Okavango Delta

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Map of the delta NASA view of Okavango Delta, with national borders added. Typical region in the Okavango Delta, with free canals and lakes, swamps and islands The Okavango Delta (or Okavango Swamp), in Botswana, is a large inland delta, formed where the Okavango River reaches a tectonic trough in the central part of the endorheic basin of the Kalahari. All the water reaching the Delta is ultimately evaporated and transpired, and does not flow into any sea or ocean. Each year approximately 11 cubic kilometres of water spread over the 6,000-15,000 km² area. Some flood-waters drain into Lake Ngami.[1] The Moremi Game Reserve, a National Park, spreads across the eastern side of the Delta. The area was once part of Lake Makgadikgadi, an ancient lake that mostly dried up by the early Holocene. Although the Okavango Delta is widely believed to be the world's largest inland delta, it is, in fact not. In Africa alone there are two larger similar geological features - the Sudd on the Nile in South Sudan, and the Inner Niger Delta in Mali.[2] Contents 1 Geography 1.1 Floods 1.2 Where the water goes 1.3 Salt islands 1.4 Chief’s Island 2 Climate 3 Wildlife 3.1 Fish 3.2 Lechwe 3.3 Plants 3.4 Game lodges 4 People 5 Threats 6 See also 7 Gallery 8 References 9 External links Geography Floods The Okavango is produced by seasonal flooding. The Okavango River drains the summer (January–February) rainfall from the Angola highlands and the surge flows 1,200 kilometres in approximately one month. The waters then spread over the 250 km by 150 km area of the delta over the next four months (March–June). The high temperature of the delta causes rapid transpiration and evaporation, resulting in a cycle of rising and falling water level that was not fully understood until the early 20th century. The flood peaks between June and August, during Botswana’s dry winter months, when the delta swells to three times its permanent size, attracting animals from kilometres around and creating one of Africa’s greatest concentrations of wildlife. The delta is very flat, with less than 2 metres variation in height across its 15,000 km².[3] Where the water goes Every year, circa 11 cubic kilometres (11,000,000,000,000 litres) of water flow into the delta. Approximately 60% is consumed through transpiration by plants, 36% by evaporation, 2% percolates into the aquifer system; and 2% flows into Lake Ngami. This turgid outflow means that the delta is unable to flush out the minerals carried by the river and is liable to become increasingly salty and uninhabitable, but this effect is reduced by the low salt content which collects around the roots of the plants. The low salinity of the water also means that the floods do not greatly enrich the floodplain with nutrients. Salt islands The agglomeration of salt around plant roots means that many of the thousands of islands have barren white patches in their centre, which have become too salty to support plants, aside from the odd salt resistant palm tree. Trees and grasses grow in sand near the edges of the islands that has yet to become too salty. Approximately 70% of the islands began as termite mounds, where a tree then takes root on the mound of earth. Chief’s Island Chief’s Island, the largest island in the delta, was formed by a fault line which uplifted an area over 70 km long and 15 km wide. Historically it was reserved as an exclusive hunting area for the chief. It now provides the core area for much of the resident wildlife when the waters rise. Climate The Delta's profuse greenery is not the result of a tropical climate, rather it is an oasis in an arid country. The average annual rainfall is 450mm (approximately one third that of its Angolan catchment area) and most of it falls between December and March in the form of heavy afternoon thunderstorms. December to February are hot wet months with daytime temperatures as high as 40°C, warm nights, and humidity levels fluctuating between 50 and 80%. From March to May the temperature becomes far more comfortable with a maximum of 30°C during the day and mild to cool nights. The rains quickly dry up leading into the dry, cold winter months of June to August. Daytime temperatures at this time of year are mild to warm but the temperature begins to fall after sunset. Nights can be surprisingly cold in the Delta with temperatures barely above freezing. September to November sees the heat and atmospheric pressure build up once more as the dry season slides into the rainy season. October is the most challenging month for visitors - daytime temperatures often push past 40°C and the dryness is only occasionally broken by a sudden cloudburst. Wildlife The Okavango delta is both a permanent and seasonal home to a wide variety of wildlife which is now a popular tourist attraction.[4] Species include African Bush Elephant, African Buffalo, Hippopotamus, Lechwe, Tsessebe, Sitatunga, Blue Wildebeest, Giraffe, Nile crocodile, Lion, Cheetah, Leopard, Brown Hyena, Spotted Hyena, springbok, Greater Kudu, Sable Antelope, Black Rhinoceros, White Rhinoceros, Plains Zebra, Warthog and Chacma Baboon. Notably the endangered African Wild Dog still survives within the Okavango Delta,[5] exhibiting one of the richest pack densities in Africa. The delta also includes over 400 species of birds, including African Fish Eagle, Pel's Fishing Owl, Crested Crane, Lilac-breasted Roller, Hammerkop, Ostrich, and Sacred Ibis. The majority of the estimated 200,000 large mammals in and around the delta are not year-round residents. They leave with the summer rains to find renewed fields of grass to graze on and trees to browse, then make their way back as winter approaches. Large herds of buffalo and elephant total about 30,000 beasts.[citation needed] Fish The Okavango Delta is home to 71 fish species including Tigerfish, Tilapia and Catfish. They range from 1.4 m Sharptooth-Catfish to 3.2 cm Sickle-fin Barb. The same species are to be found in the Zambezi River, indicating a historic link between the two river systems.[6] Lechwe A female lechwe in the delta The most populous large mammal is the lechwe antelope, with more than 60,000. It is a little larger than an impala with elongated hooves and a water repellent substance on their legs that enables rapid movement through knee deep water. They graze on aquatic plants and, like Waterbuck, take to water when threatened by predators. Only the males have horns. Plants Papyrus and reed rafts make up a large part of the Okavango's vegetation. During the flood season they float well above the sandy river bed with roots dangling free in the water. This gap between bed and roots is utilised as shelter by crocodiles. The plants of the Delta play an important role in providing cohesion for the sand. The banks or levees of a river normally have a high mud content and this combines with the sand in the river’s load to continuously build up the river banks. In the Delta, because of the clean waters of the Okavango, there is almost no mud and the river’s load consists almost entirely of sand. The plants capture the sand, acting as the glue and making up for the lack of mud and in the process creating further islands on which more plants can take root. This process is not important in the formation of linear islands. They are long and thin and often curved like a gently meandering river. The reason for that is that they are actually the natural banks of old river channels which over time have become blocked up by plant growth and sand deposition, resulting in the river changing course and the old river levees becoming islands. Due to the flatness of the Delta, and the large tonnage of sand flowing into it from the Okavango River, the floor of the delta is slowly but constantly rising. Where channels are today, islands will be tomorrow and then new channels may wash away these existing islands.[7] Game lodges The Botswana Okavango Game Lodges(2011) cater for small numbers of guests, each one operating in its own Okavango Delta private concession area.There are a huge number of lodges with low impact policies to the environment.[8] People The Okavango Delta peoples consist of five ethnic groups, each with its own ethnic identity and language. They are Hambukushu (also known as Mbukushu, Bukushu, Bukusu, Mabukuschu, Ghuva, Haghuva), Dceriku (Dxeriku, Diriku, Gciriku, Gceriku, Giriku, Niriku), Wayeyi (Bayei, Bayeyi, Yei), Bugakhwe (Kxoe, Khwe, Kwengo, Barakwena, G/anda) and ||anikhwe (Gxanekwe, //tanekwe, River Bushmen, Swamp Bushmen, G//ani, //ani, Xanekwe). The Hambukushu, Dceriku, and Wayeyi are all Bantus who have traditionally engaged in mixed economies of millet/sorghum agriculture; fishing, hunting, and the collection of wild plant foods; and pastoralism. The Bugakhwe and ||anikwhe are Bushmen who have traditionally practised fishing, hunting, and the collection of wild plant foods; Bugakhwe utilized both forest and riverine resources while the ||anikhwe mostly focused on riverine resources. The Hambukushu, Dceriku, and Bugakhwe are present along the Okavango River in Angola and in the Caprivi Strip of Namibia, and there are small numbers of Hambukushu and Bugakhwe in Zambia as well. Within the Okavango Delta, over the past 150 years or so Hambukushu, Dceriku, and Bugakhwe have inhabited the Panhandle and the Magwegqana in the northeastern Delta. ||anikhwe have inhabited the Panhandle and the area along the Boro River through the Delta, as well as the area along the Boteti River. The Wayeyi have inhabited the area around Seronga as well as the southern Delta around Maun, and a few Wayeyi live in their putative ancestral home in the Caprivi Strip. Within the past 20 years many people from all over the Okavango have migrated to Maun, the late 1960s and early 1970s over 4,000 Hambukushu refugees from Angola were settled in the area around Etsha in the western Panhandle. The Okavango Delta has been under the political control of the Batawana (a Tswana sub-tribe) since the late 18th century. Most Batawana, however, have traditionally lived on the edges of the Delta. Small numbers of people from other ethnic groups such as Ovaherero and Ovambanderu now live in parts of the Okavango Delta, but since the majority of the members of those groups live elsewhere and the habitation is recent they are not considered as part of the Okavango Delta peoples. There are also several Bushmen groups represented by a handful of people. These groups were decimated by diseases of contact in the middle part of the 20th century, and most of the remaining members have intermarried with the ||anikwhe. Threats The Namibian government has presented plans to build a hydropower station in the Caprivi Region, which would regulate the Okavango's flow to some extent. While proponents argue that the effect would be minimal, environmentalists argue that this project could destroy most of the rich wildlife and plant life in the Delta.[9] Other threats include, at a local level, human encroachment and, regionally, the extraction of water in both Angola and Namibia.[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okavango_Delta

Nazism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search "National Socialism" redirects here. For other ideologies and groups called National Socialism, see National Socialism (disambiguation). "Nazi" redirects here. For the Sumerian deity, see Nanshe. Page semi-protected Part of a series on Nazism Flag of the Nazi Party Organizations[show] History[show] Ideology (non-racial)[show] Racial ideology[show] Final Solution[show] People[show] Beyond Germany[show] Literature[show] Lists[show] Related topics[show] Category Category v t e Nazism (German: Nationalsozialismus; English long form National Socialism) was the ideology of the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany.[1][2][3][4] It is a variety of fascism that incorporates biological racism and antisemitism.[5] Nazism used elements of the far-right racist Völkisch German nationalist movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture which fought against the communists in post-World War I Germany.[6] It was designed to draw workers away from communism and into Völkisch nationalism.[7] Major elements of Nazism have been described as far-right, such as allowing domination of society by people deemed racially superior, while purging society of people declared inferior which were said to be a threat to national survival.[8][9] Nazi philosophy claimed that an Aryan master race was superior to all other races.[10] To maintain what it regarded as the purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews and Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled.[11] Other groups deemed "degenerate" or "asocial" received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state and included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.[11] The Nazis promoted German territorial expansionism to gain Lebensraum ("living space") for German settlers and to bring labor, food and materials into the nation for growth.[12][13] Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler had objected to the party's previous leader's decision to use the word "Socialist" in its name as Hitler at the time instead preferred to use "Social Revolutionary".[14] Upon taking over the leadership, Hitler kept the term but defined socialism as meaning a commitment of an individual to a community.[14] Hitler claimed that true socialism does not repudiate private property unlike the claims of Marxism, and claimed that the "Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning" and said that "Communism is not socialism. Marxism is not socialism."[15] Nazism favoured private property, freedom of contract, and promoted the creation of national solidarity that would transcend class differences.[16][17] The Nazis outlawed strikes by employees and lockouts by employers, because these were regarded a threat to national unity.[18] Instead, the state controlled and approved wage and salary levels.[18] Contents 1 Etymology 2 Position in the political spectrum 3 Origins 3.1 Nationalism, antisemitism and racism 3.2 Response to World War I and fascism 4 Ideology 4.1 Social class 4.2 Sex and gender 4.2.1 Opposition to homosexuality 4.3 Racial policy 4.4 Religion 4.5 Economics 4.5.1 Anti-communism 4.5.2 Anti-capitalism 5 See also 6 References 6.1 Notes 6.2 Bibliography 7 External links Etymology The full name of Adolf Hitler's party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The acronym Nazi was formed from the first syllable of NAtional and the second syllable of SoZIalist. Such acronyms, usually formed from the initial letters or syllables of successive parts of compound names, were popular in the Third Reich. Another such example was Gestapo for GEheime STAatsPOlizei (Secret State Police).[19] Position in the political spectrum Führer Adolf Hitler (first from left side), Hermann Göring (second from left side), Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (third from left side), Rudolf Hess (fourth from left side). Nazis alongside members of the far-right reactionary and monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP), during the brief Nazi-DNVP alliance in the Harzburg Front from 1931 to 1932. A majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.[20] Far right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over others and purge society of supposed inferior elements.[8] Adolf Hitler and other proponents officially portrayed Nazism as being neither left- nor right-wing, but syncretic.[21][22] Hitler in Mein Kampf directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying: Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors [...] But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms.[23] Hitler, when asked whether he supported the "bourgeois right-wing", claimed that Nazism was not exclusively for any class, and indicated that it favoured neither the left nor the right, but preserved "pure" elements from both "camps", stating: "From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism".[24] The Nazis were strongly influenced by the post-World War I far-right in Germany, which held common beliefs such as anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, and anti-Semitism, along with nationalism, contempt towards the Treaty of Versailles, and condemnnation of the Weimar Republic for signing the armistice in November 1918 that later led to their signing of the Treaty of Versailles.[25] A major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organizations that engaged in political violence after World War I.[25] Initially, the post-World War I German far right was dominated by monarchists, but the younger generation, who were associated with Völkisch nationalism, were more radical and did not express any emphasis on the restoration of the German monarchy.[26] This younger generation desired to dismantle the Weimar Republic and create a new radical and strong state based upon a martial ruling ethic that could revive the "Spirit of 1914" that was associated with German national unity (Volksgemeinschaft).[26] The Nazis, the far-right monarchist and reactionary German National People's Party (DNVP), and others, such as monarchist officers of the German army and several prominent industrialists, formed an alliance in opposition to the Weimar Republic on 11 October 1931 in Bad Harzburg; officially known as the "National Front", but commonly referred to as the Harzburg Front.[27] The Nazis stated the alliance was purely tactical and there remained substantial differences with the DNVP. The Nazis described the DNVP as a bourgeois party and called themselves an anti-bourgeois party.[27] After the elections in 1932, the alliance broke after the DNVP lost many of its seats in the Reichstag. The Nazis denounced them as "an insignificant heap of reactionaries".[28] The DNVP responded by denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their street violence, and the "economic experiments" that would take place if the Nazis rose to power.[29] Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, initially supported the Nazi Party. His four sons, including Prince Eitel Friedrich and Prince Oskar, became members of the Nazi Party, in hopes that in exchange for their support, the Nazis would permit the restoration of the monarchy.[30] There were factions in the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical.[31] The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries.[31] Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.[32] The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels, hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasize both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.[31] Large segments of the Nazi Party staunchly supported its official socialist, revolutionary, and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and economic revolution upon the party gaining power in 1933.[33] Many of the million members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) were committed to the party's official socialist program.[33] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, pushed for a "second revolution" (the "first revolution" being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would entrench the party's official socialist program. Further, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.[33] Prior to becoming an anti-Semite and a Nazi, Hitler had lived a Bohemian lifestyle as a wandering watercolour artist in Austria and southern Germany, though he maintained elements of it later in life.[34] Hitler served in World War I and after the war his battalion was absorbed by the Bavarian Soviet Republic from 1918 to 1919, where he was elected Deputy Battalion Representative. According to historian Thomas Weber, he attended the funeral of communist Kurt Eisner (a German Jew), wearing a black mourning armband on one arm and a red communist armband on the other.[35] Further that Hitler's political beliefs had not yet solidified, and at that time he supported the idea of a classless society and was an anti-monarchist.[35] In Mein Kampf, Hitler never mentioned any service with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and he stated that he became an anti-Semite in 1913 in Vienna. This statement has been disputed with the contention he in fact was not an anti-Semite at that time.[36] Hitler altered his political views in response to the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, and it was then that he became an anti-Semitic, German nationalist.[36] As a Nazi, Hitler had expressed opposition to capitalism; he regarded capitalism as having Jewish origins, and accused capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.[37] Hitler took a pragmatic position between the conservative and radical factions of the Nazi Party, in that he accepted private property and allowed capitalist private enterprises to exist as long as they adhered to the goals of the Nazi state. However, if a capitalist private enterprise resisted Nazi goals, he sought to destroy it.[31] Upon the Nazis achieving power, Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction, without Hitler's authorization to do so.[38] Hitler considered Röhm's independent actions to be violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.[39] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in what came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives.[39] Although he opposed communist ideology, Hitler on numerous occasions publicly praised the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin and Stalinism.[40] Hitler commended Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting Stalin's purging of Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek.[41] While Hitler always intended to bring Germany into conflict against the Soviet Union to gain Lebensraum ("living space"), he supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front to crush liberal democracies, particularly France.[40] Origins See also: Early timeline of Nazism Nationalism, antisemitism and racism Johann Gottlieb Fichte, considered one of the fathers of German nationalism. One of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works had served as inspiration to Hitler and other Nazi members, including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck.[42] In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic France's occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public speeches, arming his students for battle against the French, and stressing the need for action by the German nation to free itself.[43] Fichte's nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites, spoke of the need of a "People's War" (Volkskrieg), and put forth concepts similar to those the Nazis adopted.[43] Fichte promoted German exceptionalism and stressed the need for the German nation to be purified (including purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis undertook upon rising to power).[43] Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism, and secularized urban industrial society, while advocating a "superior" society based on ethnic German "folk" culture and German "blood".[44] It denounced foreigners, foreign ideas and declared that Jews, national minorities, Catholics, and Freemasons were "traitors to the nation" and unworthy of inclusion.[45] Völkisch nationalism saw the world in terms of natural law and romanticism, viewed societies as organic, extolling the virtues of rural life, condemning the neglect of tradition and decay of morals, denounced the destruction of the natural environment, and condemned "cosmopolitan" cultures such as Jews and Romani.[46] During the era of Imperial Germany, Völkisch nationalism was overshadowed by both Prussian patriotism and the federalist tradition of various states therein.[47] The events of World War I including the end of the Prussian monarchy in Germany, resulted in a surge of revolutionary Völkisch nationalism.[48] The Nazis supported such revolutionary Völkisch nationalist policies.[47] The Nazis claimed that their ideology was influenced by the leadership and policies of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire.[49] The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve.[50] While Hitler was supportive of Bismarck's creation of the German Empire, he was critical of Bismarck's moderate domestic policies.[51] On the issue of Bismarck's support of a Kleindeutschland ("Lesser Germany", excluding Austria) versus the pan-German Großdeutschland ("Greater Germany") of the Nazis, Hitler stated that Bismarck's attainment of Kleindeutschland was the "highest achievement" Bismarck could have achieved "within the limits possible of that time".[52] In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler presented himself as a "second Bismarck".[52] The concept of the Aryan race which the Nazis promoted stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia.[53] Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the similarity of European words and their meaning to those of Indo-Iranian languages.[53] Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint, and science.[53] Contemporaries of Herder utilized the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture.[53] Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority combined in the nineteenth century, with white supremacists maintaining that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" which is superior to other races, and particularly the Semitic race, which they associated with "cultural sterility".[53] Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued destroyed the purity of the Aryan race.[54] Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany,[54] emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan and Jewish cultures.[53] Houston Stewart Chamberlain Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious tradition and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.[53] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and anti-Semitism in Germany.[54] Chamberlain's work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a "Jewish" spirit of selfishness and materialism.[54] Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism, and socialism.[54] The book became popular, especially in Germany.[54] Chamberlain stressed the need of a nation to maintain racial purity in order to prevent degeneration, and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.[54] In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.[55] Beginning in the 1870s, German Völkisch nationalism began to adopt anti-Semitic and racist themes and was adopted by a number of radical right political movements.[56] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) was an anti-Semitic forgery created by the police of the Russian Empire. Anti-Semites believed it was real and the Protocol surged in popularity after World War I.[57] The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.[58] Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg, and from 1920 onward Hitler focused his attacks on claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected; that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology.[59] Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.[60] Radical anti-Semitism was promoted by prominent advocates of Völkisch nationalism including Eugen Diederichs, Paul de Lagarde, and Julius Langbehn.[46] De Lagarde called the Jews a "bacillus, the carrier of decay...who pollute every national culture...and destroy all faith with their materialistic liberalism" and he called for the extermination of the Jews.[61] Langbehn called for a war of annihilation of the Jews and Langbehn's genocidal policies were published by the Nazis and given to soldiers on the front during World War II.[61] Johann Gottlieb Fichte accused Jews in Germany of having been, and inevitably continuing to be, a "state within a state" in Germany that was a threat to German national unity.[43] Fichte promoted two options to address this: the first was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine to impel the Jews to leave Europe.[62] The other option was violence against Jews, saying that the goal would be "...to cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea".[62] The Nazis claimed that Bismarck was unable to complete German national unification because of Jewish infiltration of the German parliament, and that their abolition of parliament ended the obstacle to unification.[49] Using the "stab in the back" legend, the Nazis accused Jews, and other populaces it considered non-German, of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German anti-semitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the perennial far right political canard popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland were strong.[63][64] Nazism's racial policy positions may have developed from the views of important biologists of the 19th century, including French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, through Ernst Haeckel's idealist version of Lamarckism and the father of genetics, German botanist Gregor Mendel.[65] However Haeckel's works were later condemned and banned from bookshops and libraries by the Nazis as inappropriate for “National-Socialist formation and education in the Third Reich.” This may have been because of his "monist" atheistic, materialist philosophy which the Nazis disliked.[66] Unlike Darwinian theory, Lamarckian theory officially ranked races in a hierarchy of evolution from apes while Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy of higher or lower evolution from apes, simply categorizing humans as a whole of all as having progressed in evolution from apes.[65] Many Lamarckians viewed "lower" races as having been exposed to debilitating conditions for too long for any significant "improvement" of their condition in the near future.[67] Haeckel utilized Lamarckian theory to describe the existence of interracial struggle and put races on a hierarchy of evolution, ranging from being wholly human to subhuman.[65] Georg Ritter von Schönerer Mendelian inheritance or Mendelism was supported by the Nazis and also mainstream eugenics proponents at the time. The Mendelian theory of inheritance declared that genetic traits and attributes were passed from one generation to another.[68] Proponents of eugenics used Mendelian inheritance theory to demonstrate the transfer of biological illness and impairments from parents to children, including mental disability; others also utilized Mendelian theory to demonstrate the inheritance of social traits, with racialists claiming a racial nature of certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behaviour.[69] During his youth in Austria, Hitler was politically influenced by Austrian pan-Germanist proponent Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who advocated radical German nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Slavism and anti-Habsburg views.[70] From von Schönerer and his followers, Hitler adopted for the Nazi movement the Heil greeting, the Führer title, and the model of absolute party leadership.[70] Hitler was also impressed with the populist anti-Semitism and anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger, who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler's time in the city used a rabble-rousing oratory style that appealed to the wider masses.[71] Unlike von Schönerer, however, Lueger was not a German nationalist, but a pro-Catholic Habsburg supporter.[71] Response to World War I and fascism During World War I, German sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a "National Socialism" in Germany within what he termed the "ideas of 1914" that were a declaration of war against the "ideas of 1789" (the French Revolution).[72] According to Plenge, the "ideas of 1789" that included rights of man, democracy, individualism and liberalism were being rejected in favour of "the ideas of 1914" that included "German values" of duty, discipline, law, and order.[72] Plenge believed that ethnic solidarity (Volksgemeinschaft) would replace class division and that "racial comrades" would unite to create a socialist society in the struggle of "proletarian" Germany against "capitalist" Britain.[72] He believed that the "Spirit of 1914" manifested itself in the concept of the "People's League of National Socialism".[73] This National Socialism was a form of state socialism that rejected the "idea of boundless freedom" and promoted an economy that would serve the whole of Germany under the leadership of the state.[73] This National Socialism was opposed to capitalism due to the components that were against "the national interest" of Germany, but insisted that National Socialism would strive for greater efficiency in the economy.[73] Plenge advocated an authoritarian rational ruling elite to develop National Socialism through a hierarchical technocratic state.[74] Plenge's ideas formed the basis of Nazism.[72] Oswald Spengler Oswald Spengler, a German cultural philosopher, was a major influence on Nazism; although after 1933 Spengler became alienated from Nazism and was later condemned by the Nazis for criticizing Adolf Hitler.[75] Spengler's conception of national socialism along with a number of his political views were shared by the Nazis and the Conservative Revolutionary movement.[76] Spengler's views were also popular amongst Italian Fascists, including Benito Mussolini.[77] Spengler's book The Decline of the West (1918) written during the final months of World War I, addressed the claim of decadence of modern European civilization, whicht he claimed was caused by atomizing and irreligious individualization and cosmopolitanism.[75] Spengler's major thesis was that a law of historical development of cultures existed involving a cycle of birth, maturity, aging, and death when it reaches its final form of civilization.[75] Upon reaching the point of civilization, a culture will lose its creative capacity and succumb to decadence until the emergence of "barbarians" create a new epoch.[75] Spengler considered the Western world as having succumbed to decadence of intellect, money, cosmopolitan urban life, irreligious life, atomized individualization, and the end of biological fertility as well as "spiritual" fertility.[75] He believed that the "young" German nation as an imperial power would inherit the legacy of Ancient Rome, lead a restoration of value in "blood" and instinct, while the ideals of rationalism would be revealed as absurd.[75] Spengler's notions of "Prussian socialism" as described in his book Preussentum und Sozialismus ("Prussiandom and Socialism", 1919), influenced Nazism and the Conservative Revolutionary movement.[76] Spengler wrote: "The meaning of socialism is that life is controlled not by the opposition between rich and poor, but by the rank that achievement and talent bestow. That is our freedom, freedom from the economic despotism of the individual."[76] Spengler adopted the anti-English ideas addressed by Plenge and Sombart during World War I that condemned English liberalism and English parliamentarianism while advocating a national socialism that was free from Marxism and that would connect the individual to the state through corporatist organization.[75] Spengler claimed that socialistic Prussian characteristics existed across Germany, including creativity, discipline, concern for the greater good, productivity and self-sacrifice.[78] He prescribed war as a necessity, saying "War is the eternal form of higher human existence and states exist for war: they are the expression of the will to war."[79] The book Das Dritte Reich (1923) translated as "The Third Reich", by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Spengler's definition of socialism did not advocate a change to property relations.[76] He denounced Marxism for seeking to train the proletariat to "expropriate the expropriator", the capitalist, and then to let them live a life of leisure on this expropriation.[80] He claimed that "Marxism is the capitalism of the working class" and not true socialism.[80] True socialism, according to Spengler, would be in the form of corporatism, stating that "local corporate bodies organized according to the importance of each occupation to the people as a whole; higher representation in stages up to a supreme council of the state; mandates revocable at any time; no organized parties, no professional politicians, no periodic elections."[81] Wilhelm Stapel, an anti-Semitic German intellectual utilized Spengler's thesis on the cultural confrontation between Jews as whom Spengler described as a Magian people versus Europeans as a Faustian people.[82] Stapel described Jews as a landless nomadic people in pursuit of an international culture whereby they can integrate into Western civilization.[82] As such, Stapel claims that Jews have been attracted to "international" versions of socialism, pacifism, or capitalism, because as a landless people the Jews have transgressed various national cultural boundaries.[82] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck who initially was the dominant figure of the Conservative Revolutionaries influenced Nazism.[83] He rejected reactionary conservatism, while proposing a new state, that he coined the "Third Reich", which would unite all classes under authoritarian rule.[84] Van den Bruck advocated a combination of the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left.[85] Fascism was a major influence on Nazism. The seizure of power by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the March on Rome in 1922 drew admiration by Hitler who less than a month later had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists.[86] Hitler presented the Nazis as a German fascism.[87][88] Benito Mussolini (centre in suit with fists against body) along with other Fascist leader figures and Blackshirts during the March on Rome. In November 1923, the Nazis attempted a "March on Berlin" modelled upon the March on Rome that resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.[89] Other Nazis — especially more radical ones such as Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler — rejected Italian Fascism, accusing it of being too conservative or capitalist.[90] Alfred Rosenberg condemned Italian Fascism for being racially confused and having influences from philo-Semitism.[91] Strasser criticized the policy of Führerprinzip as being created by Mussolini, and considered its presence in Nazism as a foreign imported idea.[92] Throughout the relationship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a number of lower-ranking Nazis scornfully viewed fascism as a conservative movement that lacked a full revolutionary potential.[92] Ideology From 1920 to 1923, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925–26, as Mein Kampf, a two-volume, biography and political manifesto.[93] Though Hitler for "tactical" reasons had rhetorically declared a 1920 party platform with socialist platitudes "unshakable," actually "many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans...Point 11, for example...Point 12...nationalization...Point 16...communalization.... put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the 'socialism' of National Socialism."[94] In actual practice, such points were mere slogans, "most of them forgotten by the time the party came to power.... the Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of them."[94] Historian Conan Fischer argues that the Nazis were sincere in their use of the adjective socialist, which they saw as inseparable from the adjective national, and meant it as a socialism of the master race, rather than the socialism of the "underprivileged and oppressed seeking justice and equal rights."[95] Social class In 1922, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower and working-class young people: The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers — in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.[96] Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the Nazi Party was arguably more effective with the middle class. Moreover, the financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis.[97] In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless — later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA — Storm Detachment).[97] Sex and gender Further information: Women in the Third Reich Homophobia: Berlin Memorial to Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust; Totgeschlagen—Totgeschwiegen (Struck Dead—Hushed Up) Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" (Children, Kitchen, Church).[citation needed] Opposition to homosexuality Further information: Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the SS, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, saying: "We must exterminate these people root and branch ... the homosexual must be eliminated."[98] In 1936, Himmler established the "Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung" ("Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion").[99] The Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.[100] As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges.[101][102] Racial policy Further information: Nazism and race and Racial policy of Nazi Germany The Master Race: the Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) depicts German war hero Karl von Müller as an exemplar Nordic type of the Herrenvolk. Europe, with pre-WW2 borders, showing the extension of Generalplan Ost, i.e., the massive depopulation and ethnic cleansing within German Lebensraum. Several of the founders and leaders of the Nazi Party were members of the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), who romanticized Aryan race superstitions with ritual and theology.[103] Originally, derived from the Germanenorden, the Thule Society shared the racist superstitions of Ariosophy and the society's activities consisted of anti-Semitism lectures and excursions of Germanic antiquity.[104] The Thule Society member, Dietrich Eckart, coached Adolf Hitler in public speaking, and Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart.[105] The DAP had initial support from the Thule Society — but after Hitler had taken over the Party, by denigrating their superstitious approach to politics, the society's members were quickly marginalised to allow the party to become a mass movement.[106] Hitler viewed individual races as being part of a hierarchy, and he espoused the "aristocratic idea of nature". This view led to his assertion of superior and higher qualities of the Aryan race.[107] Hitler claimed to have first developed his worldview while in Vienna from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the Austro–Hungarian Empire comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; he viewed "Aryans" as the ultimate master race inhabiting the top, whilst Jews and Gypsies were at bottom.[108] Other research suggests that Hitler's virulent antisemitism was a post-war development, influenced from the Russian civil war.[109] The idea of the Russian roots of Nazism has been explored by Walter Laqueur[110] and Michael Kellogg.[111] The racist subject of Nazism was Das Volk, the German people living under continual cultural attack by Judeo-Bolshevism. Nazi Party leadership sought to unify the Volk, and strongly encouraged stoicism, self-discipline and self-sacrifice to achieve final victory.[112] Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels frequently employed antisemitic rhetoric to underline this view: "The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods."[113] In the pseudoscientific treatise, The Myth of the Twentieth Century — according to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein Kampf[114] — Reichstag Secretary, Alfred Rosenberg proposed that, "[F]rom a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape".[115] Sketch plan of Treblinka extermination camp. Between the years 1942 and 1943, more than 850,000 Jews were murdered there and only 54 survived. According to Nazism, through struggle and proper "breeding", the "strong" would subdue the "weak" and rise to dominance.[107] For example, Nazi policy since 1920 emphasized that only people of "German blood" could be considered German citizens thus excluding people of Jewish descent,[116] a view that ultimately resulted in the killing of millions of people in the Holocaust. A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in Buchenwald concentration camp To maintain the "purity and strength" of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled.[11] Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.[11] One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from central and eastern Europe (i.e., Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.) so as to make living space for German settlers.[117] Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary to save Germany from suffering under them and dismissed concerns about such conflict being inhumane or an injustice: We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality.[118] In Germany, the idea of creating a master-race resulted in efforts to "purify' the Deutsche Volk through eugenics; its culmination was compulsory sterilization or involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. The ideological justification was Adolf Hitler's view of Sparta (11th c.–195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:[119][120] The number of Germans of African descent was low; however, some of them were enlisted into Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht.[121] Religion Further information: Religious aspects of Nazism, Religion in Nazi Germany, Positive Christianity, German Christians, and Kreuz und Adler Members of the German Christians organization celebrating Luther-Day in Berlin in 1933, speech by bishop Hossenfelder Hitler with Cesare Orsenigo, the Catholic Church's nuncio to Germany, in 1935. The Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations not hostile to the State and endorsed Positive Christianity to combat “the Jewish-materialist spirit”.[122] It was a modified version of Christianity which emphasized racial purity and nationalism.[123] The Nazis were aided by theologians, such as, Dr. Ernst Bergmann (philosopher). Bergmann, in his work, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), held that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He claimed that Jesus was not a Jew and of Aryan origin, and that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.[123] At the same time the Nazis utilized Protestant Martin Luther in their propaganda. Nazis publicly displayed an original of Luther's On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies.[124][125] The Nazis endorsed the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christians organization. The Nazis were initially highly hostile to Catholics because most Catholics supported the German Centre Party. Catholics opposed the Nazis' promotion of sterilization of those deemed inferior, and the Catholic Church forbid its members to vote for the Nazis. In 1933, extensive Nazi violence occurred against Catholics due to the their association with the Centre Party and their opposition to the Nazi regime's sterilization laws.[126] The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state.[127] In propaganda, the Nazis used elements of Germany's Catholic history, in particular the German Catholic Teutonic Knights and their campaigns in Eastern Europe. The Nazis identified them as "sentinels" in the East against "Slavic chaos", though beyond that symbolism the influence of the Teutonic Knights on Nazism was limited.[128] Hitler also admitted that the model of the Nazis' night rallies was inspired by the Catholic rituals he witnessed during his Catholic upbringing.[129] The Nazis did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church and endorsed the creation of the pro-Nazi Catholic Kreuz und Adler organization that supported a national Catholicism.[127] On 20 July 1933, a successful concordat (Reichskonkordat) was signed between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church which demanded loyalty of German Catholics to the German state in exchange for acceptance of the Catholic Church in Germany. The Catholic Church then ended its ban on members supporting the Nazi Party.[127] Historian Michael Burleigh claims that Nazism used Christianity for political purposes, but such use required that "fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses".[129] Burleigh claims that Nazism's conception of spirituality was "self-conciously pagan and primitive".[129] However, historian Roger Griffin rejects the claim that Nazism was primarily pagan, noting that although there were some influential neo-paganists in the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, they represented a minority and their views did not influence Nazi ideology beyond its use for symbolism; its noted that Hitler denounced Germanic paganism in Mein Kampf and condemned Rosenburg's and Himmler's paganism as "nonsense".[130][131] Economics Further information: Economy of Nazi Germany Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit: German People, German Work, the alliance of worker and work. (1934) Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be "productive" rather than "parasitical".[132] Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use, if it did not advance Nazi economic goals then the state could nationalize it.[133] Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.[134] Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.[135][136] To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.[137]Farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed.[citation needed] That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards, to control production and prices with a quota system.[138] Anti-communism Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post-World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement. The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility to small businessmen, and its atheism.[139] Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property, and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.[16] During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to "Jewish Marxism."[140] Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish Marxism" were democracy, pacifism and internationalism.[141] In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term ‘Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not."[142] In 1942, Hitler privately said: "I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative".[143] During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Spain; the Vichy regime and the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) in France; and the Cliveden Set, Lord Halifax, and associates of Neville Chamberlain in Britain.[144] Anti-capitalism Nazi anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist theme in a cartoon telling Germans not to buy from Jewish shops. It portrays a stereotypical depiction of Jews as affluent capitalists. The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences.[139] Nazi propaganda posters in working-class districts emphasized anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism."[145] Hitler, both in public and in private, expressed strong disdain for capitalism, accusing modern capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.[146] He opposed free-market capitalism's profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy in which community interests would be upheld.[132] He distrusted capitalism for being unreliable, due to its egotistic nature, and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the Volk.[146] Hitler told a party leader in 1934, "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews."[146] Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that "Capitalism had run its course".[146] Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them."[147] Hitler admired Napoleon as a role model for his anti-conservative, anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois attitudes.[148] In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism, in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force; he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.[149] He believed that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade.[149] He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.[149] A number of other Nazis held strong revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, most prominently Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA).[150] Röhm claimed that the Nazis' rise to power constituted a national revolution, but insisted that a socialist "second revolution" was required for Nazi ideology to be fulfilled.[38] Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.[38] Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.[39] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA.[39] Another radical Nazi, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels adamantly stressed the socialist character of Nazism, and claimed in his diary that if he were to pick between Bolshevism and capitalism, he said "in final analysis", "it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism."[151] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

Microsoft

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Page semi-protected Coordinates: 47°38'22.55?N 122°7'42.42?W Microsoft Corporation Microsoft's new logo, introduced in 2012. Type Public Traded as NASDAQ: MSFT SEHK: 4338 Dow Jones Industrial Average component NASDAQ-100 component S&P 500 component Industry Computer software Online services Video games Founded Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States (April 4, 1975) Founder(s) Bill Gates, Paul Allen Headquarters Microsoft Redmond Campus, Redmond, Washington, U.S. Area served Worldwide Key people Bill Gates (Chairman) Steve Ballmer (CEO) Products See products list Services See products list Revenue Increase US$ 73.72 billion (2012)[1] Operating income Decrease US$ 21.76 billion (2012)[1] Net income Decrease US$ 16.97 billion (2012)[1] Total assets Increase US$ 121.2 billion (2012)[1] Total equity Increase US$ 66.36 billion (2012)[1] Employees 94,000 (2012)[1] Subsidiaries List of Microsoft subsidiaries Website Microsoft.com References: [2] Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington that develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of products and services related to computing. The company was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975. Microsoft is the world's largest software maker measured by revenues.[3] It is also one of the world's most valuable companies.[4] Microsoft was established to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created an estimated three billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.[5] As of 2012, Microsoft is market dominant in both the PC operating system and office suite markets (the latter with Microsoft Office). The company also produces a wide range of other software for desktops and servers, and is active in areas including internet search (with Bing), the video game industry (with the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles), the digital services market (through MSN), and mobile phones (via the Windows Phone OS). In June 2012, Microsoft announced that it would be entering the PC vendor market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface tablet computer. In the 1990s, critics began to contend that Microsoft used monopolistic business practices and anti-competitive strategies including refusal to deal and tying, put unreasonable restrictions in the use of its software, and used misrepresentative marketing tactics; both the U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission found the company in violation of antitrust laws. Contents 1 History 1.1 Early history 1.2 1984–1994: Windows and Office 1.3 1995–2005: Internet and the 32-bit era 1.4 2006–2012: Windows Vista, mobile, SaaS and Windows 7 1.5 2011-present: Mobile, Metro and Yammer 2 Product divisions 2.1 Windows Division, Server and Tools, Online Services Division 2.2 Business Division 2.3 Entertainment and Devices Division 3 Culture 4 Criticism 5 Corporate affairs 5.1 Financial 5.2 Environment 5.3 Marketing 5.4 Logo 6 See also 7 References 8 External links History Main articles: History of Microsoft and History of Microsoft Windows Early history Paul Allen and Bill Gates (respectively) on October 19, 1981, in a sea of PCs after signing a pivotal contract. IBM called Microsoft in July 1980 inquiring about programming languages for its upcoming PC line;[6]:228 after failed negotiations with another company, IBM gave Microsoft a contract to develop the OS for the new line of PCs.[7] Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion in computer programming, were seeking to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems's (MITS) Altair 8800 microcomputer. Allen noticed that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device; after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didn't actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter. Although they developed the interpreter on a simulator and not the actual device, the interpreter worked flawlessly when they demonstrated the interpreter to MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico in March 1975; MITS agreed to distribute it, marketing it as Altair BASIC.[6]:108, 112–114 They officially established Microsoft on April 4, 1975, with Gates as the CEO.[8] Allen came up with the original name of "Micro-Soft," as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, "ASCII Microsoft".[9] The company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979.[8] Microsoft Inc. logo history[10] Logo Years Microsoft Logo Historical.svg Microsoft "blibbet" logo, filed August 26, 1982 at the USPTO and used until 1987.[11] Microsoft - Where do you want to go today.svg Microsoft "Pac-Man" logo, designed by Scott Baker and used from 1987 to 2012 with the 1994–2002 slogan "Where do you want to go today?".[12][13] Microsoft logo & slogan.svg Microsoft logo as of 2006–2011, with the slogan "Your potential. Our passion."[13] The Microsoft logo & slogan.png Logo by Microsoft with the slogan"Be What's Next." 2011–2012.[14] Microsoft.svg Introduced on August 23, 2012 to symbolize the "world of digital motion" and Microsoft's "diverse portfolio of products." 2012-present .[15] Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, called Xenix.[16] However, it was MS-DOS that solidified the company's dominance. After negotiations with Digital Research failed, IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft in November 1980 to provide a version of the CP/M OS, which was set to be used in the upcoming IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC).[17] For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, which IBM rebranded to PC-DOS. Following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to reverse engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles, but no such restriction applied to the operating systems. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOS's available software selection, Microsoft eventually became the leading PC operating systems vendor.[7][18]:210 The company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as a publishing division named Microsoft Press.[6]:232 Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in February after developing Hodgkin's disease.[6]:231 1984–1994: Windows and Office While jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20.[6]:242–243, 246 Microsoft moved its headquarters to Redmond on February 26, 1986, and on March 13 the company went public;[19] the ensuing rise in the stock would make an estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.[20] Due to the partnership with IBM, in 1990 the Federal Trade Commission set its eye on Microsoft for possible collusion; it marked the beginning of over a decade of legal clashes with the U.S. Government.[21] Microsoft announced the release of its version of OS/2 to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) on April 2, 1987;[6]:243–244 meanwhile, the company was at work on a 32-bit OS, Microsoft Windows NT, using ideas from OS/2; it shipped on July 21, 1993 with a new modular kernel and the Win32 application programming interface (API), making porting from 16-bit (MS-DOS-based) Windows easier. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated.[22] Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office, in 1990. The software bundled separate office productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.[6]:301 On May 22 Microsoft launched Windows 3.0 with a streamlined user interface graphics and improved protected mode capability for the Intel 386 processor.[23] Both Office and Windows became dominant in their respective areas.[24][25] Novell, a Word competitor from 1984–1986, filed a lawsuit years later claiming that Microsoft left part of its APIs undocumented in order to gain a competitive advantage.[26] On July 27, 1994, the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division filed a Competitive Impact Statement that said, in part: "Beginning in 1988, and continuing until July 15, 1994, Microsoft induced many OEMs to execute anti-competitive "per processor" licenses. Under a per processor license, an OEM pays Microsoft a royalty for each computer it sells containing a particular microprocessor, whether the OEM sells the computer with a Microsoft operating system or a non-Microsoft operating system. In effect, the royalty payment to Microsoft when no Microsoft product is being used acts as a penalty, or tax, on the OEM's use of a competing PC operating system. Since 1988, Microsoft's use of per processor licenses has increased."[27] 1995–2005: Internet and the 32-bit era Bill Gates giving his deposition in 1998 for the United States v. Microsoft trial. Once the U.S. Department of Justice 1993 took over from the Federal Trade Commission, a protracted legal wrangling between Microsoft and the department ensued, resulting in various settlements and possible blocked mergers. Microsoft would point to companies such as AOL-Time Warner in its defense.[21] Following Bill Gates's internal "Internet Tidal Wave memo" on May 26, 1995 Microsoft began to redefine its offerings and expand its product line into computer networking and the World Wide Web.[28] The company released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, featuring pre-emptive multitasking, a completely new user interface with a novel start button, and 32-bit compatibility; similar to NT, it provided the Win32 API.[29][30]:20 Windows 95 came bundled with the online service MSN, and for OEMs Internet Explorer, a web browser. Internet Explorer was not bundled with the retail Windows 95 boxes because the boxes were printed before the team finished the web browser, and instead was included in the Windows 95 Plus! pack.[31] Branching out into new markets in 1996, Microsoft and NBC Universal created a new 24/7 cable news station, MSNBC.[32] Microsoft created Windows CE 1.0, a new OS designed for devices with low memory and other constraints, such as personal digital assistants.[33] In October 1997, the Justice Department filed a motion in the Federal District Court, stating that Microsoft violated an agreement signed in 1994 and asked the court to stop the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.[6]:323–324 Bill Gates handed over the CEO position on January 13, 2000 to Steve Ballmer, an old college friend of Gates and employee of the company since 1980, creating a new position for himself as Chief Software Architect.[6]:111, 228[8] Various companies including Microsoft formed the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance in October 1999 to, among other things, increase security and protect intellectual property through identifying changes in hardware and software. Critics decry the alliance as a way to enforce indiscriminate restrictions over how consumers use software, and over how computers behave, a form of digital rights management; for example the scenario where a computer is not only secured for its owner, but also secured against its owner as well.[34][35] On April 3, 2000, a judgment was handed down in the case of United States v. Microsoft,[36] calling the company an "abusive monopoly";[37] it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2004.[19] On October 25, 2001 Microsoft released Windows XP, unifying the mainstream and NT lines under the NT codebase.[38] The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo.[39] In March 2004 the European Union brought antitrust legal action against the company, citing it abused its dominance with the Windows OS, resulting in a judgment of €497 million ($613 million) and to produce new versions of Windows XP without Windows Media Player, Windows XP Home Edition N and Windows XP Professional N.[40][41] 2006–2012: Windows Vista, mobile, SaaS and Windows 7 CEO Steve Ballmer at the MIX event in 2008. In an interview about his management style in 2005, he mentioned that his first priority was to get the people he delegates to in order. Ballmer also emphasized the need to continue pursuing new technologies even if initial attempts fail, citing the original attempts with Windows as an example.[42] Released in January 2007, the next version of Windows, Windows Vista, focused on features, security, and a redesigned user interface dubbed Aero.[43][44] Microsoft Office 2007, released at the same time, featured a "Ribbon" user interface which was a significant departure from its predecessors. Relatively strong sales of both titles helped to produce a record profit in 2007.[45] The European Union imposed another fine of €899 million ($1.4 billion) for Microsoft's lack of compliance with the March 2004 judgment on February 27, 2008, saying that the company charged rivals unreasonable prices for key information about its workgroup and backoffice servers. Microsoft stated that it was in compliance and that "these fines are about the past issues that have been resolved".[46] Bill Gates retired from his role as Chief Software Architect on June 27, 2008 while retaining other positions related to the company in addition to being an advisor for the company on key projects.[47] Azure Services Platform, the company's entry into the cloud computing market for Windows, launched on October 27, 2008.[48] On February 12, 2009, Microsoft announced its intent to open a chain of Microsoft-branded retail stores, and on October 22, 2009 the first retail Microsoft Store opened in Scottsdale, Arizona; the same day the first store opened Windows 7 was officially released to the public. Windows 7's focus was on refining Vista with ease of use features and performance enhancements, rather than a large reworking of Windows.[49][50][51] As the smartphone industry boomed beginning in 2007, Microsoft struggled to keep up with its rivals Apple and Google in providing a modern smartphone operating system. As a result, in 2010, Microsoft revamped their aging flagship mobile operating system, Windows Mobile, replacing it with the new Windows Phone OS; along with a new strategy in the smartphone industry that has Microsoft working more closely with smartphone manufactures, such as Nokia, and to provide a consistent user experience across all smartphones using Microsoft's Windows Phone OS. It used a new user interface design language, codenamed "Metro", which prominently used simple shapes, typography and iconography, and the concept of minimalism. Microsoft is a founding member of the Open Networking Foundation started on March 23, 2011. Other founding companies include Google, HP Networking, Yahoo, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and 17 other companies. The nonprofit organization is focused on providing support for a new cloud computing initiative called Software-Defined Networking.[52] The initiative is meant to speed innovation through simple software changes in telecommunications networks, wireless networks, data centers and other networking areas.[53] 2011-present: Mobile, Metro and Yammer Following the release of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft gradually began a rebranding of its entire product range between 2011 and 2012. Logos, products, services and websites were updated to use the principles and concepts of the Metro design language.[54] In June 2011, Windows 8 was previewed for the first time in Taipei. A Developer Preview was released on September 13 of that year, which was replaced by a Consumer Preview on February 29, 2012.[55] On May 31, 2012, Microsoft released the Release Preview version of its next generation Windows 8 software. It was designed to power devices ranging from tablets to desktop computers.[56] On June 18, 2012, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Surface, the first computer in the company's history to have its hardware made by Microsoft themselves.[57] On June 25, 2012, Microsoft announced that it was paying $1.2 billion to buy the social network Yammer.[58] On July 31, 2012 Microsoft launched the Outlook.com webmail service to compete with Gmail.[59] On September 4, 2012, Windows Server 2012 was released.[60] On October 1, 2012, Microsoft announced it is launching a news operation when Windows 8 launches later in the month. It is part of a new-look MSN.[61] On October 26, Microsoft launched Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface.[62] Three days later, it launched Windows Phone 8.[63] To cope with the potential increase in demand for products and services, Microsoft opened a number of "holiday stores" across the US to compliment the ever-growing increase of bricks and mortar Microsoft Stores that have been sprouting up in 2012.[64] Product divisions Main article: Microsoft Product Divisions For the 2010 fiscal year, Microsoft had five product divisions: Windows Division, Server and Tools, Online Services Division, Microsoft Business Division, and Entertainment and Devices Division. Windows Division, Server and Tools, Online Services Division The company's Client division produces the flagship Windows OS line such as Windows 7; it also produces the Windows Live family of products and services. Server and Tools produces the server versions of Windows, such as Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as a set of development tools called Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Silverlight, a web application framework, and System Center Configuration Manager, a collection of tools providing remote-control abilities, patch management, software distribution and a hardware/software inventory. Other server products include: Microsoft SQL Server, a relational database management system, Microsoft Exchange Server, for certain business-oriented e-mail and scheduling features, Small Business Server, for messaging and other small business-oriented features; and Microsoft BizTalk Server, for business process management. Microsoft provides IT consulting ("Microsoft Consulting Services") and produces a set of certification programs handled by the Server and Tools division designed to recognize individuals who have a minimal set of proficiencies in a specific role; this includes developers ("Microsoft Certified Solution Developer"), system/network analysts ("Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer"), trainers ("Microsoft Certified Trainers") and administrators ("Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator" and "Microsoft Certified Database Administrator"). Microsoft Press, which publishes books, is also managed by the division. The Online Services Business division handles the online service MSN and the search engine Bing. As of December 2009, the company also possesses an 18% ownership of the cable news channel MSNBC without any editorial control; however, the division develops the channel's website, msnbc.com, in a joint venture with the channel's co-owner, NBC Universal.[65] Business Division The Commons, located on the campus of the company's headquarters in Redmond. The Microsoft Business Division produces Microsoft Office including Microsoft Office 2010, the company's line of office software. The software product includes Word (a word processor), Access (a relational database program), Excel (a spreadsheet program), Outlook (Groupware, frequently used with Exchange Server), PowerPoint (presentation software), Publisher (desktop publishing software) and Sharepoint. A number of other products were added later with the release of Office 2003 including Visio, Project, MapPoint, InfoPath and OneNote. The division also develops enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for companies under the Microsoft Dynamics brand. These include: Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics GP, and Microsoft Dynamics SL. They are targeted at varying company types and countries, and limited to organizations with under 7,500 employees.[66] Also included under the Dynamics brand is the customer relationship management software Microsoft Dynamics CRM, part of the Azure Services Platform. Entertainment and Devices Division The Entertainment and Devices Division produces the Windows CE OS for embedded systems and Windows Phone for smartphones.[67] Microsoft initially entered the mobile market through Windows CE for handheld devices, eventually developing into the Windows Mobile OS and now, Windows Phone. Windows CE is designed for devices where the OS may not directly be visible to the end user, in particular, appliances and cars. The division also produces computer games that run on Windows PCs and other systems including titles such as Age of Empires, Halo and the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, and houses the Macintosh Business Unit which produces Mac OS software including Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division designs, markets, and manufactures consumer electronics including the Xbox 360 game console, the handheld Zune media player, and the television-based Internet appliance MSN TV. Microsoft also markets personal computer hardware including mice, keyboards, and various game controllers such as joysticks and gamepads. Culture Technical reference for developers and articles for various Microsoft magazines such as Microsoft Systems Journal (or MSJ) are available through the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). MSDN also offers subscriptions for companies and individuals, and the more expensive subscriptions usually offer access to pre-release beta versions of Microsoft software.[68][69] In April 2004 Microsoft launched a community site for developers and users, titled Channel9, that provides a wiki and an Internet forum.[70] Another community site that provides daily videocasts and other services, On10.net, launched on March 3, 2006.[71] Free technical support is traditionally provided through online Usenet newsgroups, and CompuServe in the past, monitored by Microsoft employees; there can be several newsgroups for a single product. Helpful people can be elected by peers or Microsoft employees for Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status, which entitles them to a sort of special social status and possibilities for awards and other benefits.[72] Noted for its internal lexicon, the expression "eating our own dog food" is used to describe the policy of using prerelease and beta versions of products inside Microsoft in an effort to test them in "real-world" situations.[73] This is usually shortened to just "dog food" and is used as noun, verb, and adjective. Another bit of jargon, FYIFV or FYIV ("Fuck You, I'm [Fully] Vested"), is used by an employee to indicate they are financially independent and can avoid work anytime they wish.[74] The company is also known for its hiring process, mimicked in other organizations and dubbed the "Microsoft interview", which is notorious for off-the-wall questions such as "Why is a manhole cover round?".[75] Microsoft is an outspoken opponent of the cap on H1B visas, which allow companies in the U.S. to employ certain foreign workers. Bill Gates claims the cap on H1B visas makes it difficult to hire employees for the company, stating "I'd certainly get rid of the H1B cap" in 2005.[76] Critics of H1B visas argue that relaxing the limits would result in increased unemployment for U.S. citizens due to H1B workers working for lower salaries.[77] The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, a report of how progressive the organization deems company policies towards LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) employees, rated Microsoft as 87% from 2002 to 2004 and as 100% from 2005 to 2010 after they allowed gender expression.[78] Criticism Main article: Criticism of Microsoft Criticism of Microsoft has followed the company's existence because of various aspects of its products and business practices. Ease of use, stability, and security of the company's software are common targets for critics. More recently, Trojan horses and other exploits have plagued numerous users due to faults in the security of Microsoft Windows and other programs. Microsoft is also accused of locking vendors into their products, and of not following and complying with existing standards in its software.[79] Total cost of ownership comparisons of Linux as well as Mac OS X to Windows are a continuous point of debate. The company has been in numerous lawsuits by several governments and other companies for unlawful monopolistic practices. In 2004, the European Union found Microsoft guilty in a highly publicized anti-trust case. Additionally, Microsoft's EULA for some of its programs is often criticized as being too restrictive as well as being against open source software. Microsoft has been criticized (along with Yahoo, AOL, and other companies) for its involvement in censorship in the People's Republic of China.[80] Microsoft has also come under criticism for outsourcing jobs to China and India.[81][82][83] There were reports of poor working conditions at a factory in southern China that makes some of Microsoft's products.[84] Criticism of the company has resulted in it being deemed "the evil empire" by some.[85] In a sci-fi allusion, Microsoft has also been called "The Borg" after the fictional race of aliens in the Star Trek universe. It reflects the perception that Microsoft often acquires technology from other companies rather than developing it in-house,[86] as well as to Microsoft's ability to adapt to and overwhelm its opponents' strategies.[87][88][89][90][91][92] Corporate affairs The company is run by a board of directors made up of mostly company outsiders, as is customary for publicly traded companies. Members of the board of directors as of June 2010 are: Steve Ballmer, Dina Dublon, Bill Gates (chairman), Raymond Gilmartin, Reed Hastings, Maria Klawe, David Marquardt, Charles Noski, and Helmut Panke.[93] Board members are elected every year at the annual shareholders' meeting using a majority vote system. There are five committees within the board which oversee more specific matters. These committees include the Audit Committee, which handles accounting issues with the company including auditing and reporting; the Compensation Committee, which approves compensation for the CEO and other employees of the company; the Finance Committee, which handles financial matters such as proposing mergers and acquisitions; the Governance and Nominating Committee, which handles various corporate matters including nomination of the board; and the Antitrust Compliance Committee, which attempts to prevent company practices from violating antitrust laws.[94] Five year history graph of (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock on September 29, 2009.[95] When Microsoft went public and launched its initial public offering (IPO) in 1986, the opening stock price was $21; after the trading day, the price closed at $27.75. As of July 2010, with the company's nine stock splits, any IPO shares would be multiplied by 288; if one was to buy the IPO today given the splits and other factors, it would cost about 9 cents.[6]:235–236[96][97] The stock price peaked in 1999 at around $119 ($60.928 adjusting for splits).[98] The company began to offer a dividend on January 16, 2003, starting at eight cents per share for the fiscal year followed by a dividend of sixteen cents per share the subsequent year, switching from yearly to quarterly dividends in 2005 with eight cents a share per quarter and a special one-time payout of three dollars per share for the second quarter of the fiscal year.[98][99] Though the company had subsequent increases in dividend payouts, the price of Microsoft's stock remained steady for years.[99][100] One of Microsoft's business tactics, described by an executive as "embrace, extend and extinguish," initially embraces a competing standard or product, then extends it to produce their own version which is then incompatible with the standard, which in time extinguishes competition that does not or cannot use Microsoft's new version.[101] Various companies and governments sue Microsoft over this set of tactics, resulting in billions of dollars in rulings against the company.[102][36][41] Microsoft claims that the original strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want.[103] Financial Standard and Poor's and Moody's have both given a AAA rating to Microsoft, whose assets were valued at $41 billion as compared to only $8.5 billion in unsecured debt. Consequently, in February 2011 Microsoft released a corporate bond amounting to $2.25 billion with relatively low borrowing rates compared to government bonds.[104] For the first time in 20 years Apple Inc. surpassed Microsoft in Q1 2011 quarterly profits and revenues due to a slowdown in PC sales and continuing huge losses in Microsoft's Online Services Division (which contains its search engine Bing). Microsoft profits were $5.2 billion, while Apple Inc. profits were $6 billion, on revenues of $14.5 billion and $24.7 billion respectively.[105] Microsoft's Online Services Division has been continuously loss-making since 2006 and in Q1 2011 it lost $726 million. This follows a loss of $2.5 billion for the year 2010.[106] On July 20, 2012, Microsoft posted its first quarterly loss ever, despite earning record revenues for the quarter and fiscal year. Microsoft reported a net loss of $492 million; the 2007 acquisition of advertising company aQuantive for $6.2 billion and problems associated with it have been cited as the cause.[107] Environment Microsoft is ranked on the 17th place in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics (16th Edition) that ranks 18 electronics manufacturers according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate change.[108] Microsoft’s timeline for phasing out BFRs and phthalates in all products is 2012 but its commitment to phasing out PVC is not clear. As yet (January 2011) it has no products that are completely free from PVC and BFRs.[109] Microsoft's main U.S. campus received a silver certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program in 2008, and it installed over 2,000 solar panels on top of its buildings in its Silicon Valley campus, generating approximately 15 percent of the total energy needed by the facilities in April 2005.[110] Microsoft makes use of alternative forms of transit. It created one of the worlds largest private bus systems, the "Connector", to transport people from outside the company; for on-campus transportation, the "Shuttle Connect" uses a large fleet of hybrid cars to save fuel. The company also subsidises regional public transport as an incentive.[110][111] In February 2010 however, Microsoft took a stance against adding additional public transport and high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to a bridge connecting Redmond to Seattle; the company did not want to delay the construction any further.[112] Microsoft was ranked number 1 in the list of the World's Best Multinational Workplaces by the Great Place to Work Institute in 2011.[113] Marketing The Microsoft "Pac-Man" logo In 2004, Microsoft commissioned research firms to do independent studies comparing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Windows Server 2003 to Linux; the firms concluded that companies found Windows easier to administrate than Linux, thus those using Windows would administrate faster resulting in lower costs for their company (i.e. lower TCO).[114] This spurred a wave of related studies; a study by the Yankee Group concluded that upgrading from one version of Windows Server to another costs a fraction of the switching costs from Windows Server to Linux, although companies surveyed noted the increased security and reliability of Linux servers and concern about being locked into using Microsoft products.[115] Another study, released by the Open Source Development Labs, claimed that the Microsoft studies were "simply outdated and one-sided" and their survey concluded that the TCO of Linux was lower due to Linux administrators managing more servers on average and other reasons.[116] The current Microsoft symbol As part of the "Get the Facts" campaign Microsoft highlighted the .NET trading platform that it had developed in partnership with Accenture for the London Stock Exchange, claiming that it provided "five nines" reliability. After suffering extended downtime and unreliability[117][118] the LSE announced in 2009 that it was planning to drop its Microsoft solution and switch to a Linux based one in 2010.[119][120] Logo Microsoft adopted the so-called "Pac-Man Logo", designed by Scott Baker, in 1987. Baker stated "The new logo, in Helvetica italic typeface, has a slash between the o and s to emphasize the "soft" part of the name and convey motion and speed."[121] Dave Norris ran an internal joke campaign to save the old logo, which was green, in all uppercase, and featured a fanciful letter O, nicknamed the blibbet, but it was discarded.[122] Microsoft's logo with the "Your potential. Our passion." tagline below the main corporate name, is based on a slogan Microsoft used in 2008. In 2002, the company started using the logo in the United States and eventually started a TV campaign with the slogan, changed from the previous tagline of "Where do you want to go today?".[12][13][123] During the private MGX (Microsoft Global Exchange) conference in 2010, Microsoft unveiled the company's next tagline, "Be What's Next.".[14] On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo at the opening of its 23rd Microsoft store in Boston indicating the company's shift of focus from the classic style to the tile-centric modern interface which it uses/will use on the Windows Phone platform, Xbox 360 and the upcoming Windows 8 and Office Suites.[124] The new logo also includes four squares with the colors of the then-current Windows logo.[125] This logo is, however, not completely new - it was featured in Windows 95 commercials from the mid-90s.[126][127] Each color represents a major product of the company: blue for Windows (hence the Windows 8 logo), green for Xbox, red for Office, and yellow for Bing.[128] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft

History of Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search "Wikipedia in the news" redirects here. For an overview of Wikipedia mentioned in other media, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia in the media "Growth of Wikipedia" redirects here. For mathematical models of Wikipedia's expansion, see Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth. The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 4,097,967 articles, equivalent to over 1,700 print volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Including all language editions, Wikipedia has over 23 million articles.[1] The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993,[2] but the concept of an open source web-based online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman around 1999.[3] Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1994 by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was created to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of additional reference projects. As of November 2012, Wikipedia includes over 23.3 million freely usable articles in 285 languages,[1] written by over 36 million registered users and numerous anonymous contributors worldwide.[4][5][6] According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website, visited monthly by around 12.5% of all internet users.[7] Contents 1 History overview 1.1 Background 1.2 Formulation of the concept 1.3 Founding of Wikipedia 1.4 Namespaces, subdomains, and internationalization 1.5 Development 1.6 Organization 1.7 Logo 2 Historical overview by year 2.1 2000 2.2 2001 2.3 2002 2.4 2003 2.5 2004 2.6 2005 2.7 2006 2.8 2007 2.9 2008 2.10 2009 2.11 2010 2.12 2011 2.13 2012 3 History by subject area 3.1 Hardware and software 3.2 Look and feel 3.3 Internal structures 3.4 The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures 3.5 Projects and milestones 3.6 Fundraising 3.7 External impact 3.7.1 Effect of biographical articles 3.8 Early roles of Wales and Sanger 3.9 Controversies 3.10 Notable forks and derivatives 3.11 Publication on other media 3.12 Lawsuits 4 See also 5 References 6 External links 6.1 Wikipedia records and archives 6.2 Third party History overview Background The idea of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place dates from the ancient Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis Diderot and the 18th-century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's book Traité de documentation (1934; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum institution in 1910), H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945).[8] Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, begun in 1960.[8] While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia Britannica, were book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates;[2] but this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.[3] His published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On 17 January 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation's GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia,[9] but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".[10] Formulation of the concept Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis.[11][12][13] Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate multi-step peer review process. Despite its mailing-list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger, a graduate philosophy student hired by Wales,[14] the writing of content for Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles written during the first year.[13] Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly.[12] The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz.[15][16][17] Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on 2 January 2001.[15][16][17][18] Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software",[19] though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept.[20][21][22][23] Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote: No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine. Wales set one up and put it online on 10 January 2001.[24] Founding of Wikipedia There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on 15 January 2001. The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these initial projects were donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later contributed content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey. In December 2008, Wales stated that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!".[25] The oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.[26][27] The existence of the project was formally announced and an appeal for volunteers to engage in content creation was made to the Nupedia mailing list on 17 January.[28] The UuU edit, the first edit that is still preserved on Wikipedia to this day, as it appears using the Nostalgia skin. The project received many new participants after being mentioned on the Slashdot website in July 2001,[29] with two minor mentions in March 2001.[30][31] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July.[32] Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in the New York Times on 20 September 2001.[33] The project passed 1,000 articles around 12 February 2001, and 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created—a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000. Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki software deleted old data after about a month. On the eve of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, 14 December 2010, developer Tim Starling found backups on SourceForge containing every change made to Wikipedia from its creation in January 2001 to 17 August 2001.[34] Namespaces, subdomains, and internationalization Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC),[35] followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC).[36] The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period,[37][38] and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language,[39][40] although statistics of that early period are imprecise.[41] The French Wikipedia was created on or around 11 May 2001,[42] in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.[43] These languages were soon joined by Arabic[44] and Hungarian.[45][46] In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia,[47] notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.[48] In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, fewer than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase. As of 2012, around 83% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions. Development A Screenshot from the main page, 28 September 2002. In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia.[49] By 2002 Sanger and Wales differed in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but the two disagreed on how best to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success. Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management,[citation needed] went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day-to-day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects. Sanger says he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything.[50] He proposed that experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. He returned briefly to academia, then after joining the Digital Universe Foundation, went on in 2006 to found Citizendium, an open encyclopedia which used real names for contributors intended to reduce disruptive editing, and hoped to facilitate "gentle expert guidance" to increase the accuracy of its content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was to include a statement[51] about "family-friendly content." He stated early on that he intended to leave in a few years, by which time the project and its management should be established.[52] Organization The Wikipedia project has grown rapidly in the course of its life, at several levels. Content has grown organically through the addition of new articles, new wikis have been added in English and non-English languages, and entire new projects replicating these growth methods in other related areas (news, quotations, reference books and so on) have been founded as well. Wikipedia itself has grown, with the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation to act as an umbrella body and the growth of software and policies to address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below: Logo Foundation–late 2001 Foundation–late 2001 6 December 2001 – 12 October 2003 6 December 2001 – 12 October 2003 13 October 2003 – 13 May 2010 13 October 2003 – 13 May 2010 13 May 2010–present 13 May 2010–present Historical overview by year Articles summarizing each year are held within the Wikipedia project namespace and are linked to below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article. 2000 The Bomis staff, summer 2000 The Bomis staff in the summer of 2000. In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to have articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising company Bomis.[53] 2001 In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process.[54] The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were registered on 12 January 2001[55] and 13 January 2001,[56] respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day.[57] The project formally opened on 15 January ("Wikipedia Day"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave arrived on 26 July.[29] The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[58] The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.[59] 2002 2002 saw the end of funding from Bomis and the departure of Larry Sanger. The forking of the Spanish Wikipedia also took place with the establishment of the Enciclopedia Libre. The first portable Mediawiki software went live on 25 January.[dubious – discuss] Bots were introduced, Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style were launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project was proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia. 2003 The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established, and Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo. Mathematical formulae using TeX were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich, Germany, in October. The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee (known colloquially as "ArbCom") were developed, mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other early Wikipedians. 2004 The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continued to grow rapidly in 2004, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of 2004. The English Wikipedia accounted for just under than half of these articles. The website's server farms were moved from California to Florida, Categories and CSS style configuration sheets were introduced, and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two weeks in June. The formal election of a board and Arbitration Committee began. The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias arising from Wikipedia's community structure. Bourgeois v. Peters,[60] (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia.[citation needed] It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was "elevated" at the time of the protest, "to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times."[60] 2005 In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to Hitwise, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005. The first major Wikipedia scandal occurred in 2005, when a well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months. In the wake of this and other concerns,[61] the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry investigations, a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005.[62] 2006 The English Wikipedia gained its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station, on 1 March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to download, and "Wikipedia" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals – multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.[63] Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles. A new privilege, "oversight", was created, allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable. Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proved more popular than expected, with over 1,000 pages being semi-protected at any given time in 2006. 2007 Wikipedia continued to grow rapidly in 2007, possessing over 5 million registered editor accounts by 13 August.[64] The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words in approximately 250 languages, by 13 August.[65] The English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day,[66] with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked the 10th-busiest in the world (see Wikipedia:Statistics). Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in the press – the Essjay controversy broke when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium, a competing online encyclopedia, launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creating a distinct biographical article.[67] On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia gained its two-millionth article, El Hormiguero.[68] 2008 Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth overall Wikipedia article was created, and by the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles. 2009 By late August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions had exceeded 14 million.[4] The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia, Beate Eriksen, was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC.[69] On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME magazine article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best websites.[70] The Arbitration Committee of the English Wikipedia decided in May 2009 to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists.[71][72][73] A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were also topic-banned.[72][73] The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties".[72] Wikipedia content became licensed under Creative Commons in 2009. 2010 On 24 March, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. Failover to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.[74][75] On 13 May, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard.[76] However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On 12 December, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1-billionth Wikimedia project edit was performed on 16 April.[77] 2011 One of many cakes made to celebrate Wikipedia's 10th anniversary in 2011. Wikipedia and its users held hundreds of celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January.[78] The site began efforts to expand its growth in India, holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November 2011.[79][80] The English Wikipedia passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia exceeded 100 million page edits, becoming the second language edition to do so after the English edition, which attained 500 million page edits on 24 November 2011. The Dutch Wikipedia exceeded 1 million articles on 17 December 2011, becoming the fourth Wikipedia edition to do so. Between 4 and 6 October 2011, the Italian Wikipedia became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the Italian Parliament's proposed DDL intercettazioni law, which, if approved, would allow any person to force websites to remove information that is perceived as untrue or offensive, without the need to provide evidence.[81] Also in October 2011, Wikimedia announced the launch of Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to enable free mobile access to Wikipedia in developing countries through partnerships with mobile operators.[82][83] 2012 As of November 2012, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet,[7] with a combined total of over 23.3 million mainspace articles across all 284 active language editions.[1] It is estimated that Wikipedia receives more than 10 billion global pageviews every month,[84] of which 2.7 billion are from the United States.[85] On average, the Main Page of the English Wikipedia alone receives 7 million global pageviews every day.[86] On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia gained its 4-millionth article, Izbat al-Burj.[87] In October 2012, historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen opined that the English Wikipedia was "nearing completion", noting that the number of regularly active editors had fallen significantly since 2007 despite Wikipedia's rapid growth in readership.[88] On 16 January, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that the English Wikipedia would shut down for 24 hours on 18 January as part of a protest meant to call public attention to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, two anti-piracy laws under debate in the United States Congress. Calling the blackout a "community decision", Wales and other opponents of the laws believed that they would endanger free speech and online innovation.[89] A similar blackout was staged on 10 July by the Russian Wikipedia, in protest against a proposed Russian internet regulation law.[90] In late March 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation announced Wikidata, a planned universal platform for sharing data between all Wikipedia language editions.[91] The US$1.7-million Wikidata project was partly funded by Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[92] Wikimedia Deutschland has assumed responsibility for the first phase of Wikidata, and editors are expected to be able to utilize the platform by December 2012. Wikidata is scheduled to enter full operation by March 2013.[93] History by subject area Hardware and software Main article: MediaWiki The software that runs Wikipedia, and the computer hardware, server farms and other systems upon which Wikipedia relies. In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl by Clifford Adams. The server has run on Linux to this day, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the CamelCase convention. In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Wikipedia was introduced, replacing the older UseModWiki. Written specifically for the project by Magnus Manske, it included a PHP wiki engine. In July 2002, a major rewrite of the software powering Wikipedia went live; dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and became MediaWiki. It was written by Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the increasing demands of the growing project. In October 2002, Derek Ramsey started to use a "bot", or program, to add a large number of articles about United States towns; these articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data. Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics. These articles were generally well received, but some users criticized them for their initial uniformity and writing style (for example, see this version of an original bot-generated town article, and compare to current version). In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski. 9 June 2003 – ISBNs in articles now link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page Wikipedia:Book sources. Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the Wikipedia:ISBN page. See the edit that changed this. After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Wikipedia users were no longer hard coded, allowing Wikipedia administrators to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users. On 12 February 2004, server operations were moved from San Diego, California to Tampa, Florida.[94] On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of the MediaWiki software. On 30 May 2004, the first instances of "categorization" entries appeared. Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed from the founding of Wikipedia. However, Larry Sanger had viewed the schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles, whereas the categorization effort centered on individual categorization entries in each article of the encyclopedia, as part of a larger automatic categorization of the articles of the encyclopedia.[95] After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css. Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was created, allowing transclusion of standard texts.[96] On 7 June 2005 at 3:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, the bulk of the Wikimedia servers were moved to a new facility across the street. All Wikimedia projects were down during this time. Look and feel The external face of Wikipedia, its look and feel, and the Wikipedia branding, as presented to users. On 4 April 2002, BrilliantProse, since renamed to Featured Articles,[97] was moved to the Wikipedia Namespace from the article namespace. Around 15 October 2003, a new Wikipedia logo was installed. The logo concept was selected by a voting process,[98] which was followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The final selection was created by David Friedland (who edits Wikipedia under the username "nohat") based on a logo design and concept created by Paul Stansifer. On 22 February 2004, Did You Know (DYK) made its first Main Page appearance. On 23 February 2004, a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared at 19:46 UTC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look. On 10 January 2005, the multilingual portal at www.wikipedia.org was set up, replacing a redirect to the English-language Wikipedia. On 5 February 2005, the Portal:Biology was created, first "portal" on the English Wikipedia.[99] However, the concept was pioneered on the German Wikipedia where Portal:Recht (law studies) was set up in October 2003.[100] On 16 July 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page. On 19 March 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English-language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years. On 13 May 2010, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard.[76] The "classic" Wikipedia interface remained available as an option. Internal structures Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies. April 2001, Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view",[101] Wikipedia's core non-negotiable editorial policy,[102] a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Sanger for Nupedia[103] in spring or summer 2000, which covered many of the same core principles.[104] In September 2001, collaboration by subject matter in WikiProjects is introduced.[105] In February 2002, concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bomis Inc (Wikipedia's original host) combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, led most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia to break away and establish it independently as the Enciclopedia Libre.[106] Following clarification of Wikipedia's status and non-commercial nature later that year, re-merger talks between Enciclopedia Libre and the re-founded Spanish Wikipedia occasionally took place in 2002 and 2003, but no conclusion was reached. As of October 2009, the two continue to coexist as substantial Spanish language reference sources, with around 43,000 articles (EL) and 520,000 articles (Sp.W)[107] respectively. Also in 2002, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the Manual of Style, along with a number of other policies and guidelines.[108] November 2002 – new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce are set up, as well as other language mailing lists (e.g. Polish), to reduce the volume of traffic on mailing lists.[109] In July 2003, the rule against editing one's autobiography is introduced.[110] On 28 October 2003, the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in Munich. Many cities followed suit, and soon a number of regular Wikipedian get-togethers were established around the world. Several Internet communities, including one on the popular blog website LiveJournal, have also sprung up since. From 10 July to 30 August 2004 the Wikipedia:Browse and Wikipedia:Browse by overview formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On 27 August 2004 the Community Portal was started,[111] to serve as a focus for community efforts. These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad-hoc collaborations between like-minded editors. During September to December 2005 following the Seigenthaler controversy and other similar concerns,[61] several anti-abuse features and policies were added to Wikipedia. These were: The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWiki extension to assist detection of abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005.[112] Checkuser function had previously existed, but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, so there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis.[113] Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who had created a user account.[114] The introduction and rapid adoption of the policy Wikipedia:Biographies of living people, giving a far tighter quality control and fact-check system to biographical articles related to living people. The "semi-protection" function and policy,[115] allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit. In May 2006, a new "oversight" feature was introduced on the English Wikipedia, allowing a handful of highly trusted users to permanently erase page revisions containing copyright infringements or libelous or personal information from a page's history. Previous to this, page version deletion was laborious, and also deleted versions remained visible to other administrators and could be un-deleted by them. On 1 January 2007, the subcommunity named Esperanza was disbanded by communal consent. Esperanza had begun as an effort to promote "wikilove" and a social support network, but had developed its own subculture and private structures.[116][117] Its disbanding was described as the painful but necessary remedy for a project that had allowed editors to "see themselves as Esperanzans first and foremost".[117] A number of Esperanza's subprojects were integrated back into Wikipedia as free-standing projects, but most of them are now inactive. When the group was founded in September 2005, there had been concerns expressed that it would eventually be condemned as such.[118] In April 2007 the results of 4 months policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia policies into one core policy (See: Wikipedia:Attribution) was polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focused policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal. A one-day closure of Wikipedia was called by Jimmy Wales on 18 January 2012. The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia Foundation, its executive, and its activities as a foundation. In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org (see: .com and .org). On 20 June 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded. Communications committee was formed in January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Wikipedia via the newly implemented OTRS (a ticket handling system). Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. During this time, Angela was active in editing content and setting policy, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation.[119] On 10 January 2006, Wikipedia became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation.[120] In July 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.[121] In June 2006, Brad Patrick was hired to be the first executive director of the Foundation. He resigned in January 2007, and was later replaced by Sue Gardner (June 2007). In October 2006, Florence Nibart-Devouard became chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation. Projects and milestones Main page: Wikipedia:Statistics Sister projects and milestones related to articles, user base, and other statistics. On 15 January 2001, the first recorded edit of Wikipedia was performed. In December 2002, the first sister project, Wiktionary, was created; aiming to produce a dictionary and thesaurus of the words in all languages. It uses the same software as Wikipedia. On 22 January 2003, the English Wikipedia was again slashdotted after having reached the 100,000 article milestone with the Hastings, New Zealand article. Two days later, the German-language Wikipedia, the largest non-English language version, passed the 10,000 article mark. On 20 June 2003, the same day that the Wikimedia Foundation was founded, "Wikiquote" was created. A month later, "Wikibooks" was launched. "Wikisource" was set up towards the end of the year. In January 2004, Wikipedia reached the 200,000-article milestone in English with the article on Neil Warnock, and reached 450,000 articles for both English and non-English Wikipedias. The next month, the combined article count of the English and non-English reached 500,000. On 20 April 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached 250,000. On 7 July 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached 300,000. On 20 September 2004, Wikipedia reached one million articles in over 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press.[122] The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew Wikipedia, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan. On 20 November 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached 400,000. On 18 March 2005, Wikipedia passed the 500,000 article milestone in English, with Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union being announced in a press release as the landmark article.[123] In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company Hitwise, relegating Dictionary.com to second place. On 29 September 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 750,000 article mark. On 1 March 2006, the English Wikipedia passed the 1,000,000 article mark, with Jordanhill railway station being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.[124] On 8 June 2006, the English Wikipedia passed the 1,000-featured-article mark, with Iranian peoples.[125] On 15 August 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation launched Wikiversity.[126] On 24 November 2006, the English Wikipedia passed the 1,500,000-article mark, with Kanab ambersnail being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.[124] On 4 April 2007, the first Wikipedia CD selection in English was published as a free download.[127] On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia passed the 2,000,000-article mark. El Hormiguero was accepted by consensus as the 2,000,000th article. On 17 August 2009, the English Wikipedia passed the 3,000,000-article mark, with Beate Eriksen being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article. On 12 December 2010, the English Wikipedia passed the 3,500,000-article mark. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia exceeded 100 million page edits. On 24 November 2011, the English Wikipedia exceeded 500 million page edits. On 17 December 2011, the Dutch Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the fourth Wikipedia language edition to do so. On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia exceeded 4,000,000 articles, with Izbat Al Burj.[87] Fundraising Every year, Wikipedia runs a fundraising campaign to support its operations. One of the first fundraisers was held from 18 February 2005 to 1 March 2005, raising US$94,000, which was US$21,000 more than expected.[128] On 6 January 2006, the Q4 2005 fundraiser concluded, raising a total of just over US$390,000.[129] The 2007 fundraising campaign raised US$1.5 million from 44,188 donations.[130] The 2008 fundraising campaign gained Wikipedia more than US$6 million.[131][132] The 2010 campaign was launched on 13 November 2010.[133] The campaign raised US$16 million.[134] The 2011 campaign raised US$20 million from more than one million donors.[135] External impact In 2007, Wikipedia is deemed fit to be used as a major source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in the Formula One trademark case ruling.[136] Over time Wikipedia gains recognition amongst other traditional media as a "key source" for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and related tsunami, the biographies of 2008 Presidential election candidates,[137] and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The latter article was accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published local to the shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event."[138] On 21 February 2007, Noam Cohen of the New York Times publishes A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source. On 27 February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[139] Effect of biographical articles Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography. November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy. Someone, who later admitted that he wanted to make a joke, wrote into the article that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy murder of 1963. December 2006: German comedian "Atze Schröder", who does not want his real name published, sued Arne Klempert, secretary of Wikimedia Deutschland, because of the Wikipedia article. Then the artist withdrew his complaint, but wanted his attorney's costs to be paid by Klempert. A court decided that the artist had to cover those costs by himself.[140] 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport because of false information on his biography that he was a terrorist.[141][142] September 2008: Changes or "manipulations" at the Sarah Palin article in English Wikipedia have been noticed by the media. November 2008: Germany's Left Party politician Lutz Heilmann believed that some remarks in "his" article caused damage to his reputation. He succeeded in getting a court order to make Wikimedia Deutschland stop linking from its page www.wikipedia.de to German Wikipedia de.wikipedia.org. The result was a huge national support for Wikipedia, more donations to Wikimedia Deutschland, a rise from several dozen page views of "Lutz Heilmann" daily to half a million the two days after, and after a couple of days Heilmann asked the court to withdraw the court order. December 2008: Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch chapter, won a preliminary injunction. An entrepreneur was linked in "his" article with the criminal Willem Holleeder and wanted the article deleted. The judge in Utrecht did not follow him but believed the chapter that it has no influence on the content of Dutch Wikipedia.[143] February 2009: When Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jakob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg became federal minister on 10 February 2009, an unregistered user added an eleventh given name in the article on German Wikipedia: Wilhelm. Numerous newspapers took it over. When wary Wikipedians wanted to erase Wilhelm, the revert was reverted with regard to those newspapers. This case about Wikipedia reliability and journalists copying from Wikipedia became known as Falscher Wilhelm ("wrong Wilhelm").[144] May 2009: Richard Herzinger, a German journalist writing for Die Welt, has an article in German Wikipedia which was vandalized. The IP user added that Herzinger was Jewish; the sighter marked this as "sighted" (meaning that there is no vandalism in the article). Herzinger complained about that to Wikipedians who immediately deleted the assertion. According to Herzinger, who wrote about the incident in a newspaper article,[145] he is regularly called a Jew by right-wing extremists due to his perceived pro-Israel stance. October 2009: In 1990, the German actor Walter Sedlmayr was murdered. Years later, when the two murderers were released from prison, they wanted to begin a new life and not be connected in public to the murder. According to German law they prohibited the media from mentioning their names. The men's lawyer also sent the Wikimedia Foundation a cease and desist letter requesting the men's names be removed from the English language Wikipedia.[146][147] The case is an example of differing law in Germany (which strongly considers privacy) and the US (which favors freedom of speech). Early roles of Wales and Sanger Both Wales and Sanger played important roles in the early stages of Wikipedia. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it.[16] To Wales is ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Wikipedia; Sanger wrote, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine" (emphasis in original text). He also wrote, "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia."[13] Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software."[19] Sanger coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name.[13] In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems.[148] In terms of project roles, Sanger spearheaded and pursued the project as its leader in its first year, and did most of the early work in formulating policies (including "Ignore all rules"[149] and "Neutral point of view"[49]) and building up the community.[148] Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of Bomis' funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and his changing personal priorities;[14] however, by 2004, the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger criticized Wikipedia, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair."[150] In 2002 Sanger parted ways with Wikipedia; by 2005 Wales began to dispute Sanger's role in the project, three years after Sanger left.[151][152][153] In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia;[151] however, according to Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder."[148] There is evidence that Sanger was called co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Wikipedia press releases and Wikipedia articles and in a September 2001 New York Times article for which both were interviewed.[154] In 2006, Wales said, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title";[155] nonetheless, before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder[156] and, indeed, identified himself as "co-founder" as late as August 2002.[157] As of March 2007: Wales emphasized this employer–employee relationship and his ultimate authority, terming himself Wikipedia's sole founder; and Sanger emphasized their statuses as co-founders, referencing earlier versions of Wikipedia pages (2004, 2006), press releases (2002–2004), and media coverage from the time of his involvement routinely terming them in this manner.[148][154][158][159] Controversies Main articles: List of litigation involving Wikipedia and Reliability of Wikipedia Wikinews has related news: U.K. National Portrait Gallery threatens U.S. citizen with legal action over Wikimedia images January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, attempted to promote itself on its Wikipedia page. October 2005: Alan Mcilwraith was exposed as a fake war hero with a Wikipedia page. November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy caused Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity was ascertained by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch. Following this, the scientific journal Nature undertook a peer reviewed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in Encyclopædia Britannica, and concluded they are comparable in terms of accuracy.[160][161] Britannica rejected their methodology and their conclusion.[162] Nature refused to make any apologies, asserting instead the reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms.[163] Early-to-mid 2006: The congressional aides biography scandals came to public attention, in which several political aides were caught trying to influence the Wikipedia biographies of several politicians to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replace the article in part or whole by staff authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden, Gil Gutknecht.[164] In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents.[165] Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006. July 2006: Joshua Gardner was exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Wikipedia page. January 2007: English-language Wikipedians in Qatar were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP address. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar from the site.[166] On 23 January 2007, a Microsoft employee offered to pay Rick Jelliffe to review and change certain Wikipedia articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format.[167] In February 2007, The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials.[168][169] The editor, Ryan Jordan, became a Wikia employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, and communicated to the original article author. (See: Essjay controversy) February 2007: Fuzzy Zoeller sued a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Wikipedia biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network. 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist. In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site Wikinews. In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently deceased TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the S Club 7 song "Reach". In fact, he hadn't, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article.[170] In February 2007, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency.[171] In Bauer v. Glatzer, Bauer claimed that information on Wikipedia critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Wikipedia[172] and moved to dismiss the case on 1 May 2008.[173] The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on 1 July 2008.[174] On 14 July 2009, the National Portrait Gallery issued a cease and desist letter for alleged breach of copyright, against a Wikipedia editor who downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the NPG website, and placed them on Wikimedia Commons.[175][176][177][178][179] See National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute for more. In April and May 2010, there was controversy over the hosting and display of sexual drawing and pornographic images including images of children on Wikipedia.[180][181][182] It led to the mass removal of pornographic content from Wikimedia Foundation sites.[183][184] Notable forks and derivatives See this page for a partial list of Wikipedia mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is maintained. A significant number of sites use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia. Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias. In 2006, Larry Sanger founded Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki.[185] The site cited its aims were 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other things'.[52][186] (see also Nupedia). Publication on other media The German Wikipedia was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004[187] and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139 page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia.[188] Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.[189] In September 2008, Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.[190] The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Wikipedia was published in April 2006 by SOS Children as the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection.[191] In April 2007, "Wikipedia Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles.[192][193] The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file or Torrent file, or accessed online at the project's website. A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of Wikipedia available for use on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.[194] Lawsuits In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In the defamation action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer due to the provisions of this section.[195] A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.[196] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia