiki, was developed, updated many times, and working till now.

Containing all branches of knowledge, Wikipedia grew and attracted contributors; it quickly developed a life of its own and began to function largely independently of Nupedia. Over the years, since its establishment, Wikipedia has developed multiple sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, etc.

Presently, many national authorities have blocked Wiki, including the People's Republic of China, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Thailand, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. As of February 2010, there are some 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with approximately 3.2 million articles in English Wikipedia.

The Founding of Wikipedia: How It Happened

The old dream for a world encyclopedia of Paul Otlet and Herbert Wells from the 1930s became possible in the 1990s, after the rapid progress of the Internet and World Wide Web: the first known proposal for an online Internet encyclopedia was made by the Internet enthusiast Rick Gates in October 1993.

In a message titled "The Internet Encyclopedia" and published in the Usenet newsgroup alt internet services, Gates proposed to collaboratively create an encyclopedia on the Internet, which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalog of all encyclopedia pages. Later the term Interpedia was coined for this encyclopedia, but the project never left the planning stages and finally died.

Several years later, in 1999, the famous open-source activist Richard Stallman popularized his concept of an open-source web-based online encyclopedia, but his idea also remained unrealized.

The first working online encyclopedia was Wikipedia, launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The founders used the concept and technology of a wiki devised in 1994 by the computer programmer Ward Cunningham. In the simplest terms, Wikipedia is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. A special wiki software has been created, often used to create collaborative websites.

Wikipedia Through the Decades

First Decade: 2000-2009

Nupedia was started in the early 2000s by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger for publishing expert-written articles licensable as "free content." Nupedia, in 2001, birthed Wikipedia in January 2001 to give room for collaborations when writing articles.

By 2003, after two years of actively running Wiki, the online encyclopedia now boasts of more than 100,000 articles. Also, within these first two years of operations, two sister products had been developed, Wiktionary and Wikisource.

Wikipedia continued to grow afterward, recording over 1 million articles across 100 different languages before the end of 2004; in 2005, Hitwise named Wikipedia the most popular reference website.

Before the end of the first decade, Wikipedia already had 10million+ articles with over 51,000 editors. In 2009, these articles were also licensed under Creative Commons.

Second Decade: 2010-2019

Having made tremendous progress in its first decade, the second decade was expected to continue on the high side. However, the opposite happened, as all European Wikipedia servers went offline on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, due to overheating issues. In essence, Wikipedia failed worldwide - thankfully, the problem didn't last for long, although it was slower to gain access in some places than others. By May 2010, the issue had been completely resolved, with the site having an entirely new user interface.

The progress continued throughout the second decade, with English Wiki hitting the 3.6million-article mark in 2011 just before celebrating its 10th anniversary, and by November 2011, the number of articles published on English Wikipedia had surpassed 3.8million and 500million page edits.

In January 2012, Wikipedia was shut down for 24 hours supporting the PROTECT IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act. These two laws were under debate in the United States Congress at that time. In July 2012, another complete shut down of the Russian Wiki also occurred, protesting against the proposed Russian Internet Regulation Law.

Alexa Internet named Wikipedia the sixth most popular website in the world in November 2012, and by January 2015, the quick encyclopedia already had 36million main-space articles. In 2016, Wikipedia improved its website's user interface yet again.

Having hit the 6milllion article mark in January 2020, Wikipedia dramatically fell off the ranks, ranking as the 11th most popular website globally, according to Alexa. Wikipedia celebrated its 20th anniversary in January 2021 and currently ranks as the 13th most engaging website in the world, falling by two places from last year's position.

What Are the Most Important Inventions from Wikipedia?

Many sister Wikipedia projects evolved during the years - Wiktionary, 2002 (dictionary and thesaurus); Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikisource.

Wikiquote

The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikiquote, a compendium of quotations collaboratively written by the readers. Like Wikipedia, Wikiquote is also free, and every user of the Internet can edit all Wikiquote entries. Wikiquote was created in July 2003.

Wikibooks

Founded in 2003, Wikibooks was created as a book authoring website where everyone is a contributor. That is, all users can collaboratively write instructional books, such as eBooks, textbooks, etc., on various topics.

Wikisource

While Wikipedia is regarded as a digital encyclopedia, we can safely call Wikisource an online library. Wikisource was created to serve as a library of films, domain texts, etc. In essence, while Wikisource contains articles about books, Wikipedia contains the book itself.

How Does Wikipedia Make Money?

Wikipedia makes its money via donations, merchandise sales from the Wikipedia store, and investments. So far, Wiki's biggest donors include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Craig Newmark, with each donor donating over $1million each.

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Wikipedia: Complete Guide - History, Products, Founding, And More

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Wikipedia is a free digital encyclopedia that allows everyone and anyone to freely share knowledge. Wikipedia was coined from the Hawaiian word, "Wiki," meaning "Quick," and Encyclopedia. Therefore, it is safe to regard Wikipedia as the "Quick Encyclopedia." Initially, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl.

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Around this time conventional and distance colleges/universities because introducing e-learning into their programs. E-learning helped eliminate costs regarding physical materials, but presentation costs where the next conflict.

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In the 2017 ATD research report Next-Generation E-Learning, 89% of those surveyed said that changes in e-learning require their staff to update or add new skills. That research highlighted skills that TD professionals need to have to find success in e-learning: general e-learning design skills, knowledge of available e-learning tools and applications, skills in specific design tools and software, overall instructional design knowledge and skills, and audio/video design skills.

When designing or creating e-learning content, incorporate performance-based learning objectives and utilize decision-based interactions rather than "click to reveal" activity for more effective retention, engagement, and desired job behavior outcomes.

E-learning authoring tools are software or simple keyboard shortcuts that enable you to create custom digital learning content. Authoring tools can range in capabilities, price, ease of use, and functionality. For example, PowerPoint is a popular and accessible authoring tool for many learning designers. Some LMS (Learning Management Systems) used to deliver learning content provide authoring tools within the platform.

ATD research E-learning: The Evolving Landscape highlights the top skills that are lacking among TD professionals: measuring and evaluating e-learning, deciding whether e-learning is a good choice for the content, designing, writing, and building scenarios, testing courses for usability, functionality, and browser compatibility, and designing the user interface.

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benefits of e learning for employee training and development

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In the 2017 ATD research report Next-Generation E-Learning , 89% of those surveyed said that changes in e-learning require their staff to update or add new skills. That research highlighted skills that TD professionals need to have to find success in e-learning: general e-learning design skills, knowledge of available e-learning tools and applications, skills in specific design tools and software, overall instructional design knowledge and skills, and audio/video design skills.

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Blogging is a great addition to the classroom, having students either create them or read from them. Blogging can be a free space to share and learn about different perspectives in regards to various topics.

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Web 2.0 is the term used to describe a variety of websites and applications that allow anyone to create and share online information or material they have created.

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A virtual world is a computer-simulated representation of a world with specific spatial and physical characteristics, and users of virtual worlds interact with each other via representations of themselves called “avatars".

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What is Social Media?
Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

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What is social media?

Social media is a collective term for websites and applications that focus on communication, community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.

People use social media to stay in touch and interact with friends, family and various communities. Businesses use social applications to market and promote their products and track customer concerns.

Business-to-consumer websites include social components, such as comment fields for users. Various tools help businesses track, measure and analyze the attention the company gets from social media, including brand perception and customer insight.

Social media has enormous traction globally. Mobile applications make these platforms easily accessible. Some popular examples of general social media platforms include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

What are the business applications of social media?

In business, social media is used to market products, promote brands, connect to customers and foster new business. As a communication platform, social media promotes customer feedback and makes it easy for customers to share their experiences with a company. Businesses can respond quickly to positive and negative feedback, address customer problems and maintain or rebuild customer confidence.

Social media is also used for crowdsourcing. That's the practice of using social network ing to gather knowledge, goods or services. Companies use crowdsourcing to get ideas from employees, customers and the general public for improving products or developing future products or services.

What some popular social media platforms provide and their target enterprise uses

Examples of business to business ( B2B) applications include the following:

Social media analytics. This is the practice of gathering and analyzing data from blogs and social media websites to assist in making business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to do customer sentiment analysis.

Social media marketing (SMM). This application increases a company's brand exposure and customer reach. The goal is to create compelling content that social media users will share with their social networks. A key components of SMM is social media optimization (SMO). Like search engine optimization, SMO is a strategy for drawing new visitors to a website. Social media links and share buttons are added to content and activities are promoted via status updates, tweets and blogs.

Social customer relationship marketing. Social CRM is a powerful business tool. For example, a Facebook page lets people who like a company's brand to like the business's page. This, in turn, creates ways to communicate, market and network. Social media sites give users the option to follow conversations about a product or brand to get real-time market data and feedback.

Recruiting. Social recruiting has become a key part of employee recruitment strategies. It is a fast way to reach a lot of potential candidates, both active job seekers and people who were not thinking about a job change until they say the recruitment post.

Enterprise social networking. Businesses also use enterprise social networking to connect people who share similar interests or activities. These applications include internal intranets and collaboration tools, such as Yammer, Slack and Microsoft Teams, that give employees access to information and communication capabilities. Externally, public social media platforms let organizations stay close to customers and make it easy to conduct market research.

What social media platforms that large businesses are using

What are the benefits of social media?

Social media provides several benefits, including the following:

User visibility. Social platforms let people easily communicate and exchange ideas or content.

Business and product marketing. These platforms enable businesses to quickly publicize their products and services to a broad audience. Businesses can also use social media to maintain a following and test new markets. In some cases, the content created on social media is the product.

Audience building. Social media helps entrepreneurs and artists build an audience for their work. In some cases, social media has eliminated the need for a distributor, because anyone can upload their content and transact business online. For example, an amateur musician can post a song on Facebook, get instant visibility among their network of friends, who in turn share it on their networks.

What are the challenges of social media?

Social media can also pose challenges to individual users, in the following ways:

Mental health issues. Overuse of social apps can result in burnout, social media addiction and other issues.

Polarization. Individuals can end up in filter bubbles. They create the illusion of open discourse when the user is actually sequestered in an algorithmically generated online community.

Disinformation. Polarized environments foster the spread of disinformation where the perpetrator's intent is to deceive others with false information.

Businesses face similar and unique social media challenges.

Offensive posts. Conversations on intranets and enterprise collaboration tools can veer off into non-work-related subjects. When that happens, there is potential for co-workers to disagree or be offended. Controlling such conversations and filtering for offensive content can be difficult.

Security and retention. Traditional data security and retention policies may not work with the features available in collaboration tools. This can raise security risks and compliance issues that companies must deal with.

Productivity concerns. Social interaction, whether online or in person, is distracting and can affect employees' productivity.

What are enterprise social media best practices?

It is important for companies to have a social media strategy and establish social media goals. These help to build trust, educate their target audience and create brand awareness. They also enable real people to find and learn about a business.

Here are some social media social media best practices for companies to follow:

Establish social media policies that set expectations for appropriate employee social behavior. These policies should also ensure social media posts do not expose the company to legal problems or public embarrassment. Guidelines should include directives for when an employee must identify them self as a company representative and rules for what type of information can be shared.

Focus on platforms geared to B2B marketing, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Put in place an engaging, customer-centric strategy in social media campaigns. An example would be to use Twitter to field questions from customers.

Include rich media, such as pictures and video, in content to make it more compelling and appealing to users.

Use social media analytics tools to measure user engagement with content and to keep on top of trends.

Use a conversational voice in posts that comes across as professional but not rigid.

Shorten long form content to make it social friendly. Lists and audio and video snippets are examples.

Embrace employees and customers talking positively about the organization and repost that content.

Check in on analytics and management tools frequently, if not on a daily basis, as well as the social media accounts.

What are the different types of social media?

The four main categories of social platforms are these:

1. Social networks. People use these networks to connect with one another and share information, thoughts and ideas. The focus of these networks is usually on the user. User profiles help participants identify other users with common interests or concerns. Facebook and LinkedIn are good examples.

2. Media-sharing networks. These networks focus is on content. For example, on YouTube, interaction is around videos that users create. Other media-sharing networks are TikTok and Instagram. Streaming platforms like Twitch are considered a subset of this category.

3. Community-based networks. The focus of this type of social network is in-depth discussion, much like a blog forum. Users leave prompts for discussion that spiral into detailed comment threads. Communities often form around select topics. Reddit is an example of a community-based network.

4. Review board networks. With these networks, the focus is on a review, usually of a product or service. For example, on Yelp, users can write reviews on restaurants and endorse each other's reviews to boost visibility.

What are examples of social media?

Here are some examples of popular web-based social media platforms:

Facebook is a free social networking website where registered users create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues.

LinkedIn is a social networking site designed for the business community. Registered members can create networks of people they know and trust professionally.

Pinterest is a social curation website for sharing and categorizing images found online. The main focus of Pinterest is visual, though it does call for brief descriptions of images. Clicking on an image will take a user to the original source. For example, clicking on a picture of a pair of shoes might redirect a user to a purchasing site; an image of blueberry pancakes might redirect to the recipe.

Reddit is a social news website and forum where site members curate and promote stories. The site is composed of hundreds of sub-communities called subreddits. Each subreddit has a specific topic, such as technology, politics or music. Reddit site members, also known as "redditors," submit content that members vote on. The goal is to elevate well-regarded stories to the top of the site's main thread page.

Twitter is a free microblogging service for registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets. Twitter members can broadcast tweets and follow other active users' tweets using several platforms and devices.

Wikipedia is a free, open content encyclopedia created through a collaborative community. Anyone registered on Wikipedia can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles.

The takeaway

Social media is everywhere. Individuals and businesses of all sizes and types use it. It's a critical resource for engaging with customers, getting customer feedback and expanding company visibility.

An effective social strategy can enhance an organization's reputation and build trust and awareness among a growing network of connections. While some are more tailored to B2B promotion, no platforms are off limits.

Continue Reading About social media

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Social media is a collective term for websites and applications that focus on communication, community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. People use social media to stay in touch and interact with friends, family and various communities. Businesses use social applications to market and promote their products and track customer concerns.

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"massive open online course"
MOOCs integrate social networking, accessible online resources, and are facilitated by leading practitioners in the field of study. Most significantly, MOOCs build on the engagement of learners who self-organize their participation according to learning goals, prior knowledge and skills, and common interests.

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A digital badge is a visual representation of skills or knowledge you have gained. ... Quest Badges are earned for completing either a single course or a group of courses, depending on the program. A Mastery Badge is earned upon completion of all courses within a program.

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Uploaded by Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative on 2017-01-04.