139-524: Misplaced Pages is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers , known as Wikipedians , through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki . Misplaced Pages is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites ; as of August 2024, it was ranked fourth by Semrush , and seventh by Similarweb . Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Misplaced Pages has been hosted since 2003 by
278-513: A wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored "creative construction" over "creative destruction". Any change that deliberately compromises Misplaced Pages's integrity is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and other types of spam. Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking
417-449: A badge indicating that they are "approved for free cultural works". Repositories exist which exclusively feature free material and provide content such as photographs, clip art , music, and literature. While extensive reuse of free content from one website in another website is legal, it is usually not sensible because of the duplicate content problem. Misplaced Pages is amongst the most well-known databases of user-uploaded free content on
556-402: A copyright holder's power to license their work, as copyleft which also utilizes copyright for such a purpose. The public domain is a range of creative works whose copyright has expired or was never established, as well as ideas and facts which are ineligible for copyright. A public domain work is a work whose author has either relinquished to the public or no longer can claim control over,
695-504: A definition would exclude the Open Content License because that license forbids charging for content; a right required by free and open-source software licenses. It has since come to describe a broader class of content without conventional copyright restrictions. The openness of content can be assessed under the '5Rs Framework' based on the extent to which it can be retained, reused, revised, remixed and redistributed by members of
834-647: A filing that it was unable to "successfully [leverage] the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business". On January 27, 2016, the two sites were sold to the San Diego–based BizX, LLC for an undisclosed amount. It was run by its founder, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda , from 1998 until 2011. He shared editorial responsibilities with several other editors including Timothy Lord, Patrick "Scuttlemonkey" McGarry, Jeff "Soulskill" Boehm, Rob "Samzenpus" Rozeboom, and Keith Dawson. Jonathan "cowboyneal" Pater
973-455: A for-profit business. Misplaced Pages gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Misplaced Pages coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Misplaced Pages. The English Misplaced Pages passed
1112-536: A 💕 of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all its projects (Misplaced Pages and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Misplaced Pages, and it maintains
1251-409: A free way of obtaining higher education that is "focused on collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content." There are multiple projects and organizations that promote learning through open content, including OpenCourseWare and Khan Academy . Some universities, like MIT , Yale , and Tufts are making their courses freely available on the internet. There are also
1390-400: A given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the article's underlying code, or use images disruptively. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Misplaced Pages articles;
1529-576: A later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small. According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Misplaced Pages community to new content". Several studies have shown that most Misplaced Pages contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Misplaced Pages editors were female. Because of this, universities throughout
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#17328371460971668-402: A later date). Paid staff editors have an unlimited number of moderation points. A given comment can have any integer score from −1 to +5 , and registered users of Slashdot can set a personal threshold so that no comments with a lesser score are displayed. For instance, a user reading Slashdot at level +5 will only see the highest rated comments, while a user reading at level −1 will see
1807-505: A link to the original story, and a lengthy discussion section, all contributed by users. At its peak, discussion on stories could get up to 10,000 posts per day. Slashdot has been considered a pioneer in user-driven content, influencing other sites such as Google News and Misplaced Pages. There has been a dip in readership as of 2011, primarily due to the increase of technology-related blogs and Twitter feeds. In 2002, approximately 50% of Slashdot's traffic consisted of people who simply check out
1946-516: A list of articles every Misplaced Pages should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet
2085-502: A month, "according to the ratings firm comScore". As of March 2023, it ranked 6th in popularity, according to Similarweb . Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Misplaced Pages follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through " stigmergic accumulation". On January 18, 2012, the English Misplaced Pages participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in
2224-426: A more "unfiltered, anarchic version". A meta-moderation system was implemented on September 7, 1999, to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses in the moderation system. Meta-moderators are presented with a set of moderations that they may rate as either fair or unfair . For each moderation, the meta-moderator sees the original comment and the reason assigned by the moderator (e.g. troll , funny ), and
2363-417: A negative response from many longtime users, upset by the added visual complexity, and the removal of features, such as comment viewing, that distinguished Slashdot from other news sites. An organized boycott of the site was held from February 10 to 17, 2014. The "beta" site was eventually shelved. In July 2015, Dice announced that it planned to sell Slashdot and SourceForge; in particular, the company stated in
2502-471: A new website redesign, called "Vector 2022". It featured a redesigned menu bar , moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar , and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool. The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Misplaced Pages unanimously voted to revert the changes. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Misplaced Pages follows
2641-605: A number of organizations promoting the creation of openly licensed textbooks such as the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library, Connexions , OpenStax College , the Saylor Academy, Open Textbook Challenge, and Wikibooks . Any country has its own law and legal system, sustained by its legislation, which consists of documents. In a democratic country , laws are published as open content, in principle free content; but in general, there are no explicit licenses attributed for
2780-402: A particular editor with certainty. A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Misplaced Pages ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site". Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact,
2919-575: A rate of $ 5 per 1,000 page views – non-subscribers may still view articles and respond to comments, with banner ads in place. On March 6, 2003, subscribers were given the ability to see articles 10 to 20 minutes before they are released to the public. Slashdot altered its threaded discussion forum display software to explicitly show domains for links in articles, as "users made a sport out of tricking unsuspecting readers into visiting [ Goatse.cx ]." In observance of April Fools' Day in 2006, Slashdot temporarily changed its signature teal color theme to
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#17328371460973058-523: A sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references". Editors who do not log in are in some sense " second-class citizens " on Misplaced Pages, as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation", but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to
3197-508: A subsidiary known as Slashdot Media. While initially stating that there were no plans for major changes to Slashdot, in October 2013, Slashdot launched a "beta" for a significant redesign of the site, which featured a simpler appearance and commenting system. While initially an opt-in beta, the site automatically began migrating selected users to the new design in February 2014; the rollout led to
3336-456: A topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style. A topic should also meet Misplaced Pages's standards of "notability" , which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject. Further, Misplaced Pages intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized. It must not present original research. A claim that
3475-456: A user's rating, which is known as " karma " on Slashdot. Users with high "karma" are eligible to become moderators themselves. The system does not promote regular users as "moderators" and instead assigns five moderation points at a time to users based on the number of comments they have entered in the system – once a user's moderation points are used up, they can no longer moderate articles (though they can be assigned more moderation points at
3614-408: A warm palette of bubblegum pink and changed its masthead from the usual, "News for Nerds" motto to, "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" Editors joked that this was done to increase female readership. In another supposed April Fools' Day joke, User Achievement tags were introduced on April 1, 2009. This system allowed users to be tagged with various achievements, such as "The Tagger" for tagging a story or "Member of
3753-476: A work. The aim of copyleft is to use the legal framework of copyright to enable non-author parties to be able to reuse and, in many licensing schemes, modify content that is created by an author. Unlike works in the public domain, the author still maintains copyright over the material, however, the author has granted a non-exclusive license to any person to distribute, and often modify, the work. Copyleft licenses require that any derivative works be distributed under
3892-473: Is a sign that someone has an older account and has contributed to the site longer. For Slashdot's 10-year anniversary in 2007, one of the items auctioned off in the charity auction for the Electronic Frontier Foundation was a 3-digit Slashdot user ID. In 2006, Slashdot had approximately 5.5 million users per month. The primary stories on the site consist of a short synopsis paragraph,
4031-486: Is administered by its own open source content management system , Slash , which is available under the GNU General Public License . In 2012, Slashdot had around 3.7 million unique visitors per month and received over 5300 comments per day. The site has won more than 20 awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 for "Best Community Site" and "Best News Site". At its peak use, a news story posted to
4170-488: Is another popular editor of Slashdot, who came to work for Slashdot as a programmer and systems administrator. His online nickname (handle), CowboyNeal, is inspired by a Grateful Dead tribute to Neal Cassady in their song, "That's It for the Other One". He is best known as the target of the usual comic poll option, a tradition started by Chris DiBona . Slashdot runs on Slash , a content management system available under
4309-709: Is described as synonymous to the definitions of open/free in the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition, and the Definition of Free Cultural Works. A distinct difference is the focus given to the public domain, open access , and readable open formats . OKF recommends six conformant licenses: three of OKN's (Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence, Open Data Commons Attribution License, Open Data Commons Open Database License ) and
Misplaced Pages - Misplaced Pages Continue
4448-522: Is distributed via Internet to the general public. Publication of such resources may be either by a formal institution-wide program, or informally, by individual academics or departments. Open content publication has been seen as a method of reducing costs associated with information retrieval in research, as universities typically pay to subscribe for access to content that is published through traditional means. Subscriptions for non-free content journals may be expensive for universities to purchase, though
4587-495: Is dying." Users will also typically refer to articles referring to data storage and data capacity by inquiring how much it is in units of Libraries of Congress . Sometimes bandwidth speeds are referred to in units of Libraries of Congress per second. When numbers are quoted, people will comment that the number happens to be the "combination to their luggage" (a reference to the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs ) and express false anger at
4726-413: Is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source, as do all quotations. Among Misplaced Pages editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations. This can at times lead to the removal of information which, though valid,
4865-728: Is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings. Each article and each user of Misplaced Pages has an associated and dedicated "talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate. Misplaced Pages's community has been described as cultlike , although not always with entirely negative connotations. Its preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials , has been referred to as " anti-elitism ". Misplaced Pages does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. As Misplaced Pages grew, "Who writes Misplaced Pages?" became one of
5004-458: Is not properly sourced. Finally, Misplaced Pages must not take sides. As Misplaced Pages policies changed over time, and became more complex, their number has grown. In 2008, there were 44 policy pages and 248 guideline pages; by 2013, scholars counted 383 policy pages and 449 guideline pages. Misplaced Pages's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by
5143-482: Is quite unique in organization studies, though there has been some recent interest in consensus building in the field. Joseph Reagle and Sue Gardner argue that the approaches to consensus building are similar to those used by Quakers . A difference from Quaker meetings is the absence of a facilitator in the presence of disagreement, a role played by the clerk in Quaker meetings. The Arbitration Committee presides over
5282-492: Is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. colour versus color ) or points of view. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use . Jimmy Wales has described Misplaced Pages as "an effort to create and distribute
5421-941: Is used by the Wikimedia Foundation . In 2009, the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons licenses were marked as "Approved for Free Cultural Works". Another successor project is the Open Knowledge Foundation , founded by Rufus Pollock in Cambridge , in 2004 as a global non-profit network to promote and share open content and data. In 2007 the OKF gave an Open Knowledge Definition for "content such as music, films, books; data be it scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise; government and other administrative information". In October 2014 with version 2.0 Open Works and Open Licenses were defined and "open"
5560-436: Is very similar to open content . An analogy is a use of the rival terms free software and open-source, which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement. For instance, the Open Knowledge Foundation 's Open Definition describes "open" as synonymous with the definition of free in the "Definition of Free Cultural Works" (as also in
5699-488: The CC BY , CC BY-SA , and CC0 Creative Commons licenses. Slashdot Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /. ) is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments. The website
Misplaced Pages - Misplaced Pages Continue
5838-604: The Columbia Journalism Review identified Misplaced Pages's page-protection policies as "perhaps the most important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas". In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Misplaced Pages maintains "stable versions" of articles which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion,
5977-454: The GNU General Public License . Early versions of Slash were written by Rob Malda in the spring of 1998. After Andover.net bought Slashdot in June 1999, Several programmers were hired to structure the code and render it scalable, as its users had increased from a few hundred to tens of thousands. This work was done by Brian Aker, Patrick Galbraith, Chris Nandor and others, resulting in version 2 of
6116-584: The Global South ( Eurocentrism ). While the reliability of Misplaced Pages was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward while becoming an important fact-checking site . Misplaced Pages has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before
6255-548: The Open Content Project , describing works licensed under the Open Content License (a non-free share-alike license, see 'Free content' below) and other works licensed under similar terms. The website of the Open Content Project once defined open content as 'freely available for modification, use and redistribution under a license similar to those used by the open-source / free software community'. However, such
6394-523: The Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition ). For such free/open content both movements recommend the same three Creative Commons licenses , the CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0. Copyright is a legal concept, which gives the author or creator of a work legal control over the duplication and public performance of their work. In many jurisdictions, this is limited by a time period after which
6533-511: The Philippines . In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each ( Russian , Spanish , Italian , Polish , Egyptian Arabic , Chinese , Japanese , Ukrainian , Vietnamese , Waray , Arabic , and Portuguese ), seven more have over 500,000 articles ( Persian , Catalan , Indonesian , Serbian , Korean , Norwegian , and Turkish ), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000. The largest,
6672-717: The United States Congress —the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours . More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content. In January 2013, 274301 Misplaced Pages , an asteroid , was named after Misplaced Pages; in October 2014, Misplaced Pages was honored with the Misplaced Pages Monument ; and, in July 2015, 106 of
6811-598: The Wikimedia Foundation , an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Initially only available in English, editions of Misplaced Pages in more than 300 other languages have been developed. The English Misplaced Pages , with its over 6.9 million articles, is the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 64 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024. As of November 2024, over 25% of Misplaced Pages's traffic
6950-462: The deletion of articles on Misplaced Pages , with roughly 500,000 such debates since Misplaced Pages's inception. Once an article is nominated for deletion, the dispute is typically determined by initial votes (to keep or delete) and by reference to topic-specific notability policies. Content in Misplaced Pages is subject to the laws (in particular, copyright laws) of the United States and of the US state of Virginia , where
7089-824: The procrastination principle regarding the security of its content, meaning that it waits until a problem arises to fix it. Due to Misplaced Pages's increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. For instance, on the English Misplaced Pages and some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article. On the English Misplaced Pages, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. A frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or "extended confirmed protected", meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended confirmed" editors can modify it. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes. A 2021 article in
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#17328371460977228-465: The public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work. In most countries, the Berne Convention grants copyright holders control over their creations by default. Therefore, copyrighted content must be explicitly declared free by the authors, which is usually accomplished by referencing or including licensing statements from within
7367-690: The 7,473 700-page volumes of Misplaced Pages became available as Print Misplaced Pages . In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander , Beresheet , crash landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Misplaced Pages engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Misplaced Pages had been encoded into synthetic DNA . On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Misplaced Pages's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There
7506-642: The English Misplaced Pages introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012. Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published. However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement as well as efforts to diversify the editing community. Although changes are not systematically reviewed, Misplaced Pages's software provides tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. Each article's History page links to each revision. On most articles, anyone can view
7645-494: The English Misplaced Pages, has over 6.9 million articles. As of January 2021, the English Misplaced Pages receives 48% of Misplaced Pages's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. The top 10 editions represent approximately 85% of the total traffic. Since Misplaced Pages is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as
7784-482: The Internet as a " series of tubes " or former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer 's chair-throwing incident from 2005. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a popular target of jokes by Slashdotters, and all stories about Microsoft were once identified with a graphic of Gates looking like a Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation . Many Slashdotters have long talked about the supposed release of Duke Nukem Forever , which
7923-412: The Internet". Andover.net merged with VA Linux on February 3, 2000, changed its name to SourceForge, Inc. on May 24, 2007, and then became Geeknet, Inc. on November 4, 2009. Slashdot's 10,000th article was posted after two and a half years on February 24, 2000, and the 100,000th article was posted on December 11, 2009, after 12 years online. During the first 12 years, the most active story with
8062-584: The Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Misplaced Pages was launched on January 15, 2001 as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia . Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended for it to be
8201-767: The US National Institutes of Health , Research Councils UK (effective 2016) and the European Union (effective 2020). At an institutional level, some universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , have adopted open access publishing by default by introducing their own mandates. Some mandates may permit delayed publication and may charge researchers for open access publishing. For teaching purposes, some universities, including MIT , provide freely available course content, such as lecture notes, video resources and tutorials. This content
8340-401: The United States tried to encourage women to become Misplaced Pages contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown , gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. Andrew Lih , a professor and scientist, said that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly
8479-466: The articles are written and peer-reviewed by academics themselves at no cost to the publisher. This has led to disputes between publishers and some universities over subscription costs, such as the one that occurred between the University of California and the Nature Publishing Group . Free and open content has been used to develop alternative routes towards higher education. Open content is
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#17328371460978618-478: The automated rejection of edits may have contributed to a downturn in active Misplaced Pages editors. Over time, Misplaced Pages has developed a semiformal dispute resolution process. To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a "request for comment". Misplaced Pages encourages local resolutions of conflicts, which Jemielniak argues
8757-567: The automotive industry, and even agricultural areas. Technologies such as distributed manufacturing can allow computer-aided manufacturing and computer-aided design techniques to be able to develop small-scale production of components for the development of new, or repair of existing, devices. Rapid fabrication technologies underpin these developments, which allow end-users of technology to be able to construct devices from pre-existing blueprints, using software and manufacturing hardware to convert information into physical objects. In academic work,
8896-456: The categories for which it was nominated ( Best Community Site and Best News Site ). It was also voted as one of Newsweek ' s favorite technology Web sites and rated in Yahoo! 's Top 100 Web sites as the "Best Geek Hangout" (2001). The main antagonists in the 2004 novel Century Rain , by Alastair Reynolds – The Slashers – are named after Slashdot users. The site was mentioned briefly in
9035-639: The comment, either up ( +1 ) or down ( −1 ). Moderators may choose to attach a particular descriptor to the comments as well, such as "normal", "offtopic", " flamebait ", " troll ", "redundant", "insightful", "interesting", "informative", "funny", "overrated", or "underrated", with each corresponding to a −1 or +1 rating. So a comment may be seen to have a rating of "+1 insightful" or "−1 troll". Comments are very rarely deleted, even if they contain hateful remarks. Starting in August 2019 anonymous comments and postings have been disabled. Moderation points add to
9174-503: The committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Misplaced Pages policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased). Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Misplaced Pages (16%). Complete bans from Misplaced Pages are generally limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior . When conduct
9313-555: The cost of publication and reduced the entry barrier sufficiently to allow for the production of widely disseminated materials by individuals or small groups. Projects to provide free literature and multimedia content have become increasingly prominent owing to the ease of dissemination of materials that are associated with the development of computer technology. Such dissemination may have been too costly prior to these technological developments. In media, which includes textual, audio, and visual content, free licensing schemes such as some of
9452-458: The course of the site's history. A popular meme (based on an unscientific Slashdot user poll ) is, "In Soviet Russia , noun verb you!" This type of joke has its roots in the 1960s or earlier, and is known as a " Russian reversal ". Other popular memes usually pertain to computing or technology, such as "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these", "But does it run Linux ?", or " Netcraft now confirms: BSD (or some other software package or item)
9591-413: The distribution and usage of the work. As such, any person may manipulate, distribute, or otherwise use the work, without legal ramifications. A work in the public domain or released under a permissive license may be referred to as "copycenter". Copyleft is a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of
9730-416: The domain, he desired to make a name that was "silly and unpronounceable" – try pronouncing out, 'h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org ' ". By June 1998, the site was seeing as many as 100,000 page views per day and advertisers began to take notice. By December 1998, Slashdot had net revenues of $ 18,000, yet its Internet profile was higher and revenues were expected to increase. On June 29, 1999,
9869-689: The edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor. The results were tabulated for several language versions of Misplaced Pages. The English Misplaced Pages's three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush , anarchism , and Muhammad . By comparison, for the German Misplaced Pages, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia , Scientology , and 9/11 conspiracy theories . In 2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Misplaced Pages. Editors also debate
10008-570: The founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University , called Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced. After the incident, Seigenthaler described Misplaced Pages as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool". The incident led to policy changes at Misplaced Pages for tightening up
10147-532: The growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called " low-hanging fruit "—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain found that the English Misplaced Pages had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during
10286-569: The growth rate of the English Misplaced Pages in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. The edition reached 3 million articles in August 2009. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to "increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits". Others suggest that
10425-544: The headlines and click through, while others participate in discussion boards and take part in the community. Many links in Slashdot stories caused the linked site to get swamped by heavy traffic and its server to collapse. This was known as the "Slashdot effect", a term first coined on February 15, 1999, that refers to an article about a "new generation of niche Web portals driving unprecedented amounts of traffic to sites of interest". Slashdot has received over twenty awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 in both of
10564-502: The importance of Online Moderation last December 1, 2011. On Valentine's Day 2002, founder Rob Malda proposed to longtime girlfriend Kathleen Fent using the front page of Slashdot. They were married on December 8, 2002, in Las Vegas , Nevada . Slashdot implemented a paid subscription service on March 1, 2002. Slashdot's subscription model works by allowing users to pay a small fee to be able to view pages without banner ads , starting at
10703-456: The influence of rival editing camps, the conversational structure, and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources. Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their resolution in a 2013 study. Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive work behavior at Misplaced Pages. He relied instead on "mutually reverting edit pairs", where one editor reverts
10842-412: The latest changes and undo others' revisions by clicking a link on the article's History page. Registered users may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes. "New pages patrol" is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems. In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in
10981-537: The latter must be available for commercial use by the public. However, it is similar to several definitions for open educational resources, which include resources under noncommercial and verbatim licenses. In 2003, David Wiley announced that the Open Content Project had been succeeded by Creative Commons and their licenses; Wiley joined as "Director of Educational Licenses". In 2005, the Open Icecat project
11120-404: The licenses made by Creative Commons have allowed for the dissemination of works under a clear set of legal permissions. Not all Creative Commons licenses are entirely free; their permissions may range from very liberal general redistribution and modification of the work to a more restrictive redistribution-only licensing. Since February 2008, Creative Commons licenses which are entirely free carry
11259-501: The main one is that published by a government gazette . So, law-documents can eventually inherit license expressed by the repository or by the gazette that contains it. The concept of applying free software licenses to content was introduced by Michael Stutz, who in 1997 wrote the paper "Applying Copyleft to Non-Software Information" for the GNU Project . The term "open content" was coined by David A. Wiley in 1998 and evangelized via
11398-523: The majority of Misplaced Pages's servers are located. By using the site, one agrees to the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use and Privacy Policy ; some of the main rules are that contributors are legally responsible for their edits and contributions, that they should follow the policies that govern each of the independent project editions, and they may not engage in activities, whether legal or illegal, that may be harmful to other users. In addition to
11537-826: The majority of works are not free, although the percentage of works that are open access is growing. Open access refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions to access and free of many restrictions on use (e.g. certain copyright and license restrictions). Authors may see open access publishing as a way of expanding the audience that is able to access their work to allow for greater impact, or support it for ideological reasons. Open access publishers such as PLOS and BioMed Central provide capacity for review and publishing of free works; such publications are currently more common in science than humanities. Various funding institutions and governing research bodies have mandated that academics must produce their works to be open-access, in order to qualify for funding, such as
11676-820: The mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Misplaced Pages forked from Misplaced Pages to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Misplaced Pages would not display advertisements, and changed Misplaced Pages's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org . After an early period of exponential growth,
11815-526: The median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect and repair. In the Seigenthaler biography incident , an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy . It remained uncorrected for four months. Seigenthaler,
11954-461: The meta-moderator can click to see the context of comments surrounding the one that was moderated. Slashdot uses a system of "tags" where users can categorize a story to group them together and sorting them. Tags are written in all lowercase, with no spaces, and limited to 64 characters. For example, articles could be tagged as being about "security" or "mozilla". Some articles are tagged with longer tags, such as "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" (expressing
12093-494: The most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Misplaced Pages content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders". A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, although
12232-448: The most responses posted was the post- 2004 US Presidential Election article "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" with 5,687 posts. This followed the creation of a new article section, politics.slashdot.org , created at the start of the 2004 election on September 7, 2004. Many of the most popular stories are political, with "Strike on Iraq" (March 19, 2003) the second-most-active article and "Barack Obama Wins US Presidency" (November 5, 2008)
12371-531: The most visited article with more than 680,000 hits. Some controversy erupted on March 9, 2001, after an anonymous user posted the full text of Scientology 's "Operating Thetan Level Three" (OT III) document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article. The Church of Scientology demanded that Slashdot remove the document under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act . A week later, in a long article, Slashdot editors explained their decision to remove
12510-593: The notability criteria of other language Misplaced Pages projects. Free content Free content , libre content , libre information , or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art , a book, a software program , or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in
12649-639: The number of consumers. In some cases, free software vendors may use peer-to-peer technology as a method of dissemination. Project hosting and code distribution is not a problem for most free projects as a number of providers offer these services free of charge. Free content principles have been translated into fields such as engineering, where designs and engineering knowledge can be readily shared and duplicated, in order to reduce overheads associated with project development. Open design principles can be applied in engineering and technological applications, with projects in mobile telephony , small-scale manufacture,
12788-426: The old one but is more polished with more rounded curves, collapsible menus, and updated fonts. On November 9 that same year, Malda wrote that Slashdot attained 16,777,215 (or 2 − 1) comments, which broke the database for three hours until the administrators fixed the problem. On July 11, 2010, SlashDot was the first major media platform where Bitcoin , the first cryptocurrency, was publicized. On January 25, 2011,
12927-442: The original author, to maintain the original license of the reused content) or restrictions (excluding commercial use, banning certain media) chosen by the author. There are a number of standardized licenses offering varied options that allow authors to choose the type of reuse of their work that they wish to authorize or forbid. There are a number of different definitions of free content in regular use. Legally, however, free content
13066-684: The original content ran counter to the website's longtime focus on user-generated submissions. Nick Kolakowski, the editor of the three websites, told The Next Web that the websites were "meant to complement Slashdot with an added layer of insight into a very specific area of technology, without interfering with Slashdot's longtime focus on tech-community interaction and discussion." Despite the debate, articles published on SlashCloud and SlashBI attracted attention from io9, NPR, Nieman Lab, Vanity Fair, and other publications. In September 2012, Slashdot, SourceForge , and Freecode were acquired by online job site Dice.com for $ 20 million, and incorporated into
13205-567: The page while providing links and information on how to get the document from other sources. Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001 (although the first article was published April 5, 2001) and is an official offshoot of the US-based Web site. As of January 2010 the site was owned by OSDN-Japan, Inc., and carried some of the US-based Slashdot articles as well as localized stories. An external site, New Media Services , has reported
13344-452: The page-view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]." By the end of December 2016, Misplaced Pages was ranked the fifth most popular website globally. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Misplaced Pages articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page. On January 18, 2023, Misplaced Pages debuted
13483-407: The past 30 days. Editors who fail to comply with Misplaced Pages cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Misplaced Pages outsiders, increasing the odds that Misplaced Pages insiders may target or discount their contributions. Becoming a Misplaced Pages insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Misplaced Pages-specific technological codes, submit to
13622-491: The perception of catastrophic risk), "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" (used when the community feels that the subject has finally figured out something obvious), "correlationnotcausation" (used when scientific articles lack direct evidence; see correlation does not imply causation ), or "getyourasstomars" (commonly seen in articles about Mars or space exploration ). As an online community with primarily user-generated content, many in-jokes and internet memes have developed over
13761-427: The person who revealed it. Slashdotters often use the abbreviation TFA which stands for The fucking article or RTFA ("Read the fucking article"), which itself is derived from the abbreviation RTFM . Usage of this abbreviation often exposes comments from posters who have not read the article linked to in the main story. Slashdotters typically like to mock then United States Senator Ted Stevens ' 2006 description of
13900-419: The process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship. Misplaced Pages has delegated some administrative functions to bots , such as when granting privileges to human editors. Such algorithmic governance has an ease of implementation and scaling, though
14039-401: The public without violating copyright law. Unlike free content and content under open-source licenses , there is no clear threshold that a work must reach to qualify as 'open content'. The 5Rs are put forward on the Open Content Project website as a framework for assessing the extent to which content is open: This broader definition distinguishes open content from open-source software, since
14178-469: The questions frequently asked there. Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Misplaced Pages and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Misplaced Pages users are responsible for about half of
14317-407: The same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Misplaced Pages", questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Misplaced Pages had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators
14456-424: The same period in 2008. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology. Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In
14595-507: The same terms and that the original copyright notices be maintained. A symbol commonly associated with copyleft is a reversal of the copyright symbol , facing the other way; the opening of the C points left rather than right. Unlike the copyright symbol, the copyleft symbol does not have a codified meaning. Projects that provide free content exist in several areas of interest, such as software, academic literature, general literature, music, images, video, and engineering . Technology has reduced
14734-480: The site launched its third major redesign in its 13.5-year history, which gutted the HTML and CSS , and updated the graphics. On August 25, 2011, Malda resigned as Editor-in-Chief with immediate effect. He did not mention any plans for the future, other than spending more time with his family, catching up on some reading, and possibly writing a book. His final farewell message received over 1,400 comments within 24 hours on
14873-512: The site was sold to Linux megasite Andover.net for $ 1.5 million in cash and $ 7 million in Andover stock at the Initial public offering (IPO) price. Part of the deal was contingent upon the continued employment of Malda and Bates and on the achievement of certain "milestones". With the acquisition of Slashdot, Andover.net could now advertise itself as "the leading Linux/Open Source destination on
15012-496: The site with a link could overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon was known as the " Slashdot effect ". Slashdot also now offers a business software comparison directory with over 100,000 software titles. Slashdot was preceded by Rob Malda 's personal website "Chips & Dips", which launched in October 1997, featured a single "rant" each day about something that interested its author – typically something to do with Linux or open source software. At
15151-437: The site's edits." This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz , who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. The English Misplaced Pages has 6,917,260 articles, 48,334,502 registered editors, and 122,331 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in
15290-413: The site's users. A user-based moderation system is employed to filter out abusive or offensive comments. Every comment is initially given a score of −1 to +2 , with a default score of +1 for registered users, 0 for anonymous users ( Anonymous Coward ), +2 for users with high "karma", or −1 for users with low "karma". As moderators read comments attached to articles, they click to moderate
15429-426: The site. On December 7, 2011, Slashdot announced that it would start to push what the company described as "sponsored" Ask Slashdot questions. On March 28, 2012, Slashdot launched Slashdot TV. Two months later, in May 2012, Slashdot launched SlashBI, SlashCloud, and SlashDataCenter, three websites dedicated to original journalistic content. The websites proved controversial, with longtime Slashdot users commenting that
15568-562: The six largest, in order of article count, are the English , Cebuano , German , French , Swedish , and Dutch Wikipedias. The second and fifth-largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot , which as of 2013 had created about half the articles on the Swedish Misplaced Pages , and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias . The latter are both languages of
15707-422: The social structures that result leading to decreased production costs. Given sufficient interest in a software component, by using peer-to-peer distribution methods, distribution costs may be reduced, easing the burden of infrastructure maintenance on developers. As distribution is simultaneously provided by consumers, these software distribution models are scalable; that is, the method is feasible regardless of
15846-416: The software, released in 2001. Slash remains Free software and anyone can contribute to development. Slashdot's editors are primarily responsible for selecting and editing the primary stories that are posted daily by submitters. The editors provide a one-paragraph summary for each story and a link to an external website where the story originated. Each story becomes the topic for a threaded discussion among
15985-445: The start of Misplaced Pages, but with limited success. Misplaced Pages began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis , a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger , editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Misplaced Pages. Nupedia
16124-792: The subject of the article. Editors in good standing in the community can request extra user rights , granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. In particular, editors can choose to run for " adminship ", which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes. Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive editors from making unproductive edits. By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Misplaced Pages's earlier years, in part because
16263-516: The terms, the Foundation has developed policies, described as the "official policies of the Wikimedia Foundation". The fundamental principles of the Misplaced Pages community are embodied in the "Five pillars", while the detailed editorial principles are expressed in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately shape content. The five pillars are: The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Misplaced Pages editors write and revise
16402-478: The text of each law, so the license must be assumed as an implied license . Only a few countries have explicit licenses in their law-documents, as the UK's Open Government Licence (a CC BY compatible license). In the other countries, the implied license comes from its proper rules (general laws and rules about copyright in government works). The automatic protection provided by the Berne Convention does not apply to
16541-411: The texts of laws: Article 2.4 excludes the official texts from the automatic protection. It is also possible to "inherit" the license from context. The set of country's law-documents is made available through national repositories. Examples of law-document open repositories: LexML Brazil , Legislation.gov.uk , and N-Lex . In general, a law-document is offered in more than one (open) official version, but
16680-459: The third-most-active. The rest of the 10 most active articles are an article announcing the 2005 London bombings , and several articles about Evolution vs. Intelligent Design , Saddam Hussein 's capture, and Fahrenheit 9/11 . Articles about Microsoft and its Windows Operating System are popular. A thread posted in 2002 titled "What's Keeping You On Windows?" was the 10th-most-active story, and an article about Windows 2000/NT4 source-code leaks
16819-510: The time, Malda was a student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan , majoring in computer science. The site became "Slashdot" in September 1997 under the slogan "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", and quickly became a hotspot on the Internet for news and information of interest to computer geeks. The name "Slashdot" came from a somewhat "obnoxious parody of a URL " – when Malda registered
16958-457: The topic of a threaded discussion among users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system. Randomly selected moderators are assigned points (typically 5) which they can use to rate a comment. Moderation applies either −1 or +1 to the current rating, based on whether the comment is perceived as either "normal", "offtopic", "insightful", "redundant", "interesting", or " troll " (among others). The site's comment and moderation system
17097-680: The ultimate dispute resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the English Misplaced Pages committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore,
17236-541: The verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Misplaced Pages editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be discussed on article Talk pages. Disputes may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit warring". It is widely seen as a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added, and criticized as creating a competitive and conflict-based editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles . Research has focused on, for example, impoliteness of disputes,
17375-694: The web. While the vast majority of content on Misplaced Pages is free content, some copyrighted material is hosted under fair-use criteria . Free and open-source software , which is often referred to as open source software and free software , is a maturing technology with companies using them to provide services and technology to both end-users and technical consumers. The ease of dissemination increases modularity, which allows for smaller groups to contribute to projects as well as simplifying collaboration. Some claim that open source development models offer similar peer-recognition and collaborative benefit incentive as in more classical fields such as scientific research, with
17514-425: The website's policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Editors can enforce the rules by deleting or modifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Misplaced Pages were based on a translation of the rules for the English Misplaced Pages. They have since diverged to some extent. According to the rules on the English Misplaced Pages community, each entry in Misplaced Pages must be about
17653-445: The work of the author to those who either pay royalties to the author for usage of the author's content or limit their use to fair use. Secondly, it limits the use of content whose author cannot be found. Finally, it creates a perceived barrier between authors by limiting derivative works, such as mashups and collaborative content. Although open content has been described as a counterbalance to copyright , open content licenses rely on
17792-403: The work. The right to reuse such a work is granted by the authors in a license known as a free license , a free distribution license, or an open license, depending on the rights assigned. These freedoms given to users in the reuse of works (that is, the right to freely use, study, modify or distribute these works, possibly also for commercial purposes) are often associated with obligations (to cite
17931-406: The works then enter the public domain . Copyright laws are a balance between the rights of creators of intellectual and artistic works and the rights of others to build upon those works. During the time period of copyright the author's work may only be copied, modified, or publicly performed with the consent of the author, unless the use is a fair use . Traditional copyright control limits the use of
18070-430: The {1,2,3,4,5} Digit UID Club" for having a Slashdot UID consisting of a certain number of digits. While it was posted on April Fools' Day to allow for certain joke achievements, the system is real. Slashdot unveiled its newly redesigned site on June 4, 2006, following a CSS Redesign Competition. The winner of the competition was Alex Bendiken, who built on the initial CSS framework of the site. The new site looks similar to
18209-789: Was a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Misplaced Pages declined by twelve percent, those of German version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost 9 percent." Varma added, "While Misplaced Pages's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Misplaced Pages users." When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky , associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said that he suspected much of
18348-509: Was also in decline. In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Misplaced Pages, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis." The number of active English Misplaced Pages editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline. In January 2007, Misplaced Pages first became one of the ten most popular websites in the United States, according to Comscore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, it
18487-400: Was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior". Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Misplaced Pages editors. Distribution of the 64,018,182 articles in different language editions (as of November 28, 2024) There are currently 339 language editions of Misplaced Pages (also called language versions , or simply Wikipedias ). As of November 2024,
18626-562: Was founded in 1997 by Hope College students Rob Malda , also known as "CmdrTaco", and classmate Jeff Bates , also known as "Hemos". In 2012, they sold it to DHI Group, Inc. (i.e., Dice Holdings International, which created the Dice.com website for tech job seekers ). In January 2016, BIZX acquired both slashdot.org and SourceForge . In December 2019, BIZX rebranded to Slashdot Media . Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own users, and each story becomes
18765-493: Was from the United States, followed by Japan at 6.2%, the United Kingdom at 5.6%, Russia at 5.0%, Germany at 4.8%, and the remaining 53.3% split among other countries. Misplaced Pages has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge , extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias , particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against
18904-474: Was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Misplaced Pages was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman . Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on
19043-603: Was launched, in which product information for e-commerce applications was created and published under the Open Content License. It was embraced by the tech sector, which was already quite open source minded. In 2006, a Creative Commons' successor project, the Definition of Free Cultural Works , was introduced for free content. It was put forth by Erik Möller , Richard Stallman , Lawrence Lessig , Benjamin Mako Hill , Angela Beesley, and others. The Definition of Free Cultural Works
19182-405: Was promised in 1997 but was delayed indefinitely (the game was eventually released in 2011). References to the game are commonly brought up in other articles about software packages that are not yet in production even though the announced delivery date has long passed (see vaporware ). Having a low Slashdot user identifier (user ID) is highly valued since they are assigned sequentially; having one
19321-408: Was ranked #9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Misplaced Pages ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 million unique visitors. In 2014, it received 8 billion page views every month. On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Misplaced Pages had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors
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