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WikipediaThe logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphsfrom various writing systemsshowScreenshotType of siteOnline encyclopediaAvailable in309 languagesCountry of originUnited StatesOwnerWikimedia FoundationCreated byJimmy WalesLarry Sanger[1]Websitewww.wikipedia.org Alexa rank 13 (Global, February 2020)[2]CommercialNoRegistrationOptional[note 1]Users>315,147 active users[note 2]and >85,634,144 registered users1,145 administrators (English)LaunchedJanuary 15, 2001; 19 years agoCurrent statusActiveContent licenseCC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing variesWritten inLAMP platform[3]OCLC number52075003 Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ee-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual online encyclopediacreated and maintained as an open collaboration project[4] by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.[5] It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,[6][7][8] and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of January 2020.[9] It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads, and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[10][11][12][13] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[14] Sanger coined its name,[15][16] as a portmanteauof "wiki" (the Hawaiian word for "quick")[17] and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. With at least 6,025,653 articles,[note 3] the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages[18] and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month.[19] In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica,[20] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues.[21][22] The following year, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.[23] Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of "truth, half truth, and some falsehoods",[24] and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial topics.[25] Wikipedia has been criticized for gender bias, particularly on its English-language site, where the dominant majority of editors are male. However, Edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.[26][27] Facebook announced that by 2017 it would help readers detect fake newsby suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.[28] Contents 1History1.1Nupedia1.2Launch and early growth1.3Milestones 2Openness2.1Restrictions2.2Review of changes2.3Vandalism2.4Edit warring 3Policies and laws3.1Content policies and guidelines 4Governance4.1Administrators4.2Dispute resolution 5Community5.1Studies5.2Diversity 6Language editions6.1English Wikipedia editor decline 7Reception7.1Accuracy of content7.2Discouragement in education7.3Quality of writing7.4Coverage of topics and systemic bias7.5Explicit content7.6Privacy7.7Sexism 8Operation8.1Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates8.2Software operations and support8.3Automated editing8.4Hardware operations and support8.5Internal research and operational development8.6Internal news publications 9Access to content9.1Content licensing9.2Methods of access 10Cultural impact10.1Trusted source to combat fake news10.2Readership10.3Cultural significance10.4Sister projects—Wikimedia10.5Publishing10.6Research use 11Related projects 12See also 13Notes 14References 15Further reading15.1Academic studies15.2Books15.3Book review-related articles15.4Learning resources15.5Other media coverage 16External links History Main article: History of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger Nupedia Main article: Nupedia Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful.[29] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.[30] It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.[31][32] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[33] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[34][35] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[36] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[37] Launch and early growth The domains wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001[38] and January 13, 2001[39] respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001,[30] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[40] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[34] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[41] was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[34] Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit.[42] The Wikipedia Page on December 17, 2001 Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of 2004.[43] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the 1408 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for almost 600 years.[44] Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[45] These moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and to change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[46] Brion Vibber applied the change on August 15, 2002.[47] Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[48] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[49] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[50] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively.[51][52][53] A promotional video of the Wikimedia Foundation that encourages viewers to edit Wikipedia, mostly reviewing 2014 via Wikipedia content In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[54][55] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[56] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study.[57] Two years later, in 2011, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In the same interview, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable".[58] A 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia" in MIT's Technology Review questioned this claim. The article revealed that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae.[59] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[60] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis".[61] Milestones Map is showing how many articles of each European language there were as of January 2019. One square represents 1000 articles. Languages with less than 1000 articles are represented with one square. Languages are grouped by language family and each language family is presented by a separate colour. In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites in the US, according to comScore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked number 9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was number 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors.[62] As of September 2019, Wikipedia has rank 9[9] among websites in terms of popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight billion pageviews every month.[63] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia has 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore".[19] Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012 On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[64] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[65][66] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[67][68] On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There was a decline of about two billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by twelve percent, those of German version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost nine percent."[69] Varma added that, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."[69]When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society indicated that he suspected much of the page view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."[69] By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked fifth in the most popular websites globally.[70] In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia; in October 2014, Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument; and, in July 2015, Wikipedia became available as 7,473 books for $500,000. In 2019, a species of flowering plant was named Viola wikipedia.[71] In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash.[72][73] In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia have been encoded into synthetic DNA.[74] Openness Number of English Wikipedia articles[75] English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[76] Differences between versions of an article are highlighted Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination principle[note 4][77] regarding the security of its content.[77] It started almost entirely open—anyone could create articles, and any Wikipedia article could be edited by any reader, even those who did not have a Wikipedia account. Modifications to all articles would be published immediately. As a result, any article could contain inaccuracies such as errors, ideological biases, and nonsensical or irrelevant text. Restrictions Due to the increasing popularity of Wikipedia, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions in some cases. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article.[78]On the English Wikipedia, among others, some particularly controversial, sensitive and/or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to some degree.[79][80] A frequently vandalized article can be semi-protected or extended confirmed protected, meaning that only autoconfirmed or extended confirmed editors are able to modify it.[81] A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[82] In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles,[83] which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012.[84] Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.[85] The editing interface of Wikipedia Review of changes Although changes are not systematically reviewed, the software that powers Wikipedia provides certain tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. The "History" page of each article links to each revision.[note 5][86] On most articles, anyone can undo others' changes by clicking a link on the article's history page. Anyone can view the latest changes to articles, and anyone may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of any changes. "New pages patrol" is a process whereby newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.[87] In 2003, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki create a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favor "creative construction" over "creative destruction".[88] Vandalism Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia Any change or edit that manipulates content in a way that purposefully compromises the integrity of Wikipedia is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor. Vandalism can also include advertising and other types of spam.[89] Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information to an article can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the underlying code of an article, or use images disruptively.[90] American journalist John Seigenthaler (1927-2014), subject of the Seigenthaler incident. Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix vandalism is a few minutes.[91][92]However, some vandalism takes much longer to repair.[93] In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005. Seigenthaler was falsely presented as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[93] The article remained uncorrected for four months.[93] Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.[94][95] After the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".[93] This incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people.[96] Edit warring Wikipedians often have disputes regarding content, which may result in repeatedly making opposite changes to an article, known as "edit warring".[97][98] The process is a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added.[99] This practice is also criticized as creating a competitive,[100] conflict based[101] editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles,[102] which contributes to the gender bias on Wikipedia. Special interest groups have engaged in edit wars to advance their own political interests. Defending Israeli settlements in the West Bank, numerous pro-occupation groups have launched "Zionist editing" campaigns.[103] In 2010, the then-director general of the Yesha Council and former Israeli Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett described their goal "as not to make Wikipedia rightist but for it to include our point of view".[104] Policies and laws External video Wikimania, 60 Minutes, CBS, 20 minutes, April 5, 2015, co-founder Jimmy Wales at Fosdem Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, copyright laws) of the United States and of the US state of Virginia, where the majority of Wikipedia's servers are located. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in the "five pillars" and in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately shape content. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website's policies and guidelines.[105] Editors can enforce these rules by deleting or modifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. They have since diverged to some extent.[83] Content policies and guidelines According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.[106] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",[107] which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject. Further, Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized.[108] It must not present original research. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations.[109] This can at times lead to the removal of information that, though valid, is not properly sourced.[110] Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides.[111] All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article. This is known as neutral point of view (NPOV). Governance Further information: Wikipedia:Administration Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time.[112][113] An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.[114] Administrators Editors in good standing in the community can run for one of many levels of volunteer stewardship: this begins with "administrator",[115][116] privileged users who can delete pages, prevent articles from being changed in case of vandalism or editorial disputes (setting protective measures on articles), and try to prevent certain people from editing. Despite the name, administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent certain persons from making disruptive edits (such as vandalism).[117][118] Fewer editors become administrators than in years past, in part because the process of vetting potential Wikipedia administrators has become more rigorous.[119] Bureaucrats name new administrators solely upon the recommendations from the community. Dispute resolution Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semi-formal dispute resolution process to assist in such circumstances. In order to determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums,[note 6] or seek outside input through third opinion requests or by initiating a more general community discussion known as a "request for comment". Arbitration Committee Main article: Arbitration Committee The Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted,[120] functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather anti-consensus or in violation of editing policies, remedies tend to be limited to warnings.[121] Community Main article: Wikipedia community Video of Wikimania 2005—an annual conference for users of Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, was held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany August 4-8. Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated "Talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate.[122] Wikipedians and British Museumcurators collaborate on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010 Wikipedia's community has been described as cultlike,[123] although not always with entirely negative connotations.[124] The project's preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".[125] Wikipedians sometimes award one another virtual barnstars for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work.[126] Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification.[127] As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked on the project.[128] Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization".[129]In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits."[130] This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.[131] The English Wikipedia has 6,025,653 articles, 38,456,724 registered editors, and 137,439 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days. Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references".[132] Editors who do not log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia,[132] as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation",[133] but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty. Studies A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia [...] are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site".[134] Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."[129] However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most content in Wikipedia (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders".[129] A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others,[135][136] although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small.[137] According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content".[138] Diversity Several studies have shown that most of the Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female.[139] Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage females to become Wikipedia contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology.[140] Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, wrote in The New York Times that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior".[141] Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.[142] Language editions Main article: List of Wikipedias There are currently 309 language editions of Wikipedia (also called language versions, or simply Wikipedias). As of March 2020, the six largest, in order of article count, are the English, Cebuano, Swedish, German, French, and Dutch Wikipedias.[143] The second and third largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which as of 2013 had created about half the articles in the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. The latter are both languages of the Philippines. In addition to the top six, ten other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (Russian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Waray-Waray, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese), six more have over 500,000 articles (Ukrainian, Persian, Catalan, Serbian, Bokmål and Indonesian), 41 more have over 100,000, and 84 more have over 10,000.[144][145] The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 6 million articles. As of January 2019, according to Alexa, the English subdomain (en.wikipedia.org; English Wikipedia) receives approximately 57% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages (Russian: 9%; Chinese: 6%; Japanese: 6%; Spanish: 5%).[9] Distribution of the 51,542,106 articles in different language editions (as of March 3, 2020)[146] English (11.7%) Cebuano (10.4%) Swedish (7.3%) German (4.6%) French (4.2%) Dutch (3.8%) Russian (3.1%) Italian (3%) Spanish (3%) Polish (2.7%) Waray (2.5%) Vietnamese (2.4%) Japanese (2.3%) Chinese (2.1%) Other (36.9%) Logarithmic graph of the 20 largest language editions of Wikipedia (as of 3 March 2020)[147] (millions of articles)0.10.313English 6,025,653Cebuano 5,378,789Swedish 3,744,691German 2,369,142French 2,158,772Dutch 1,983,751Russian 1,580,853Italian 1,567,400Spanish 1,559,898Polish 1,370,677Waray 1,263,825Vietnamese 1,237,722Japanese 1,178,594Chinese 1,083,357Arabic 1,016,152Portuguese 1,015,397Ukrainian 957,668Persian 701,220Catalan 630,533Serbian 626,783 The unit for the numbers in bars is articles. A graph for pageviews of Turkish Wikipedia shows a large drop of roughly 80% immediately after the block of Wikipedia in Turkey was imposed in 2017. Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences(e.g. colour versus color)[148] or points of view.[149] Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.[150][151][152] Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".[153] Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all its projects (Wikipedia and others).[154] For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia,[155] and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have.[156] The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects. Estimation of contributions shares from different regions in the world to different Wikipedia editions Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles.[157] Articles available in more than one language may offer "interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions. A study published by PLoS ONE in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple English Wikipedia.[158] The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to increase the number of editors in the Global South to 37% by 2015.[159] English Wikipedia editor decline On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by Wikimedia stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years."[160] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014. Should attrition continue unabated at the quoted trend rate of approximately 20,000 editors lost within a seven-year stretch, by 2021 there will be only 10,000 active editors on English Wikipedia.[160] In contrast, the trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000.[160] No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively ameliorating substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia.[161] Reception See also: Academic studies about Wikipedia and Criticism of Wikipedia This section needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (March 2018) Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014.[162][163] Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. In 2010, columnist and journalist Edwin Black criticized Wikipedia for being a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods".[24] Articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Journal of Academic Librarianship have criticized Wikipedia's Undue Weight policy, concluding that the fact that Wikipedia explicitly is not designed to provide correct information about a subject, but rather focus on all the major viewpoints on the subject, give less attention to minor ones, and creates omissions that can lead to false beliefs based on incomplete information.[164][165][166] Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black noted (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) how articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an "ax to grind" on the topic.[24][167] A 2008 article in Education Next Journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.[25] In 2006, the Wikipedia Watch criticism website listed dozens of examples of plagiarism in the English Wikipedia.[168] Accuracy of content Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia External audio The Great Book of Knowledge, Part 1, Ideas with Paul Kennedy, CBC, January 15, 2014 Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are carefully and deliberately written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.[169] However, a peer review in 2005 of forty-two scientific entries on both Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica by the science journal Nature found few differences in accuracy, and concluded that "the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."[20] Reagle suggested that while the study reflects "a topical strength of Wikipedia contributors" in science articles, "Wikipedia may not have fared so well using a random sampling of articles or on humanities subjects."[21] Others raised similar critiques.[22] The findings by Nature were disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica,[170][171] and in response, Nature gave a rebuttal of the points raised by Britannica.[172] In addition to the point-for-point disagreement between these two parties, others have examined the sample size and selection method used in the Nature effort, and suggested a "flawed study design" (in Nature's manual selection of articles, in part or in whole, for comparison), absence of statistical analysis (e.g., of reported confidence intervals), and a lack of study "statistical power" (i.e., owing to small sample size, 42 or 4 × 101 articles compared, vs >105 and >106set sizes for Britannica and the English Wikipedia, respectively).[173] As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.[174] Concerns have been raised by PC World in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[175] the insertion of false information,[176] vandalism, and similar problems. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote: "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that some traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases and novel results, in his opinion, are over-reported in journal articles and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[177] Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable.[178] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear.[179] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[180] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of "fake news" because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles.[181] External video Inside Wikipedia—Attack of the PR Industry, Deutsche Welle, 7:13 mins[182] Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.[86][183] In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in The Wall Street Journal, to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing.[184] The article stated that: "Beginning Monday [from the date of the article, June 16, 2014], changes in Wikipedia's terms of use will require anyone paid to edit articles to disclose that arrangement. Katherine Maher, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's chief communications officer, said the changes address a sentiment among volunteer editors that, 'we're not an advertising service; we're an encyclopedia.'"[184][185][186][187][188] These issues, among others, had been parodied since the first decade of Wikipedia, notably by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.[189] A Harvard law textbook, Legal Research in a Nutshell (2011), cites Wikipedia as a "general source" that "can be a real boon" in "coming up to speed in the law governing a situation" and, "while not authoritative, can provide basic facts as well as leads to more in-depth resources".[190] Discouragement in education Most university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[191] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[192][193]Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[194] Wales once (2006 or earlier) said he receives about ten emails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia; he told the students they got what they deserved. "For God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," he said.[195] In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change.[196] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[197]stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything". In contrast, academic writing in Wikipedia has evolved in recent years and has been found to increase student interest, personal connection to the product, creativity in material processing, and international collaboration in the learning process.[198] Medical information See also: Health information on Wikipedia On March 5, 2014, Julie Beck writing for The Atlantic magazine in an article titled "Doctors' #1 Source for Healthcare Information: Wikipedia", stated that "Fifty percent of physicians look up conditions on the (Wikipedia) site, and some are editing articles themselves to improve the quality of available information."[199] Beck continued to detail in this article new programs of Amin Azzam at the University of San Francisco to offer medical school courses to medical students for learning to edit and improve Wikipedia articles on health-related issues, as well as internal quality control programs within Wikipedia organized by James Heilman to improve a group of 200 health-related articles of central medical importance up to Wikipedia's highest standard of articles using its Featured Article and Good Article peer-review evaluation process.[199] In a May 7, 2014, follow-up article in The Atlantic titled "Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text?", Julie Beck quotes WikiProject Medicine's James Heilman as stating: "Just because a reference is peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's a high-quality reference."[200] Beck added that: "Wikipedia has its own peer review process before articles can be classified as 'good' or 'featured'. Heilman, who has participated in that process before, says 'less than one percent' of Wikipedia's medical articles have passed."[200] Quality of writing Quality dimensions of web 2.0portals, encyclopedias and Wikipedia[201] In 2008, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that the quality of a Wikipedia article would suffer rather than gain from adding more writers when the article lacked appropriate explicit or implicit coordination.[202] For instance, when contributors rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor, stated that American National Biography Online outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its "clear and engaging prose", which, he said, was an important aspect of good historical writing.[203] Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil Warhistorian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization [...] his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice [...] and [...] his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull". Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the NPOV policy—[which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history". While generally praising the article on William Clarke Quantrill, he quoted its conclusion as an example of such "waffling", which then stated: "Some historians [...] remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."[203] Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented, "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 percent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage."[204] A study of Wikipedia articles on cancer was conducted in 2010 by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University. The study was limited to those articles that could be found in the Physician Data Query and excluded those written at the "start" class or "stub" class level. Lawrence found the articles accurate but not very readable, and thought that "Wikipedia's lack of readability (to non-college readers) may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing".[205] The Economist argued that better-written articles tend to be more reliable: "inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information".[206] To assess Wikipedia articles various quality measures related to credibility, completeness, objectivity, readability, relevance, style and timeliness can be used.[207] Coverage of topics and systemic bias See also: Notability in the English Wikipedia and Criticism of Wikipedia § Systemic bias in coverage Parts of this article (those related to d:Wikidata:Statistics/Wikipedia) need to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (March 2017) Shares of over 39 million Wikipedia articles in main categories in 55 most developed language versions as of April 2019[201] Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article. Since it has terabytes of disk space, it can have far more topics than can be covered by any printed encyclopedia.[208]The exact degree and manner of coverage on Wikipedia is under constant review by its editors, and disagreements are not uncommon (see deletionism and inclusionism).[209][210] Wikipedia contains materials that some people may find objectionable, offensive, or pornographic. The 'Wikipedia is not censored' policy has sometimes proved controversial: in 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of images of Muhammad in the English edition of its Muhammad article, citing this policy. The presence of politically, religiously, and pornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wikipedia by national authorities in China[211] and Pakistan,[212] amongst other countries. Pie chart of Wikipedia content by subject as of January 2008[213] A 2008 study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Palo Alto Research Center gave a distribution of topics as well as growth (from July 2006 to January 2008) in each field:[213] Culture and the arts: 30% (210%) Biographies and persons: 15% (97%) Geography and places: 14% (52%) Society and social sciences: 12% (83%) History and events: 11% (143%) Natural and physical sciences: 9% (213%) Technology and the applied sciences: 4% (−6%) Religions and belief systems: 2% (38%) Health: 2% (42%) Mathematics and logic: 1% (146%) Thought and philosophy: 1% (160%) These numbers refer only to the quantity of articles: it is possible for one topic to contain a large number of short articles and another to contain a small number of large ones. Through its "Wikipedia Loves Libraries" program, Wikipedia has partnered with major public libraries such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to expand its coverage of underrepresented subjects and articles.[214] A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota indicated that male and female editors focus on different coverage topics. There was a greater concentration of females in the People and Arts category, while males focus more on Geography and Science.[215] Coverage of topics and selection bias Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven. Africa is most underrepresented.[216] Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.[217] An editorial in The Guardian in 2014 claimed that more effort went into providing references for a list of female porn actors than a list of women writers.[218] Data has also shown that Africa-related material often faces omission; a knowledge gap that a July 2018 Wikimedia conference in Cape Town sought to address.[142] Systemic bias When multiple editors contribute to one topic or set of topics, systemic bias may arise, due to the demographic backgrounds of the editors. In 2011, Wales claimed that the unevenness of coverage is a reflection of the demography of the editors, citing for example "biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare".[58] The October 22, 2013, essay by Tom Simonite in MIT's Technology Review titled "The Decline of Wikipedia" discussed the effect of systemic bias and policy creep on the downward trend in the number of editors.[59] Systemic bias on Wikipedia may follow that of culture generally,[vague] for example favoring certain nationalities, ethnicities or majority religions.[219] It may more specifically follow the biases of Internet culture, inclining to being young, male, English-speaking, educated, technologically aware, and wealthy enough to spare time for editing. Biases of its own may include over-emphasis on topics such as pop culture, technology, and current events.[219] Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford, in 2013, studied the statistical trends of systemic bias at Wikipedia introduced by editing conflicts and their resolution.[220][221] His research examined the counterproductive work behavior of edit warring. Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive behavior at Wikipedia and relied instead on the statistical measurement of detecting "reverting/reverted pairs" or "mutually reverting edit pairs". Such a "mutually reverting edit pair" is defined where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor in the "mutually reverting edit pairs". The results were tabulated for several language versions of Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia's three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, Anarchism, and Muhammad.[221] By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the Oxford study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories.[221] Researchers from Washington University developed a statistical model to measure systematic bias in the behavior of Wikipedia's users regarding controversial topics. The authors focused on behavioral changes of the encyclopedia's administrators after assuming the post, writing that systematic bias occurred after the fact.[222][223] Explicit content See also: Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia and Reporting of child pornography images on Wikimedia Commons "Wikipedia censorship" redirects here. For the government censorship of Wikipedia, see Censorship of Wikipedia. For Wikipedia's policy concerning censorship, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not censored Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing information of graphic content. Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as Feces, Cadaver, Human penis, Vulva, and Nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children. The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles. It also has non-sexual photographs of nude children. The Wikipedia article about Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions—features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. The original release cover caused controversy and was replaced in some countries. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom after the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) decided the album cover was a potentially illegal indecent image and added the article's URL to a "blacklist" it supplies to British internet service providers.[224] In April 2010, Sanger wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of US federal obscenity law.[225][226] Sanger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one about lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children", under the PROTECT Act of 2003.[227] That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law.[227] Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.[228] Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger's accusation,[229] saying that Wikipedia did not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it."[229] Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteer to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete had been made hastily, Wales voluntarily gave up some of the powers he had held up to that time as part of his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing-list that this action was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted".[230] Critics, including Wikipediocracy, noticed that many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010 have reappeared.[231] Privacy One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law.[232][note 7] It is a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against her or his wishes. In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker. On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents was being violated.[233] Wikipedia has a "Volunteer Response Team" that uses the OTRS system to handle queries without having to reveal the identities of the involved parties. This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project.[234] Sexism Main article: Gender bias on Wikipedia Wikipedia has been described as harboring a battleground culture of sexism and harassment.[235][236] The perceived toxic attitudes and tolerance of violent and abusive language are also reasons put forth for the gender gap in Wikipedia editors.[237] In 2014, a female editor who requested a separate space on Wikipedia to discuss improving civility had her proposal referred to by a male editor using the words "the easiest way to avoid being called a **** is not to act like one".[235] Operation Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates Main article: Wikimedia Foundation Katherine Maher is the third executive director at Wikimedia, following the departure of Lila Tretikovin 2016. Wikipedia is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The foundation relies on public contributions and grants to fund its mission.[238] The foundation's 2013 IRS Form 990 shows revenue of $39.7 million and expenses of almost $29 million, with assets of $37.2 million and liabilities of about $2.3 million.[239] In May 2014, Wikimedia Foundation named Lila Tretikov as its second executive director, taking over for Sue Gardner.[240] The Wall Street Journal reported on May 1, 2014, that Tretikov's information technology background from her years at University of California offers Wikipedia an opportunity to develop in more concentrated directions guided by her often repeated position statement that, "Information, like air, wants to be free."[241][242] The same Wall Street Journal article reported these directions of development according to an interview with spokesman Jay Walsh of Wikimedia, who "said Tretikov would address that issue (paid advocacy) as a priority. 'We are really pushing toward more transparency ... We are reinforcing that paid advocacy is not welcome.' Initiatives to involve greater diversity of contributors, better mobile support of Wikipedia, new geo-location tools to find local content more easily, and more tools for users in the second and third world are also priorities," Walsh said.[241] Following the departure of Tretikov from Wikipedia due to issues concerning the use of the "superprotection" feature which some language versions of Wikipedia have adopted, Katherine Maher became the third executive director the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016.[243] Maher has stated that one of her priorities would be the issue of editor harassment endemic to Wikipedia as identified by the Wikipedia board in December. Maher stated regarding the harassment issue that: "It establishes a sense within the community that this is a priority ... (and that correction requires that) it has to be more than words."[244] Wikipedia is also supported by many organizations and groups that are affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation but independently run, called Wikimedia movement affiliates. These include Wikimedia chapters (which are national or sub-national organizations, such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimédia France), thematic organizations (such as Amical Wikimedia for the Catalan language community), and user groups. These affiliates participate in the promotion, development, and funding of Wikipedia. Software operations and support See also: MediaWiki The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database system.[245] The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language, variables, a transclusion system for templates, and URL redirection. MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects, as well as many other wiki projects. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the present double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske. The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Wikipedia shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker. Several MediaWiki extensions are installed[246] to extend the functionality of the MediaWiki software. In April 2005, a Lucene extension[247][248] was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. The site currently uses Lucene Search 2.1,[249][needs update] which is written in Java and based on Lucene library 2.3.[250] In July 2013, after extensive beta testing, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) extension, VisualEditor, was opened to public use.[251][252][253][254] It was met with much rejection and criticism, and was described as "slow and buggy".[255] The feature was changed from opt-out to opt-in afterward. Automated editing Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.[256][257][258] One controversial contributor creating articles with his bot was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days.[259] Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).[260] Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors. An anti-vandal bot is programmed to detect and revert vandalism quickly.[257] Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet incident in July 2014 when it was reported edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government.[261] Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.[262] According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots.[263] Hardware operations and support See also: Wikimedia Foundation § Hardware Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day.[264][needs update] As of 2019, page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Varnish caching servers.[265] Further statistics, based on a publicly available 3-month Wikipedia access trace, are available.[266] Requests that cannot be served from the Varnish cache are sent to load-balancing servers running the Linux Virtual Server software, which in turn pass them to one of the Apache web servers for page rendering from the database. The web servers deliver pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the language editions of Wikipedia. To increase speed further, rendered pages are cached in a distributed memory cache until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Overview of system architecture as of October 2015 Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers (mainly Ubuntu).[267][268] As of December 2009, there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam.[269] By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia.[270][271] in 2017, Wikipedia had installed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia.[272] Internal research and operational development In accordance with growing amounts of incoming donations exceeding seven digits in 2013 as recently reported,[59] the Foundation has reached a threshold of assets which qualify its consideration under the principles of industrial organization economics to indicate the need for the re-investment of donations into the internal research and development of the Foundation.[273] Two of the recent projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and a largely under-utilized "Thank" tab which were developed for the purpose of ameliorating issues of editor attrition, which have met with limited success.[59][255] The estimates for reinvestment by industrial organizations into internal research and development was studied by Adam Jaffe

The First King of England

"Alfred I" and "King Alfred" redirect here. For the Bohemian nobleman, see Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz. For other uses, see Alfred the Great (disambiguation) and King Alfred (disambiguation). Alfred the GreatStatue of Alfred the Great by Hamo Thornycroftin Winchester, unveiled during the millennial commemoration of Alfred's deathKing of the Anglo-SaxonsReignc. 886 - 26 October 899SuccessorEdward the ElderKing of the West SaxonsReign23 April 871 - c. 886PredecessorÆthelred IBorn847-849Wantage, Berkshire[a]Died26 October 899 (aged 50 or 51)Burialc. 1100Hyde Abbey, Winchester, Hampshire, now lostSpouseEalhswithIssueÆthelflæd, Lady of the MerciansEdward the ElderÆthelgifu, abbess of ShaftesburyÆlfthryth, Countess of FlandersÆthelweard of WessexHouseWessexFatherÆthelwulf, King of WessexMotherOsburh Alfred the Great (Old English: Ælfrēd,[b] Ælfrǣd,[c] 'Elf-counsel' or 'Wise-elf'; between 847 and 849 - 26 October 899) was King of Wessex from 871 to c. 886 and King of the Anglo-Saxons from c. 886 to 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. His father died when he was young and three of Alfred's brothers, Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred, reigned in turn. After ascending the throne, Alfred spent several years fighting Viking invasions. He won a decisive victory in the Battle of Edington in 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings, creating what was known as the Danelaw in the North of England. Alfred also oversaw the conversion of Viking leader Guthrum to Christianity. He defended his kingdom against the Viking attempt at conquest, becoming the dominant ruler in England.[1] Details of his life are described in a work by 9th-century Welsh scholar and bishop Asser. Alfred had a reputation as a learned and merciful man of a gracious and level-headed nature who encouraged education, proposing that primary education be conducted in Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin and improving the legal system and military structure and his people's quality of life. He was given the epithet "the Great" during and after the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and, alongside the Danish Cnut the Great, remains the only king of England to be given such a name. Contents 1Childhood 2Alfred's brothers2.1Viking invasion 3King at war3.1Early struggles3.2Counter-attack and victory3.3880s3.4Viking attacks (890s) 4Military reorganisation4.1Administration and taxation4.2Burghal system4.3English navy 5Legal reform 6Foreign relations 7Religion and culture7.1Effect of Danish raids on education7.2Establishment of a court school7.3Advocacy of education in English 8Appearance and character 9Family 10Death and burial 11Legacy 12Statues12.1Alfred University (New York)12.2Pewsey12.3Wantage12.4Winchester12.5Cleveland, Ohio 13Chronology 14Notes 15Citations 16References 17Further reading 18External links Childhood[edit] Further information: House of Wessex family tree Alfred's father Æthelwulf of Wessexin the early fourteenth-century Genealogical Roll of the Kings of England Alfred was born in the royal estate of Wantage, historically in Berkshire but now in Oxfordshire, between 847 and 849.[2][d] He was the youngest of five sons of King Æthelwulf of Wessex by his first wife, Osburh. In 853 Alfred is reported by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have been sent to Rome where he was confirmed by Pope Leo IV, who "anointed him as king".[4] Victorian writers later interpreted this as an anticipatory coronation in preparation for his eventual succession to the throne of Wessex. This is unlikely; his succession could not have been foreseen at the time as Alfred had three living elder brothers. A letter of Leo IV shows that Alfred was made a "consul" and a misinterpretation of this investiture, deliberate or accidental, could explain later confusion.[5] It may also be based upon the fact that Alfred later accompanied his father on a pilgrimage to Rome where he spent some time at the court of Charles the Bald, King of the Franks, around 854-855.[6] On their return from Rome in 856 Æthelwulf was deposed by his son Æthelbald. With civil war looming the magnates of the realm met in council to hammer out a compromise. Æthelbald would retain the western shires (i.e. historical Wessex), and Æthelwulf would rule in the east. When King Æthelwulf died in 858 Wessex was ruled by three of Alfred's brothers in succession: Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred.[7] Bishop Asser tells the story of how, as a child, Alfred won a book of Saxon poems, offered as a prize by his mother to the first of her children able to memorize it.[8] Legend also has it that the young Alfred spent time in Ireland seeking healing. Alfred was troubled by health problems throughout his life. It is thought that he may have suffered from Crohn's disease.[9] Statues of Alfred in Winchester and Wantage portray him as a great warrior. Evidence suggests he was not physically strong and, though not lacking in courage, he was noted more for his intellect than as a warlike character.[10] Alfred's brothers[edit] A map of the route taken by the Viking Great Heathen Army which arrived in England from Denmark, Norway, and southern Sweden in 865. Alfred is not mentioned during the short reigns of his older brothers Æthelbald and Æthelberht. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the Great Heathen Army of Danes landing in East Anglia with the intent of conquering the four kingdoms which constituted Anglo-Saxon England in 865.[11] Alfred's public life began in 865 at age 16 with the accession of his third brother, 18-year-old Æthelred. During this period, Bishop Asser gave Alfred the unique title of secundarius, which may indicate a position similar to the Celtic tanist, a recognised successor closely associated with the reigning monarch. This arrangement may have been sanctioned by Alfred's father or by the Witan to guard against the danger of a disputed succession should Æthelred fall in battle. It was a well known tradition among other Germanic peoples - such as the Swedes and Franks to whom the Anglo-Saxons were closely related - to crown a successor as royal prince and military commander. [12] Viking invasion[edit] In 868, Alfred is recorded as fighting beside Æthelred in a failed attempt to keep the Great Heathen Army led by Ivar the Boneless out of the adjoining Kingdom of Mercia.[13] The Danes arrived in his homeland at the end of 870 and nine engagements were fought in the following year, with mixed results; the places and dates of two of these battles have not been recorded. A successful skirmish at the Battle of Englefield in Berkshire on 31 December 870 was followed by a severe defeat at the siege and the Battle of Reading by Ivar's brother Halfdan Ragnarsson on 5 January 871. Four days later, the Anglo-Saxons won a brilliant victory at the Battle of Ashdown on the Berkshire Downs, possibly near Compton or Aldworth. Alfred is particularly credited with the success of this last battle.[12] The Saxons were defeated at the Battle of Basing on 22 January. They were defeated again on 22 March at the Battle of Merton (perhaps Marden in Wiltshire or Martin in Dorset).[12] Æthelred died shortly afterwards in April.[12] King at war[edit] Early struggles[edit] In April 871 King Æthelred died and Alfred acceded to the throne of Wessex and the burden of its defence, even though Æthelred left two under-age sons, Æthelhelm and Æthelwold. This was in accordance with the agreement that Æthelred and Alfred had made earlier that year in an assembly at an unidentified place called Swinbeorg. The brothers had agreed that whichever of them outlived the other would inherit the personal property that King Æthelwulf had left jointly to his sons in his will. The deceased's sons would receive only whatever property and riches their father had settled upon them and whatever additional lands their uncle had acquired. The unstated premise was that the surviving brother would be king. Given the Danish invasion and the youth of his nephews, Alfred's accession probably went uncontested.[14] While he was busy with the burial ceremonies for his brother, the Danes defeated the Saxon army in his absence at an unnamed spot and then again in his presence at Wilton in May.[12] The defeat at Wilton smashed any remaining hope that Alfred could drive the invaders from his kingdom. Alfred was forced instead to make peace with them, according to sources that do not tell what the terms of the peace were. Bishop Asser claimed that the pagans agreed to vacate the realm and made good their promise.[15] The Viking army withdrew from Reading in the autumn of 871 to take up winter quarters in Mercian London. Although not mentioned by Asser or by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred probably paid the Vikings cash to leave, much as the Mercians were to do in the following year.[15] Hoards dating to the Viking occupation of London in 871/2 have been excavated at Croydon, Gravesend and Waterloo Bridge. These finds hint at the cost involved in making peace with the Vikings. For the next five years the Danes occupied other parts of England.[16] In 876 under their new leader, Guthrum, the Danes slipped past the Saxon army and attacked and occupied Wareham in Dorset. Alfred blockaded them but was unable to take Wareham by assault.[12] He negotiated a peace which involved an exchange of hostages and oaths, which the Danes swore on a "holy ring" associated with the worship of Thor.[17][18] The Danes broke their word and after killing all the hostages, slipped away under cover of night to Exeter in Devon.[19] Alfred blockaded the Viking ships in Devon and with a relief fleet having been scattered by a storm, the Danes were forced to submit. The Danes withdrew to Mercia. In January 878 the Danes made a sudden attack on Chippenham, a royal stronghold in which Alfred had been staying over Christmas "and most of the people they killed, except the King Alfred, and he with a little band made his way by wood and swamp, and after Easter he made a fort at Athelney in the marshes of Somerset, and from that fort kept fighting against the foe".[20] From his fort at Athelney, an island in the marshes near North Petherton, Alfred was able to mount a resistance campaign, rallying the local militias from Somerset, Wiltshireand Hampshire.[12] A legend tells how when Alfred first fled to the Somerset Levels, he was given shelter by a peasant woman who, unaware of his identity, left him to watch some wheaten cakes she had left cooking on the fire.[21][22] Preoccupied with the problems of his kingdom Alfred accidentally let the cakes burn and was roundly scolded by the woman upon her return. 878 was the nadir of the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. With all the other kingdoms having fallen to the Vikings, Wessex alone was still resisting.[21] There is no contemporary evidence for the legend, although it is possible that there was an early oral tradition. The first time that it was actually written down was about one hundred years after Alfred's death.[22] Counter-attack and victory[edit] King Alfred's Tower (1772) on the supposed site of Egbert's Stone, the mustering place before the Battle of Edington.[e] In the seventh week after Easter (4-10 May 878), around Whitsuntide, Alfred rode to Egbert's Stone east of Selwood where he was met by "all the people of Somerset and of Wiltshire and of that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea (that is, west of Southampton Water), and they rejoiced to see him".[20] Alfred's emergence from his marshland stronghold was part of a carefully planned offensive that entailed raising the fyrds of three shires. This meant not only that the king had retained the loyalty of ealdormen, royal reeves and king's thegns, who were charged with levying and leading these forces, but that they had maintained their positions of authority in these localities well enough to answer his summons to war. Alfred's actions also suggest a system of scouts and messengers.[23] Alfred won a decisive victory in the ensuing Battle of Edington which may have been fought near Westbury, Wiltshire. He then pursued the Danes to their stronghold at Chippenham and starved them into submission. One of the terms of the surrender was that Guthrum convert to Christianity. Three weeks later the Danish king and 29 of his chief men were baptised at Alfred's court at Aller, near Athelney, with Alfred receiving Guthrum as his spiritual son.[12] According to Asser, The unbinding of the chrisom [f] on the eighth day took place at a royal estate called Wedmore.[25] While at Wedmore Alfred and Guthrum negotiated what some historians have called the Treaty of Wedmore, but it was to be some years after the cessation of hostilities that a formal treaty was signed.[26] Under the terms of the so-called Treaty of Wedmore the converted Guthrum was required to leave Wessex and return to East Anglia. Consequently, in 879 the Viking army left Chippenham and made its way to Cirencester.[27] The formal Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, preserved in Old English in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge(Manuscript 383), and in a Latin compilation known as Quadripartitus, was negotiated later, perhaps in 879 or 880, when King Ceolwulf II of Mercia was deposed.[28] That treaty divided up the kingdom of Mercia. By its terms the boundary between Alfred's and Guthrum's kingdoms was to run up the River Thames to the River Lea, follow the Lea to its source (near Luton), from there extend in a straight line to Bedford, and from Bedford follow the River Ouse to Watling Street.[29] In other words, Alfred succeeded to Ceolwulf's kingdom consisting of western Mercia, and Guthrum incorporated the eastern part of Mercia into an enlarged kingdom of East Anglia(henceforward known as the Danelaw). By terms of the treaty, moreover, Alfred was to have control over the Mercian city of London and its mints—at least for the time being.[30] In 825 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the peoples of Essex, Sussex, Kent and Surrey had surrended to Egbert, Alfred's grandfather. From then until the arrival of the Great Heathen Army Essex had formed part of Wessex. After the foundation of Danelaw, it seems that some of Essex would have been ceded to the Danes, but how much is not clear.[31] In 2015, two metal detectorists operating without landowner permission found a large hoard near Leominster consisting primarily of Saxon jewellery and silver ingots but also coins; the latter date to around 879 CE. The hoard is believed to have been buried by a Viking during their raids of the area, while Wessex was ruled by Alfred and Mercia by Ceolwulf II. Coins recovered from the treasure hunters depict both kings, "indicating an alliance between the two kingdoms—at least, for a time—that was previously unknown to historians".[32]According to Gareth Williams of the British Museum, "these coins enable us to re-interpret our history at a key moment in the creation of England as a single kingdom."[33] The Guardian suggested that the find "rewrites Anglo-Saxon history ... The presence of both kings on the two emperor coins suggests some sort of pact between the pair. But the rarity of the coins also suggests that Alfred quickly dropped his ally, who was just about written out of history."[34] 880s[edit] Further information: Londinium and Anglo-Saxon London A coin of Alfred, king of Wessex, London, 880 (based upon a Roman model).Obv: King with royal band in profile, with legend: ÆLFRED REX ('King Alfred') With the signing of the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, an event most commonly held to have taken place around 880 when Guthrum's people began settling East Anglia, Guthrum was neutralised as a threat.[35] The Viking army, which had stayed at Fulham during the winter of 878-879, sailed for Ghent and was active on the continent from 879-892.[36][37] Alfred was still forced to contend with a number of Danish threats. A year later, in 881, Alfred fought a small sea battle against four Danish ships "on the high seas".[36] Two of the ships were destroyed and the others surrendered to Alfred's forces.[38] Similar small skirmishes with independent Viking raiders would have occurred for much of the period, as they had for decades.[39] In 883—though there is some debate over the year—King Alfred, because of his support and his donation of alms to Rome, received a number of gifts from Pope Marinus.[40] Among these gifts was reputed to be a piece of the true cross, a great treasure for the devout Saxon king. According to Asser, because of Pope Marinus's friendship with King Alfred, the pope granted an exemption to any Anglo-Saxons residing within Rome from tax or tribute.[41] After the signing of the treaty with Guthrum, Alfred was spared any large-scale conflicts for some time. Despite this relative peace the king was still forced to deal with a number of Danish raids and incursions. Among these was a raid in Kent, an allied kingdom in South East England, during the year 885, which was quite possibly the largest raid since the battles with Guthrum. Asser's account of the raid places the Danish raiders at the Saxon city of Rochester[36] where they built a temporary fortress in order to besiege the city. In response to this incursion Alfred led an Anglo-Saxon force against the Danes who, instead of engaging the army of Wessex, fled to their beached ships and sailed to another part of Britain. The retreating Danish force supposedly left Britain the following summer.[42] Not long after the failed Danish raid in Kent, Alfred dispatched his fleet to East Anglia. The purpose of this expedition is debated, though Asser claims that it was for the sake of plunder.[42] After travelling up the River Stour the fleet was met by Danish vessels that numbered 13 or 16 (sources vary on the number) and a battle ensued.[42] The Anglo-Saxon fleet emerged victorious and, as Huntingdon accounts, "laden with spoils".[43] The victorious fleet was then caught unawares when attempting to leave the River Stour and was attacked by a Danish force at the mouth of the river. The Danish fleet defeated Alfred's fleet, which may have been weakened in the previous engagement.[44] A plaque in the City of Londonnoting the restoration of the Roman walled city by Alfred. A year later, in 886, Alfred reoccupied the city of London and set out to make it habitable again.[45] Alfred entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia. The restoration of London progressed through the latter half of the 880s and is believed to have revolved around a new street plan; added fortifications in addition to the existing Roman walls; and, some believe, the construction of matching fortifications on the south bank of the River Thames.[46] This is also the period in which almost all chroniclers agree that the Saxon people of pre-unification England submitted to Alfred.[47] This was not, however, the point at which Alfred came to be known as King of England; in fact, he would never adopt the title for himself. Between the restoration of London and the resumption of large-scale Danish attacks in the early 890s, Alfred's reign was rather uneventful. The relative peace of the late 880s was marred by the death of Alfred's sister, Æthelswith, en route to Rome in 888.[48] In the same year the Archbishop of Canterbury, Æthelred, also died. One year later Guthrum, or Athelstan by his baptismal name, Alfred's former enemy and king of East Anglia, died and was buried in Hadleigh, Suffolk.[49] Guthrum's death changed the political landscape for Alfred. The resulting power vacuum stirred up other power-hungry warlords eager to take his place in the following years. The quiet years of Alfred's life were coming to a close.[50] Viking attacks (890s)[edit] Map of Britain in 886 After another lull, in the autumn of 892 or 893, the Danes attacked again. Finding their position in mainland Europe precarious, they crossed to England in 330 ships in two divisions. They entrenched themselves, the larger body, at Appledore, Kent and the lesser under Hastein, at Milton, also in Kent. The invaders brought their wives and children with them indicating a meaningful attempt at conquest and colonisation. Alfred, in 893 or 894, took up a position from which he could observe both forces.[51] While he was in talks with Hastein, the Danes at Appledore broke out and struck north-westwards. They were overtaken by Alfred's eldest son, Edward and were defeated in a general engagement at Farnham in Surrey. They took refuge on an island at Thorney, on the River Colnebetween Buckinghamshire and Middlesex, where they were blockaded and forced to give hostages and promise to leave Wessex.[52][51] They then went to Essex and after suffering another defeat at Benfleet, joined with Hastein's force at Shoebury.[52] Alfred had been on his way to relieve his son at Thorney when he heard that the Northumbrian and East Anglian Danes were besieging Exeterand an unnamed stronghold on the North Devon shore. Alfred at once hurried westward and raised the Siege of Exeter. The fate of the other place is not recorded.[53] The force under Hastein set out to march up the Thames Valley, possibly with the idea of assisting their friends in the west. They were met by a large force under the three great ealdormen of Mercia, Wiltshire and Somerset and forced to head off to the north-west, being finally overtaken and blockaded at Buttington. (Some identify this with Buttington Tump at the mouth of the River Wye, others with Buttington near Welshpool.) An attempt to break through the English lines failed. Those who escaped retreated to Shoebury. After collecting reinforcements, they made a sudden dash across England and occupied the ruined Roman walls of Chester. The English did not attempt a winter blockade but contented themselves with destroying all the supplies in the district.[53] Early in 894 or 895 lack of food obliged the Danes to retire once more to Essex. At the end of the year the Danes drew their ships up the River Thames and the River Lea and fortified themselves twenty miles (32 km) north of London. A frontal attack on the Danish lines failed but later in the year, Alfred saw a means of obstructing the river to prevent the egress of the Danish ships. The Danes realised that they were outmanoeuvred, struck off north-westwards and wintered at Cwatbridge near Bridgnorth. The next year, 896 (or 897), they gave up the struggle. Some retired to Northumbria, some to East Anglia. Those who had no connections in England returned to the continent.[53] Military reorganisation[edit] Alfred the Great silver offering penny, 871-899. Legend: AELFRED REX SAXONUM ('Alfred King of the Saxons'). The Germanic tribes who invaded Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries relied upon the unarmoured infantry supplied by their tribal levy, or fyrd, and it was upon this system that the military power of the several kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon England depended.[54] The fyrd was a local militia in the Anglo-Saxon shire in which all freemen had to serve; those who refused military service were subject to fines or loss of their land.[55] According to the law code of King Ine of Wessex, issued in about 694, If a nobleman who holds land neglects military service, he shall pay 120 shillings and forfeit his land; a nobleman who holds no land shall pay 60 shillings; a commoner shall pay a fine of 30 shillings for neglecting military service.[56] Wessex's history of failures preceding his success in 878 emphasised to Alfred that the traditional system of battle he had inherited played to the Danes' advantage. While both the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes attacked settlements to seize wealth and other resources, they employed very different strategies. In their raids the Anglo-Saxons traditionally preferred to attack head-on by assembling their forces in a shield wall, advancing against their target and overcoming the oncoming wall marshalled against them in defence.[57] In contrast the Danes preferred to choose easy targets, mapping cautious forays designed to avoid risking all their accumulated plunder with high-stake attacks for more. Alfred determined their strategy was to launch smaller-scaled attacks from a secure and reinforced defensible base to which they could retreat should their raiders meet strong resistance.[57] These bases were prepared in advance, often by capturing an estate and augmenting its defences with surrounding ditches, ramparts and palisades. Once inside the fortification, Alfred realised, the Danes enjoyed the advantage, better situated to outlast their opponents or crush them with a counter-attack as the provisions and stamina of the besieging forces waned.[57] The means by which the Anglo-Saxons marshalled forces to defend against marauders also left them vulnerable to the Vikings. It was the responsibility of the shire fyrd to deal with local raids. The king could call up the national militia to defend the kingdom but, in the case of the Viking hit-and-run raids, problems with communication, and raising supplies meant that the national militia could not be mustered quickly enough. It was only after the raids were underway that a call went out to landowners to gather their men for battle. Large regions could be devastated before the fyrd could assemble and arrive. And although the landowners were obliged to the king to supply these men when called, during the attacks in 878 many of them opportunistically abandoned their king and collaborated with Guthrum.[58][59] With these lessons in mind Alfred capitalised on the relatively peaceful years immediately following his victory at Edington by focusing on an ambitious restructuring of his kingdom's military defences. On a trip to Rome Alfred had stayed with Charles the Bald and it is possible that he may have studied how the Carolingian kings had dealt with the Viking problem. Learning from their experiences he was able to put together a system of taxation and defence for his own kingdom. Also there had been a system of fortifications in pre-Viking Mercia that may have been an influence. So when the Viking raids resumed in 892 Alfred was better prepared to confront them with a standing, mobile field army, a network of garrisons, and a small fleet of ships navigating the rivers and estuaries.[60][61][62] Administration and taxation[edit] Tenants in Anglo-Saxon England had a threefold obligation based on their landholding: the so-called "common burdens" of military service, fortress work, and bridge repair. This threefold obligation has traditionally been called trinoda necessitas or trimoda necessitas.[63] The Old English name for the fine due for neglecting military service was fierdwite.[56] To maintain the burhs, and to reorganise the fyrd as a standing army, Alfred expanded the tax and conscription system based on the productivity of a tenant's landholding. The hidewas the basic unit of the system on which the tenant's public obligations were assessed. A hide is thought to represent the amount of land required to support one family. The hidewould differ in size according to the value and resources of the land, and the landowner would have to provide service based on how many hides he owned.[63][64] Burghal system[edit] See also: Burghal Hidage A map of burhs named in the Burghal Hidage. The walled defence round a burh. Alfred's capital, Winchester. Saxon and medieval work on Roman foundations. At the centre of Alfred's reformed military defence system was a network of burhs, distributed at strategic points throughout the kingdom.[65]There were thirty-three burhs, spaced approximately 30 kilometres (19 miles) apart, enabling the military to confront attacks anywhere in the kingdom within a day.[66][67] Alfred's burhs (of which twenty two developed into boroughs.[g][68]) ranged from former Roman towns, such as Winchester, where the stone walls were repaired and ditches added, to massive earthen walls surrounded by wide ditches, probably reinforced with wooden revetmentsand palisades, such as at Burpham in West Sussex.[70][71] The size of the burhs ranged from tiny outposts such as Pilton in Devon, to large fortifications in established towns, the largest being at Winchester.[72] A contemporary document now known as the Burghal Hidage provides an insight into how the system worked. It lists the hidage for each of the fortified towns contained in the document. For example, Wallingford had a hidage of 2,400, which meant that the landowners there were responsible for supplying and feeding 2,400 men, the number sufficient for maintaining 9,900 feet (3.0 kilometres) of wall.[73] A total of 27,071 soldiers were needed, approximately one in four of all the free men in Wessex.[74] Many of the burhs were twin towns that straddled a river and were connected by a fortified bridge, like those built by Charles the Bald a generation before.[61] The double-burh blocked passage on the river, forcing Viking ships to navigate under a garrisoned bridge lined with men armed with stones, spears, or arrows. Other burhs were sited near fortified royal villas, allowing the king better control over his strongholds.[75] The burhs were connected by a road system maintained for army use (known as herepaths). These roads would allow an army to be quickly assembled, sometimes from more than one burh, to confront the Viking invader.[76] This network posed significant obstacles to Viking invaders, especially those laden with booty. The system threatened Viking routes and communications making it far more dangerous for them. The Vikings lacked the equipment for a siege against a burh and a developed doctrine of siegecraft, having tailored their methods of fighting to rapid strikes and unimpeded retreats to well-defended fortifications. The only means left to them was to starve the burh into submission but this gave the king time to send his mobile field army or garrisons from neighbouring burhs along the army roads. In such cases the Vikings were extremely vulnerable to pursuit by the king's joint military forces.[77] Alfred's burh system posed such a formidable challenge against Viking attack that when the Vikings returned in 892 and stormed a half-made, poorly garrisoned fortress up the Lympneestuary in Kent, the Anglo-Saxons were able to limit their penetration to the outer frontiers of Wessex and Mercia.[78] Alfred's burghal system was revolutionary in its strategic conception and potentially expensive in its execution. His contemporary biographer Asser wrote that many nobles balked at the new demands placed upon them even though they were for "the common needs of the kingdom".[79][80] English navy[edit] Alfred also tried his hand at naval design. In 896[81] he ordered the construction of a small fleet, perhaps a dozen or so longships that, at 60 oars, were twice the size of Viking warships. This was not, as the Victorians asserted, the birth of the English Navy. Wessex had possessed a royal fleet before this. King Athelstan of Kent and Ealdorman Ealhhere had defeated a Viking fleet in 851 capturing nine ships,[82] and Alfred himself had conducted naval actions in 882.[83] Nevertheless, 897 clearly marked an important development in the naval power of Wessex. The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle related that Alfred's ships were larger, swifter, steadier and rode higher in the water than either Danish or Frisian ships. It is probable that, under the classical tutelage of Asser, Alfred utilised the design of Greek and Roman warships, with high sides, designed for fighting rather than for navigation.[84] Alfred had seapower in mind—if he could intercept raiding fleets before they landed, he could spare his kingdom from being ravaged. Alfred's ships may have been superior in conception. In practice they proved to be too large to manoeuvre well in the close waters of estuaries and rivers, the only places in which a naval battle could occur.[85] The warships of the time were not designed to be ship killers but rather troop carriers. It has been suggested that, like sea battles in late Viking age Scandinavia, these battles may have entailed a ship coming alongside an enemy vessel, lashing the two ships together and then boarding the enemy craft. The result was effectively a land battle involving hand-to-hand fighting on board the two lashed vessels.[86] In the one recorded naval engagement in 896 Alfred's new fleet of nine ships intercepted six Viking ships at the mouth of an unidentified river in the south of England. The Danes had beached half their ships and gone inland.[87][81] Alfred's ships immediately moved to block their escape. The three Viking ships afloat attempted to break through the English lines. Only one made it; Alfred's ships intercepted the other two.[81] Lashing the Viking boats to their own, the English crew boarded and proceeded to kill the Vikings. One ship escaped, because Alfred's heavy ships became grounded when the tide went out.[86] A land battle ensued between the crews. The Danes were heavily outnumbered, but as the tide rose they returned to their boats which, with shallower drafts, were freed first. The English watched as the Vikings rowed past them.[86] But they had suffered so many casualties (120 dead against 62 Frisians and English) that they had difficulty putting out to sea. All were too damaged to row around Sussex and two were driven against the Sussex coast (possibly at Selsey Bill).[81][86] The shipwrecked crew were brought before Alfred at Winchester and hanged.[81] Legal reform[edit] Main article: Doom book A silver coin of Alfred. In the late 880s or early 890s, Alfred issued a long domboc or law code consisting of his own laws, followed by a code issued by his late seventh-century predecessor King Ine of Wessex.[88] Together these laws are arranged into 120 chapters. In his introduction Alfred explains that he gathered together the laws he found in many "synod-books" and "ordered to be written many of the ones that our forefathers observed—those that pleased me; and many of the ones that did not please me, I rejected with the advice of my councillors, and commanded them to be observed in a different way".[89] Alfred singled out in particular the laws that he "found in the days of Ine, my kinsman, or Offa, king of the Mercians, or King Æthelberht of Kent who first among the English people received baptism". He appended, rather than integrated, the laws of Ine into his code and although he included, as had Æthelbert, a scale of payments in compensation for injuries to various body parts, the two injury tariffs are not aligned. Offa is not known to have issued a law code, leading historian Patrick Wormald to speculate that Alfred had in mind the legatine capitulary of 786 that was presented to Offa by two papal legates.[90] About a fifth of the law code is taken up by Alfred's introduction which includes translations into English of the Ten Commandments, a few chapters from the Book of Exodus, and the Apostolic Letter from the Acts of the Apostles (15:23-29). The Introduction may best be understood as Alfred's meditation upon the meaning of Christian law.[91] It traces the continuity between God's gift of law to Moses to Alfred's own issuance of law to the West Saxon people. By doing so, it linked the holy past to the historical present and represented Alfred's law-giving as a type of divine legislation.[92] Similarly Alfred divided his code into 120 chapters because 120 was the age at which Moses died and, in the number-symbolism of early medieval biblical exegetes, 120 stood for law.[93] The link between Mosaic law and Alfred's code is the Apostolic Letter which explained that Christ "had come not to shatter or annul the commandments but to fulfill them; and he taught mercy and meekness". (Intro, 49.1) The mercy that Christ infused into Mosaic law underlies the injury tariffs that figure so prominently in barbarian law codes since Christian synods "established, through that mercy which Christ taught, that for almost every misdeed at the first offence secular lords might with their permission receive without sin the monetary compensation which they then fixed".[94] The only crime that could not be compensated with a payment of money was treachery to a lord, "since Almighty God adjudged none for those who despised Him, nor did Christ, the Son of God, adjudge any for the one who betrayed Him to death; and He commanded everyone to love his lord as Himself".[94] Alfred's transformation of Christ's commandment, from "Love your neighbour as yourself" (Matt. 22:39-40) to love your secular lord as you would love the Lord Christ himself, underscores the importance that Alfred placed upon lordship which he understood as a sacred bond instituted by God for the governance of man.[95] When one turns from the domboc's introduction to the laws themselves, it is difficult to uncover any logical arrangement. The impression is of a hodgepodge of miscellaneous laws. The law code, as it has been preserved, is singularly unsuitable for use in lawsuits. In fact, several of Alfred's laws contradicted the laws of Ine that form an integral part of the code. Patrick Wormald's explanation is that Alfred's law code should be understood not as a legal manual but as an ideological manifesto of kingship "designed more for symbolic impact than for practical direction".[96] In practical terms the most important law in the code may well have been the very first: "We enjoin, what is most necessary, that each man keep carefully his oath and his pledge" which expresses a fundamental tenet of Anglo-Saxon law.[97] Alfred devoted considerable attention and thought to judicial matters. Asser underscores his concern for judicial fairness. Alfred, according to Asser, insisted upon reviewing contested judgments made by his ealdormen and reeves and "would carefully look into nearly all the judgements which were passed [issued] in his absence anywhere in the realm to see whether they were just or unjust".[98] A charter from the reign of his son Edward the Elder depicts Alfred as hearing one such appeal in his chamber while washing his hands.[99] Asser represents Alfred as a Solomonic judge, painstaking in his own judicial investigations and critical of royal officials who rendered unjust or unwise judgments. Although Asser never mentions Alfred's law code he does say that Alfred insisted that his judges be literate so that they could apply themselves "to the pursuit of wisdom". The failure to comply with this royal order was to be punished by loss of office.[100] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, commissioned at the time of Alfred, was probably written to promote unification of England,[101] whereas Asser's The Life of King Alfred promoted Alfred's achievements and personal qualities. It was possible that the document was designed this way so that it could be disseminated in Wales, as Alfred had recently acquired overlordship of that country.[101] Foreign relations[edit] Asser speaks grandiosely of Alfred's relations with foreign powers but little definite information is available.[53] His interest in foreign countries is shown by the insertions which he made in his translation of Orosius. He corresponded with Elias III, the patriarch of Jerusalem,[53] and embassies to Rome conveying the English alms to the pope were fairly frequent.[61][h] Around 890, Wulfstan of Hedeby undertook a journey from Hedeby on Jutland along the Baltic Sea to the Prussian trading town of Truso. Alfred personally collected details of this trip.[102] Alfred's relations with the Celtic princes in the western half of Great Britain are clearer. Comparatively early in his reign, according to Asser, the southern Welsh princes, owing to the pressure on them from North Wales and Mercia, commended themselves to Alfred. Later in his reign, the North Welsh followed their example and the latter cooperated with the English in the campaign of 893 (or 894). That Alfred sent alms to Irish and Continental monasteries may be taken on Asser's authority. The visit of three pilgrim "Scots" (i.e. Irish) to Alfred in 891 is undoubtedly authentic. The story that he himself in his childhood was sent to Ireland to be healed by Saint Modwenna may show Alfred's interest in that island.[53] Religion and culture[edit] King Alfred the Great pictured in a stained glass window in the West Window of the South Transept of Bristol Cathedral. In the 880s, at the same time that he was "cajoling and threatening" his nobles to build and man the burhs, Alfred, perhaps inspired by the example of Charlemagne almost a century before, undertook an equally ambitious effort to revive learning.[53] During this time period the Viking raids were often seen as a divine punishment and Alfred may have wished to revive religious awe in order to appease God's wrath.[103] This revival entailed the recruitment of clerical scholars from Mercia, Wales and abroad to enhance the tenor of the court and of the episcopacy; the establishment of a court school to educate his own children, the sons of his nobles, and intellectually promising boys of lesser birth; an attempt to require literacy in those who held offices of authority; a series of translations into the vernacular of Latin works the king deemed "most necessary for all men to know";[104] the compilation of a chronicle detailing the rise of Alfred's kingdom and house, with a genealogy that stretched back to Adam, thus giving the West Saxon kings a biblical ancestry.[105] Very little is known of the church under Alfred. The Danish attacks had been particularly damaging to the monasteries. Although Alfred founded monasteries at Athelney and Shaftesbury, these were the first new monastic houses in Wessex since the beginning of the eighth century.[106] According to Asser, Alfred enticed foreign monks to England for his monastery at Athelney as there was little interest for the locals to take up the monastic life.[107] Alfred undertook no systematic reform of ecclesiastical institutions or religious practices in Wessex. For him the key to the kingdom's spiritual revival was to appoint pious, learned, and trustworthy bishops and abbots. As king he saw himself as responsible for both the temporal and spiritual welfare of his subjects. Secular and spiritual authority were not distinct categories for Alfred.[108][109] He was equally comfortable distributing his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care to his bishops so that they might better train and supervise priests and using those same bishops as royal officials and judges. Nor did his piety prevent him from expropriating strategically sited church lands, especially estates along the border with the Danelaw, and transferring them to royal thegns and officials who could better defend them against Viking attacks.[109][110] Effect of Danish raids on education[edit] The Danish raids had a devastating effect on learning in England. Alfred lamented in the preface to his translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care that "learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English or even translate a single letter from Latin into English: and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either".[111] Alfred undoubtedly exaggerated, for dramatic effect, the abysmal state of learning in England during his youth.[6] That Latin learning had not been obliterated is evidenced by the presence in his court of learned Mercian and West Saxon clerics such as Plegmund, Wæferth, and Wulfsige.[112] Manuscript production in England dropped off precipitously around the 860s when the Viking invasions began in earnest, not to be revived until the end of the century.[113] Numerous Anglo-Saxon manuscripts burnt up along with the churches that housed them. A solemn diploma from Christ Church, Canterbury, dated 873, is so poorly constructed and written that historian Nicholas Brooks posited a scribe who was either so blind he could not read what he wrote, or who knew little or no Latin. "It is clear", Brooks concludes, "that the metropolitan church [of Canterbury] must have been quite unable to provide any effective training in the scriptures or in Christian worship".[114] Establishment of a court school[edit] Following the example of Charlemagne, Alfred established a court school for the education of his own children, those of the nobility, and "a good many of lesser birth".[104] There they studied books in both English and Latin and "devoted themselves to writing, to such an extent ... they were seen to be devoted and intelligent students of the liberal arts".[115]He recruited scholars from the Continent and from Britain to aid in the revival of Christian learning in Wessex and to provide the king personal instruction. Grimbald and John the Saxon came from Francia; Plegmund (whom Alfred appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 890), Bishop Werferth of Worcester, Æthelstan, and the royal chaplains Werwulf, from Mercia; and Asser, from St David's in southwestern Wales.[116] Advocacy of education in English[edit] Alfred's educational ambitions seem to have extended beyond the establishment of a court school. Believing that without Christian wisdom there can be neither prosperity nor success in war, Alfred aimed "to set to learning (as long as they are not useful for some other employment) all the free-born young men now in England who have the means to apply themselves to it".[117] Conscious of the decay of Latin literacy in his realm Alfred proposed that primary education be taught in English, with those wishing to advance to holy orders to continue their studies in Latin.[118] There were few "books of wisdom" written in English. Alfred sought to remedy this through an ambitious court-centred programme of translating into English the books he deemed "most necessary for all men to know".[118] It is unknown when Alfred launched this programme but it may have been during the 880s when Wessex was enjoying a respite from Viking attacks. Alfred was, until recently, often considered to have been the author of many of the translations but this is now considered doubtful in almost all cases. Scholars more often refer to translations as "Alfredian" indicating that they probably had something to do with his patronage but are unlikely to be his own work.[119] Apart from the lost Handboc or Encheiridio, which seems to have been a commonplace book kept by the king, the earliest work to be translated was the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a book greatly popular in the Middle Ages. The translation was undertaken at Alfred's command by Werferth, Bishop of Worcester, with the king merely furnishing a preface.[53] Remarkably, Alfred - undoubtedly with the advice and aid of his court scholars - translated four works himself: Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, St. Augustine's Soliloquies and the first fifty psalms of the Psalter.[120] One might add to this list the translation, in Alfred's law code, of excerpts from the Vulgate Book of Exodus. The Old English versions of Orosius's Histories against the Pagans and Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People are no longer accepted by scholars as Alfred's own translations because of lexical and stylistic differences.[120] Nonetheless the consensus remains that they were part of the Alfredian programme of translation. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge suggest this also for Bald's Leechbook and the anonymous Old English Martyrology.[121] The preface of Alfred's translation of Pope Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care explained why he thought it necessary to translate works such as this from Latin into English. Although he described his method as translating "sometimes word for word, sometimes sense for sense", the translation actually keeps very close to the original although, through his choice of language, he blurred throughout the distinction between spiritual and secular authority. Alfred meant the translation to be used, and circulated it to all his bishops.[122] Interest in Alfred's translation of Pastoral Care was so enduring that copies were still being made in the 11th century.[123] Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy was the most popular philosophical handbook of the Middle Ages. Unlike the translation of the Pastoral Care the Alfredian text deals very freely with the original and, though the late Dr. G. Schepss showed that many of the additions to the text are to be traced not to the translator himself[124] but to the glosses and commentaries which he used, still there is much in the work which is distinctive to the translation and has been taken to reflect philosophies of kingship in Alfred's milieu. It is in the Boethius that the oft-quoted sentence occurs: "To speak briefly: I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and after my life to leave to them that should come after, my memory in good works."[125] The book has come down to us in two manuscripts only. In one of these[126] the writing is prose, in the other[127] a combination of prose and alliterating verse. The latter manuscript was severely damaged in the 18th and 19th centuries.[128] The last of the Alfredian works is one which bears the name Blostman ('Blooms') or Anthology. The first half is based mainly on the Soliloquies of St Augustine of Hippo, the remainder is drawn from various sources. The material has traditionally been thought to contain much that is Alfred's own and highly characteristic of him. The last words of it may be quoted; they form a fitting epitaph for the noblest of English kings. "Therefore, he seems to me a very foolish man, and truly wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear."[122] Alfred appears as a character in the twelfth- or thirteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale where his wisdom and skill with proverbs is praised. The Proverbs of Alfred, a thirteenth-century work, contains sayings that are not likely to have originated with Alfred but attest to his posthumous medieval reputation for wisdom.[129] 2A drawing of the Alfred Jewel. The Alfred Jewel, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, commissioned by Alfred. The Alfred jewel, discovered in Somerset in 1693, has long been associated with King Alfred because of its Old English inscription AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN ('Alfred ordered me to be made'). The jewel is about 2 1⁄2 inches (6.4 centimetres) long, made of filigreed gold, enclosing a highly polished piece of quartz crystal beneath which is set in a cloisonné enamel plaque with an enamelled image of a man holding floriate sceptres, perhaps personifying Sight or the Wisdom of God.[130] It was at one time attached to a thin rod or stick based on the hollow socket at its base. The jewel certainly dates from Alfred's reign. Although its function is unknown it has been often suggested that the jewel was one of the æstels—pointers for reading—that Alfred ordered sent to every bishopric accompanying a copy of his translation of the Pastoral Care. Each æstel was worth the princely sum of 50 mancuseswhich fits in well with the quality workmanship and expensive materials of the Alfred jewel.[131] Historian Richard Abels sees Alfred's educational and military reforms as complementary. Restoring religion and learning in Wessex, Abels contends, was to Alfred's mind as essential to the defence of his realm as the building of the burhs.[132] As Alfred observed in the preface to his English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, kings who fail to obey their divine duty to promote learning can expect earthly punishments to befall their people.[133] The pursuit of wisdom, he assured his readers of the Boethius, was the surest path to power: "Study wisdom, then, and, when you have learned it, condemn it not, for I tell you that by its means you may without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it".[134] The portrayal of the West-Saxon resistance to the Vikings by Asser and the chronicler as a Christian holy war was more than mere rhetoric or propaganda. It reflected Alfred's own belief in a doctrine of divine rewards and punishments rooted in a vision of a hierarchical Christian world order in which God is the Lord to whom kings owe obedience and through whom they derive their authority over their followers. The need to persuade his nobles to undertake work for the 'common good' led Alfred and his court scholars to strengthen and deepen the conception of Christian kingship that he had inherited by building upon the legacy of earlier kings such as Offa as well as clerical writers such as Bede, Alcuin and the other luminaries of the Carolingian renaissance. This was not a cynical use of religion to manipulate his subjects into obedience but an intrinsic element in Alfred's worldview. He believed, as did other kings in ninth-century England and Francia, that God had entrusted him with the spiritual as well as physical welfare of his people. If the Christian faith fell into ruin in his kingdom, if the clergy were too ignorant to understand the Latin words they butchered in their offices and liturgies, if the ancient monasteries and collegiate churches lay deserted out of indifference, he was answerable before God, as Josiah had been. Alfred's ultimate responsibility was the pastoral care of his people.[132] Appearance and character[edit] No known portrait of Alfred the Great exists from life. A likeness by artist and historian George S. Stuart created from his physical description mentioned in historical records. Asser wrote of Alfred in his Life of King Alfred, Now, he was greatly loved, more than all his brothers, by his father and mother—indeed, by everybody—with a universal and profound love, and he was always brought up in the royal court and nowhere else. ... [He] was seen to be more comely in appearance than his other brothers, and more pleasing in manner, speech and behaviour ... [and] in spite of all the demands of the present life, it has been the desire for wisdom, more than anything else, together with the nobility of his birth, which have characterized the nature of his noble mind.[135] It is also written by Asser that Alfred did not learn to read until he was twelve years old or later, which is described as "shameful negligence" of his parents and tutors. Alfred was an excellent listener and had an incredible memory and he retained poetry and psalms very well. A story is told by Asser about how his mother held up a book of Saxon poetry to him and his brothers, and said; "I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn it the fastest." After excitedly asking, "Will you really give this book to the one of us who can understand it the soonest and recite it to you?" Alfred then took it to his teacher, learned it, and recited it back to his mother.[136] Alfred is also noted as carrying around a small book, probably a medieval version of a small pocket notebook, which contained psalms and many prayers that he often collected. Asser writes: these "he collected in a single book, as I have seen for myself; amid all the affairs of the present life he took it around with him everywhere for the sake of prayer, and was inseparable from it."[136] An excellent hunter in every branch of the sport, Alfred is remembered as an enthusiastic huntsman against whom nobody's skills could compare.[136] Although he was the youngest of his brothers, he was probably the most open-minded. He was an early advocate for education. His desire for learning could have come from his early love of English poetry and inability to read or physically record it until later in life. Asser writes that Alfred "could not satisfy his craving for what he desired the most, namely the liberal arts; for, as he used to say, there were no good scholars in the entire kingdom of the West Saxons at that time".[136] Family[edit] A posthumous image of Ealhswith, 1220. In 868, Alfred married Ealhswith, daughter of a Mercian nobleman, Æthelred Mucel, Ealdorman of the Gaini. The Gaini were probably one of the tribal groups of the Mercians. Ealhswith's mother, Eadburh, was a member of the Mercian royal family.[137] They had five or six children together including: Edward the Elder who succeeded his father as king; Æthelflæd who became lady of the Mercians; and Ælfthryth who married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders. His mother was Osburga, daughter of Oslac of the Isle of Wight, Chief Butler of England. Asser, in his Vita Ælfredi asserts that this shows his lineage from the Jutes of the Isle of Wight. This is unlikely as Bede tells us that they were all slaughtered by the Saxons under Cædwalla.[138] Osferth was described as a relative in King Alfred's will and he attested charters in a high position until 934. A charter of King Edward's reign described him as the king's brother - mistakenly according to Keynes and Lapidge, and in the view of Janet Nelson he probably was an illegitimate son of King Alfred.[139][140] NameBirthDeathNotesÆthelflæd12 June 918Married c. 886, Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians d. 911; had issueEdwardc. 87417 July 924Married (1) Ecgwynn, (2) Ælfflæd, (3) 919 EadgifuÆthelgifuAbbess of ShaftesburyÆthelweard16 October 922(?)Married and had issueÆlfthryth929Married Baldwin II d. 918; had issue Death and burial[edit] Alfred's will Alfred died on 26 October 899 at the age of 50 or 51.[141] How he died is unknown, although he suffered throughout his life with a painful and unpleasant illness. His biographer Asser gave a detailed description of Alfred's symptoms and this has allowed modern doctors to provide a possible diagnosis. It is thought that he had either Crohn's disease or haemorrhoids.[9][142] His grandson King Eadred seems to have suffered from a similar illness.[143][i] Alfred was buried temporarily in the Old Minster in Winchester. Four years after his death, he was moved to the New Minster (perhaps built especially to receive his body). The New Minster moved to Hyde in 1110 a little north of the city, and the monks were transferred to Hyde Abbeyalong with Alfred's body and those of his wife and children, which were presumably interred before the high altar. The abbey was dissolved in 1539 during the reign of Henry VIII and the church was demolished, leaving the graves intact.[145] The royal graves and many others were rediscovered by chance in 1788 when a prison was being constructed by convicts on the site. Prisoners dug across the width of the altar area in order to dispose of rubble left at the dissolution. Coffins were stripped of lead, and bones were scattered and lost. The prison was demolished between 1846 and 1850.[146] Further excavations were inconclusive in 1866 and 1897.[145][147] In 1866, amateur antiquarian John Mellor claimed to have recovered a number of bones from the site which he said were those of Alfred. These came into the possession of the vicar of nearby St Bartholomew's Church who reburied them in an unmarked grave in the church graveyard.[146] Excavations conducted by the Winchester Museums Service of the Hyde Abbey site in 1999 located a second pit dug in front of where the high altar would have been located, which was identified as probably dating to Mellor's 1886 excavation.[145] The 1999 archeological excavation uncovered the foundations of the abbey buildings and some bones, suggested at the time to be those of Alfred; they proved instead to belong to an elderly woman.[148] In March 2013, the Diocese of Winchester exhumed the bones from the unmarked grave at St Bartholomew's and placed them in secure storage. The diocese made no claim that they were the bones of Alfred, but intended to secure them for later analysis, and from the attentions of people whose interest may have been sparked by the recent identification of the remains of King Richard III.[148][149] The bones were radiocarbon-dated but the results showed that they were from the 1300s and therefore not of Alfred. In January 2014, a fragment of pelvis that had been unearthed in the 1999 excavation of the Hyde site, and had subsequently lain in a Winchester museum store room, was radiocarbon-dated to the correct period. It has been suggested that this bone may belong to either Alfred or his son Edward, but this remains unproven.[150][151] Legacy[edit] See also: Cultural depictions of Alfred the Great Statue of Alfred the Great at Wantage, Oxfordshire Alfred is venerated as a saint by some Christian traditions.[152] Though Henry VI of England attempted unsuccessfully to have him canonized by Pope Eugene IV in 1441, he was venerated sometimes in the Catholic Church; however the current "Roman Martyrology" does not mention him.[153][154][j] The Anglican Communion venerates him as a Christian hero, with a feast day or commemoration on 26 October, and he may often be found depicted in stained glass in Church of England parish churches.[155] Alfred commissioned Bishop Asser to write his biography, which inevitably emphasised Alfred's positive aspects. Later medieval historians such as Geoffrey of Monmouth also reinforced Alfred's favourable image. By the time of the Reformation, Alfred was seen as a pious Christian ruler who promoted the use of English rather than Latin, and so the translations that he commissioned were viewed as untainted by the later Roman Catholic influences of the Normans. Consequently, it was writers of the sixteenth century who gave Alfred his epithet as "the Great", not any of Alfred's contemporaries.[156] The epithet was retained by succeeding generations who admired Alfred's patriotism, success against barbarism, promotion of education, and establishment of the rule of law.[156] A number of educational establishments are named in Alfred's honour: The University of Winchester created from the former King Alfred's College, Winchester (1928 to 2004) Alfred University and Alfred State College in Alfred, New York; the local telephone exchange for Alfred University is 871 in commemoration of Alfred's ascension to the throne The University of Liverpool created a King Alfred Chair of English Literature 18th century portrait of Alfred by Samuel Woodforde King Alfred's Academy, a secondary school in Wantage, Oxfordshire, the birthplace of Alfred King's Lodge School in Chippenham, Wiltshire, so named because King Alfred's hunting lodge is reputed to have stood on or near the site of the school The King Alfred School and Specialist Sports Academy, Burnham Road, Highbridge, so named due to its rough proximity to Brent Knoll (a Beacon site) and Athelney The King Alfred School in Barnet, North London, UK King Alfred's house in Bishop Stopford's School at Enfield The Royal Navy has named one ship and two shore establishments HMS King Alfred, and one of the first ships of the US Navy was named USS Alfred in his honour. In 2002, Alfred was ranked number 14 in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.[157] Statues[edit] Alfred University (New York)[edit] One of the first items visible when entering the campus of Alfred University is a bronze statue of the king, created in 1990 by William Underhill. It features the king as a young man, holding a shield in his left hand and an open book in his right.[158] Pewsey[edit] A prominent statue of King Alfred the Great stands in the middle of Pewsey. It was unveiled in June 1913 to commemorate the coronation of King George V.[159] Wantage[edit] A statue of Alfred the Great, situated in the Wantage market place, was sculpted by Count Gleichen, a relative of Queen Victoria, and unveiled on 14 July 1877 by the Prince and Princess of Wales.[160] The statue was vandalised on New Year's Eve 2007, losing part of its right arm and axe. After the arm and axe were replaced the statue was again vandalised on Christmas Eve 2008, losing its axe.[160] Winchester[edit] A bronze statue of Alfred the Great stands at the eastern end of The Broadway, close to the site of Winchester's medieval East Gate. The statue was designed by Hamo Thornycroft, cast in bronze by Singer & Sons of Frome and erected in 1899 to mark one thousand years since Alfred's death.[161][162] The statue is placed on a pedestal consisting of two immense blocks of grey Cornish granite.[163] Cleveland, Ohio[edit] A marble statue of Alfred the Great stands on the North side of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. It was sculpted by Isidore Konti in 1910.[164] Chronology[edit] DateEventc. 848Alfred is born in Wantage, Berkshire.c. 852Alfred's oldest brother, Æthelstan of Kent dies.c.853Alfred's sister, Æthelswith marries the King of Mercians, Burgred.c. 854Alfred's father Æthelwulf, sends Alfred and his youngest older brother, Æthelred on a pilgrimage to Rome.[165]Alfred's mother, Osburh dies.c. 855Æthelwulf himself goes on a pilgrimage with Alfred, after dividing his realm between his sons, Æthelbald and Æthelberht.[166]c. 856Preteen Judith of Flanders becomes the stepmother of Alfred after Æthelwulf marries her.[167]Æthelwulf returns home, but Æthelbald refuses to give up his position, forcing Æthelwulf to retire to Kent with Æthelberht.[168]c. 858Æthelwulf dies.c. 860Æthelbald dies and is succeeded by his brother, Æthelberht.c. 865The Great Heathen Army lands in East Anglia.c. 868Æthelred aids

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