Wikipedia

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". Editors who do not log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia, as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation", but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.


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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". Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users... 524 people... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." However, "Business Insider" editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Wikipedia content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders".


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A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, 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. According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content".


Wikipedia

Several studies have shown that most Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women 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. 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". Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.


Wikipedia

There are currently language editions of Wikipedia (also called "language versions", or simply "Wikipedias"). As of 2022, the six largest, in order of article count, are the , , , , , and Wikipedias. The and -largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. The latter are both languages of the Philippines.


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In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (, , , , , , , , , , and ), seven more have over 500,000 articles (, , , , , and ), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000. The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 0.1*floor(/100000) million articles. the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. The top 10 editions represent approximately 85% of the total traffic.


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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") or points of view.


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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.


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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". 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). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia, and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.


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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. Articles available in more than one language may offer "interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.


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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.


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On March 1, 2014, "The Economist", in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years." 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.


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In contrast, the trend analysis for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) shows success in retaining active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. 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.


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Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words


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Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. In 2010, columnist and journalist Edwin Black described Wikipedia as being a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods". 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.


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Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black alleged (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) that articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an "ax to grind" on the topic. A 2008 article in "Education Next" Journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.


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In 2020, Omer Benjakob and Stephen Harrison noted that "Media coverage of Wikipedia has radically shifted over the past two decades: once cast as an intellectual frivolity, it is now lauded as the 'last bastion of shared reality' online."


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In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appears to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics.


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In 2006, the "Wikipedia Watch" criticism website listed dozens of examples of plagiarism in the English Wikipedia.


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Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as "Encyclopædia Britannica" are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. 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." Joseph 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." Others raised similar critiques. The findings by "Nature" were disputed by "Encyclopædia Britannica", and in response, "Nature" gave a rebuttal of the points raised by "Britannica". 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× 10 articles compared, vs >10 and >10 set sizes for "Britannica" and the English Wikipedia, respectively).


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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. Concerns have been raised by "PC World" in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, the insertion of false information, vandalism, and similar problems.


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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 as well as relevant information being 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. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, "the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created".


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Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Editors of traditional reference works such as the "Encyclopædia Britannica" have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. 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.


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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.


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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. 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. These issues, among others, had been parodied since the first decade of Wikipedia, notably by Stephen Colbert on "The Colbert Report".


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"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".


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Most university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. 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.


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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. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, 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".


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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.


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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." 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. 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." 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."


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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. 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). 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 and Pakistan, amongst other countries.


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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:


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These numbers refer only to the number 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.


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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".


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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 the most underrepresented. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.


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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. 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.


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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". 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.


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Systemic bias on Wikipedia may follow that of culture generally, for example favoring certain nationalities, ethnicities or majority religions. It may more specifically follow the biases of Internet culture, inclining to be young, male, English-speaking, educated, technologically aware, and wealthy enough to spare time for editing. Biases, intrinsically, may include an overemphasis on topics such as pop culture, technology, and current events.


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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. 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. 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.


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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.


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Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing information about 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.


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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.


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The Wikipedia article about "Virgin Killer"—a 1976 album from the German rock 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.


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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. 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. That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law. Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger's accusation, saying that Wikipedia did not have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it." Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteered 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". Critics, including Wikipediocracy, noticed that many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010 have reappeared.


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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. 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 a relatively unimportant individual and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against her or his wishes.


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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.


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Wikipedia has a "" that uses Znuny, a free and open-source software fork of OTRS 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.


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The perceived toxic attitudes and tolerance of violent and abusive language were reasons put forth in 2013 for the gender gap in Wikipedia editorship.


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A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University's College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University found significant gender differences in: confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. "Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict), and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men."


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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. 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.


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In May 2014, Wikimedia Foundation named Lila Tretikov as its second executive director, taking over for Sue Gardner. 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." 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.


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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 of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2016. Maher 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."


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Maher served as executive director until April 2021. Maryana Iskander was named the incoming CEO in September 2021, and took over that role in January 2022.


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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.


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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. 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 (GPL) 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.


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In April 2005, a Lucene extension was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Wikipedia switched from MySQL to Lucene for searching. Lucene was later replaced by CirrusSearch which is based on Elasticsearch.


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In July 2013, after extensive beta testing, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) extension, VisualEditor, was opened to public use. It was met with much rejection and criticism, and was described as "slow and buggy". The feature was changed from opt-out to opt-in afterward.


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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. One controversial contributor, , creating articles with his bot was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses). 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. 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 that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government. Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.


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According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots.


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Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000-page requests per second, depending on the time of the day. page requests are first passed to a front-end layer of Varnish caching servers and back-end layer caching is done by Apache Traffic Server. Further statistics, based on a publicly available 3-month Wikipedia access trace, are available. 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.


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Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers running the Debian operating system. there were 300 in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam. By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2017, Wikipedia installed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia.


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Following growing amounts of incoming donations exceeding seven digits in 2013 as recently reported, 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. 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 to ameliorate issues of editor attrition, which have met with limited success. The estimates for reinvestment by industrial organizations into internal research and development was studied by Adam Jaffe, who recorded that the range of 4% to 25% annually was to be recommended, with high-end technology requiring the higher level of support for internal reinvestment. At the 2013 level of contributions for Wikimedia presently documented as 45 million dollars, the computed budget level recommended by Jaffe and Caballero for reinvestment into internal research and development is between 1.8 million and 11.3 million dollars annually. In 2016, the level of contributions were reported by" Bloomberg News" as being at $77 million annually, updating the Jaffe estimates for the higher level of support to between $3.08 million and $19.2 million annually.


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Community-produced news publications include the English Wikipedia's "The Signpost", founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, an attorney, Wikipedia administrator, and former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. It covers news and events from the site, as well as major events from other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikimedia Commons. Similar publications are the German-language "Kurier", and the Portuguese-language "Correio da Wikipédia". Other past and present community news publications on English Wikipedia include the "Wikiworld" webcomic, the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, and newsletters of specific WikiProjects like "The Bugle" from WikiProject Military History and the monthly newsletter from The Guild of Copy Editors. There are also several publications from the Wikimedia Foundation and multilingual publications such as Wikimedia Diff and "This Month in Education".


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The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. Over 60 publishers have partnered with The Wikipedia Library to provide access to their resources: when ICE Publishing joined in 2020, a spokesman said "By enabling free access to our content for Wikipedia editors, we hope to further the research community's resources – creating and updating Wikipedia entries on civil engineering which are read by thousands of monthly readers."


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When the project was started in 2001, all text in Wikipedia was covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. The GFDL was created for software manuals that come with free software programs licensed under the GPL. This made it a poor choice for a general reference work: for example, the GFDL requires the reprints of materials from Wikipedia to come with a full copy of the GFDL text. In December 2002, the Creative Commons license was released: it was specifically designed for creative works in general, not just for software manuals. The license gained popularity among bloggers and others distributing creative works on the Web. The Wikipedia project sought the switch to the Creative Commons. Because the two licenses, GFDL and Creative Commons, were incompatible, in November 2008, following the request of the project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released a new version of the GFDL designed specifically to allow Wikipedia to by August 1, 2009. (A new version of the GFDL automatically covers Wikipedia contents.) In April 2009, Wikipedia and its sister projects held a community-wide referendum which decided the switch in June 2009.


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The handling of media files (e.g. image files) varies across language editions. Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine, while the others have opted not to, in part because of the lack of fair use doctrines in their home countries (e.g. in Japanese copyright law). Media files covered by free content licenses (e.g. Creative Commons' CC BY-SA) are shared across language editions via Wikimedia Commons repository, a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia's accommodation of varying international copyright laws regarding images has led some to observe that its photographic coverage of topics lags behind the quality of the encyclopedic text.


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The Wikimedia Foundation is not a licensor of content on Wikipedia and/or its related projects, but merely a hosting service for contributors to and licensors of Wikipedia, a position which was successfully defended in 2004 in a court in France.


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Because Wikipedia content is distributed under an open license, anyone can reuse or re-distribute it at no charge. The content of Wikipedia has been published in many forms, both online and offline, outside the Wikipedia website.


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Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged. Wikipedia publishes of its contents, but these are text-only; there was no dump available of Wikipedia's images. is a for-profit solution to this.


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Several languages of Wikipedia also maintain a reference desk, where volunteers answer questions from the general public. According to a study by Pnina Shachaf in the "Journal of Documentation", the quality of the Wikipedia reference desk is comparable to a standard library reference desk, with an accuracy of 55 percent.


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Wikipedia's original medium was for users to read and edit content using any standard web browser through a fixed Internet connection. Although Wikipedia content has been accessible through the mobile web since July 2013, "The New York Times" on February 9, 2014, quoted Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stating that the transition of internet traffic from desktops to mobile devices was significant and a cause for concern and worry. The article in "The New York Times" reported the comparison statistics for mobile edits stating that, "Only 20 percent of the readership of the English-language Wikipedia comes via mobile devices, a figure substantially lower than the percentage of mobile traffic for other media sites, many of which approach 50 percent. And the shift to mobile editing has lagged even more." "The New York Times" reports that Möller has assigned "a team of 10 software developers focused on mobile", out of a total of approximately 200 employees working at the Wikimedia Foundation. One principal concern cited by "The New York Times" for the "worry" is for Wikipedia to effectively address attrition issues with the number of editors which the online encyclopedia attracts to edit and maintain its content in a mobile access environment.


Wikipedia

"Bloomberg Businessweek" reported in July 2014 that Google's Android mobile apps have dominated the largest share of global smartphone shipments for 2013 with 78.6% of market share over their next closest competitor in iOS with 15.2% of the market. At the time of the Tretikov appointment and her posted web interview with Sue Gardner in May 2014, Wikimedia representatives made a technical announcement concerning the number of mobile access systems in the market seeking access to Wikipedia. Directly after the posted web interview, the representatives stated that Wikimedia would be applying an all-inclusive approach to accommodate as many mobile access systems as possible in its efforts for expanding general mobile access, including BlackBerry and the Windows Phone system, making market share a secondary issue. The Android app for Wikipedia was released on July 23, 2014, to generally positive reviews, scoring over four of a possible five in a poll of approximately 200,000 users downloading from Google. The version for iOS was released on April 3, 2013, to similar reviews. Later versions have also been released.


Wikipedia

Access to Wikipedia from mobile phones was possible as early as 2004, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), via the Wapedia service. In June 2007 Wikipedia launched en.mobile.wikipedia.org, an official website for wireless devices. In 2009 a newer mobile service was officially released, located at en.m.wikipedia.org, which caters to more advanced mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices or WebOS-based devices. Several other methods of mobile access to Wikipedia have emerged. Many devices and applications optimize or enhance the display of Wikipedia content for mobile devices, while some also incorporate additional features such as use of Wikipedia metadata, such as geoinformation.


Wikipedia

Wikipedia Zero was an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to expand the reach of the encyclopedia to the developing countries. It was discontinued in February 2018.


Wikipedia

Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult and this discourages new potential contributors. The number of Wikipedia editors has been declining after several years and Tom Simonite of "MIT Technology Review" claims the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. Simonite alleges some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and those editors have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Lih alleges there is a serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this. Lih fears for Wikipedia's long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain and rival encyclopedias will not replace it.


Wikipedia

Access to the Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in mainland China since May 2015. This was done after Wikipedia started to use HTTPS encryption, which made selective censorship more difficult.


Wikipedia

In 2017, "Quartz" reported that the Chinese government had begun creating an unofficial version of Wikipedia. However, unlike Wikipedia, the website's contents would only be editable by scholars from state-owned Chinese institutions. The article stated it had been approved by the State Council of the People's Republic of China in 2011.


Wikipedia

In 2017–18, after a barrage of false news reports, both Facebook and YouTube announced they would rely on Wikipedia to help their users evaluate reports and reject false news. Noam Cohen, writing in "The Washington Post" states, "YouTube's reliance on Wikipedia to set the record straight builds on the thinking of another fact-challenged platform, the Facebook social network, which announced last year that Wikipedia would help its users root out 'fake news'." Alexa records the daily pageviews per visitor as 3.03 and the average daily time on site as 3:46 minutes.


Wikipedia

In February 2014, "The New York Times" reported that Wikipedia was ranked fifth globally among all websites, stating "With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month... Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors." However, its ranking dropped to 13th globally by June 2020 due mostly to a rise in popularity of Chinese websites for online shopping.


Wikipedia

In addition to logistic growth in the number of its articles, Wikipedia has steadily gained status as a general reference website since its inception in 2001. The number of readers of Wikipedia worldwide reached 365 million at the end of 2009. The Pew Internet and American Life project found that one third of US Internet users consulted Wikipedia. In 2011 "Business Insider" gave Wikipedia a valuation of $4 billion if it ran advertisements.


Wikipedia

According to "Wikipedia Readership Survey 2011", the average age of Wikipedia readers is 36, with a rough parity between genders. Almost half of Wikipedia readers visit the site more than five times a month, and a similar number of readers specifically look for Wikipedia in search engine results. About 47 percent of Wikipedia readers do not realize that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization.


Wikipedia

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia's coverage of the pandemic received international media attention, and brought an increase in Wikipedia readership overall.


Wikipedia

Wikipedia's content has also been used in academic studies, books, conferences, and court cases. The Parliament of Canada's website refers to Wikipedia's article on same-sex marriage in the "related links" section of its "further reading" list for the "Civil Marriage Act". The encyclopedia's assertions are increasingly used as a source by organizations such as the US federal courts and the World Intellectual Property Organization—though mainly for "supporting information" rather than information decisive to a case. Content appearing on Wikipedia has also been cited as a source and referenced in some US intelligence agency reports. In December 2008, the scientific journal "RNA Biology" launched a new section for descriptions of families of RNA molecules and requires authors who contribute to the section to also submit a draft article on the RNA family for publication in Wikipedia.


Wikipedia

Wikipedia has also been used as a source in journalism, often without attribution, and several reporters have been dismissed for plagiarizing from Wikipedia.


Wikipedia

In 2006, "Time" magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation (along with YouTube, Reddit, MySpace, and Facebook) in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people worldwide.


Wikipedia

In July 2007, Wikipedia was the focus of a 30-minute documentary on BBC Radio 4 which argued that, with increased usage and awareness, the number of references to Wikipedia in popular culture is such that the word is one of a select group of 21st-century nouns that are so familiar (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that they no longer need explanation.


Wikipedia

On September 28, 2007, Italian politician Franco Grillini raised a parliamentary question with the minister of cultural resources and activities about the necessity of freedom of panorama. He said that the lack of such freedom forced Wikipedia, "the seventh most consulted website", to forbid all images of modern Italian buildings and art, and claimed this was hugely damaging to tourist revenues.


Wikipedia

On September 16, 2007, "The Washington Post" reported that Wikipedia had become a focal point in the 2008 US election campaign, saying: "Type a candidate's name into Google, and among the first results is a Wikipedia page, making those entries arguably as important as any ad in defining a candidate. Already, the presidential entries are being edited, dissected and debated countless times each day." An October 2007 Reuters article, titled "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol", reported the recent phenomenon of how having a Wikipedia article vindicates one's notability.


Wikipedia

Active participation also has an impact. Law students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clear and succinct writing for an uninitiated audience.


Wikipedia

A working group led by Peter Stone (formed as a part of the Stanford-based project One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence) in its report called Wikipedia "the best-known example of crowdsourcing... that far exceeds traditionally-compiled information sources, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, in scale and depth".


Wikipedia

In a 2017 opinion piece for "Wired", Hossein Derakhshan describes Wikipedia as "one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web" and contrasted its existence as a text-based source of knowledge with social media and social networking services, the latter having "since colonized the web for television's values". For Derakhshan, Wikipedia's goal as an encyclopedia represents the Age of Enlightenment tradition of rationality triumphing over emotions, a trend which he considers "endangered" due to the "gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn mean[s] a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment". Rather than "" (), social networks have led to a culture of "dare not to care to know". This is while Wikipedia faces "a more concerning problem" than funding, namely "a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website". Consequently, the challenge for Wikipedia and those who use it is to "save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know."


Wikipedia

Wikipedia won two major awards in May 2004. The first was a Golden Nica for Digital Communities of the annual Prix Ars Electronica contest; this came with a €10,000 (£6,588; $12,700) grant and an invitation to present at the PAE Cyberarts Festival in Austria later that year. The second was a Judges' Webby Award for the "community" category.


Wikipedia

In 2007, readers of brandchannel.com voted Wikipedia as the fourth-highest brand ranking, receiving 15 percent of the votes in answer to the question "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?"


Wikipedia

In September 2008, Wikipedia received Quadriga "A Mission of Enlightenment" award of Werkstatt Deutschland along with Boris Tadić, Eckart Höfling, and Peter Gabriel. The award was presented to Wales by David Weinberger.


Wikipedia

In 2015, Wikipedia was awarded both the annual Erasmus Prize, which recognizes exceptional contributions to culture, society or social sciences, and the Spanish Princess of Asturias Award on International Cooperation. Speaking at the Asturian Parliament in Oviedo, the city that hosts the awards ceremony, Jimmy Wales praised the work of the Asturian language Wikipedia users.


Wikipedia

Many parodies target Wikipedia's openness and susceptibility to inserted inaccuracies, with characters vandalizing or modifying the online encyclopedia project's articles.


Wikipedia

Comedian Stephen Colbert has parodied or referenced Wikipedia on numerous episodes of his show "The Colbert Report" and coined the related term "wikiality", meaning "together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on". Another example can be found in "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence", a July 2006 front-page article in "The Onion", as well as the 2010 "The Onion" article "'L.A. Law' Wikipedia Page Viewed 874 Times Today".


Wikipedia

In an April 2007 episode of the American television comedy "The Office", office manager (Michael Scott) is shown relying on a hypothetical Wikipedia article for information on negotiation tactics to assist him in negotiating lesser pay for an employee. Viewers of the show tried to add the episode's mention of the page as a section of the actual Wikipedia article on negotiation, but this effort was prevented by other users on the article's talk page.


Wikipedia

"My Number One Doctor", a 2007 episode of the television show "Scrubs", played on the perception that Wikipedia is an unreliable reference tool with a scene in which Perry Cox reacts to a patient who says that a Wikipedia article indicates that the raw food diet reverses the effects of bone cancer by retorting that the same editor who wrote that article also wrote the "Battlestar Galactica" episode guide.


Wikipedia

In 2008, the comedy website "CollegeHumor" produced a video sketch named "Professor Wikipedia", in which the fictitious Professor Wikipedia instructs a class with a medley of unverifiable and occasionally absurd statements.


Wikipedia

The "Dilbert" comic strip from May 8, 2009, features a character supporting an improbable claim by saying "Give me ten minutes and then check Wikipedia."


Wikipedia

In July 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a comedy series called "Bigipedia", which was set on a website which was a parody of Wikipedia. Some of the sketches were directly inspired by Wikipedia and its articles.


Wikipedia

On August 23, 2013, the "New Yorker" website published a cartoon with this caption: "Dammit, Manning, have you considered the pronoun war that this is going to start on your Wikipedia page?" The cartoon referred to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning), an American activist, politician, and former United States Army soldier and a trans woman.


Wikipedia

In December 2015, John Julius Norwich stated, in a letter published in "The Times" newspaper, that as a historian he resorted to Wikipedia "at least a dozen times a day", and had never yet caught it out. He described it as "a work of reference as useful as any in existence", with so wide a range that it is almost impossible to find a person, place, or thing that it has left uncovered and that he could never have written his last two books without it.


Wikipedia

Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation. These other Wikimedia projects include Wiktionary, a dictionary project launched in December 2002, Wikiquote, a collection of quotations created a week after Wikimedia launched, Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts, Wikimedia Commons, a site devoted to free-knowledge multimedia, Wikinews, for citizen journalism, and Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. Another sister project of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, is a catalogue of species. In 2012 Wikivoyage, an editable travel guide, and Wikidata, an editable knowledge base, launched.


Wikipedia

The most obvious economic effect of Wikipedia has been the death of commercial encyclopedias, especially the printed versions, e.g. "Encyclopædia Britannica", which were unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. Nicholas Carr wrote a 2005 essay, "The amorality of Web 2.0", that criticized websites with user-generated content, like Wikipedia, for possibly leading to professional (and, in his view, superior) content producers' going out of business, because "free trumps quality all the time". Carr wrote: "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening." Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of "Wired Magazine", wrote in "Nature" that the "wisdom of crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals, with their rigorous peer review process.


Wikipedia

There is also an ongoing debate about the influence of Wikipedia on the biography publishing business. "The worry is that, if you can get all that information from Wikipedia, what's left for biography?" said Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and author of "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton" and "George Eliot: the Last Victorian".


Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been widely used as a corpus for linguistic research in computational linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing. In particular, it commonly serves as a target knowledge base for the entity linking problem, which is then called "wikification", and to the related problem of word-sense disambiguation. Methods similar to wikification can in turn be used to find "missing" links in Wikipedia.


Wikipedia

In 2015, French researchers José Lages of the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon and Dima Shepelyansky of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse published a global university ranking based on Wikipedia scholarly citations. They used PageRank, CheiRank and similar algorithms "followed by the number of appearances in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia (descending order) and the century in which they were founded (ascending order)". The study was updated in 2019.


Wikipedia

Studies related to Wikipedia have been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to support various operations. One of the most important areas—automatic detection of vandalism and data quality assessment in Wikipedia.


Wikipedia

In February 2022, civil servants from the UK's Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities were found to have used Wikipedia for research in the drafting of the Levelling Up White Paper after journalists at "The Independent" noted that parts of the document had been lifted directly from Wikipedia articles on Constantinople and the list of largest cities throughout history.


Wikipedia

Several interactive multimedia encyclopedias incorporating entries written by the public existed long before Wikipedia was founded. The first of these was the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, which included text (entered on BBC Micro computers) and photographs from more than a million contributors in the UK, and covered the geography, art, and culture of the UK. This was the first interactive multimedia encyclopedia (and was also the first major multimedia document connected through internal links), with the majority of articles being accessible through an interactive map of the UK. The user interface and part of the content of the Domesday Project were emulated on a website until 2008.


Wikipedia

Several free-content, collaborative encyclopedias were created around the same period as Wikipedia (e.g. Everything2), with many later being merged into the project (e.g. GNE). One of the most successful early online encyclopedias incorporating entries by the public was h2g2, which was created by Douglas Adams in 1999. The h2g2 encyclopedia is relatively lighthearted, focusing on articles which are both witty and informative.


Wikipedia

Subsequent collaborative knowledge websites have drawn inspiration from Wikipedia. Others use more traditional peer review, such as "Encyclopedia of Life" and the online wiki encyclopedias "Scholarpedia" and Citizendium. The latter was started by Sanger in an attempt to create a reliable alternative to Wikipedia.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The 2022 FIFA World Cup was an international football tournament contested by the men's national teams of FIFA's member associations and 22nd edition of the FIFA World Cup. It took place in Qatar from 20 November to 18 December 2022, making it the first World Cup held in the Arab world and Muslim world, and the second held entirely in Asia after the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan. France were the defending champions, having defeated Croatia 4–2 in the 2018 final. At an estimated cost of over $220 billion, it is the most expensive World Cup ever held to date; this figure is disputed by Qatari officials, including organising CEO Nasser Al Khater, who said the true cost was $8 billion, and other figures related to overall infrastructure development since the World Cup was awarded to Qatar in 2010.


2022 FIFA World Cup

This tournament was the last with 32 participating teams, with the field set to increase to 48 teams for the 2026 edition. To avoid the extremes of Qatar's hot climate, the event was held during November and December. It was held over a reduced time frame of 29 days with 64 matches played in eight venues across five cities. The Qatar national football team entered the event – their first World Cup – automatically as the host's national team, alongside 31 teams who were determined by the qualification process. Qatar lost all three group matches; becoming the first hosts to lose every game, the earliest host nation eliminated, and the second host (after South Africa in 2010) not to progress past the first stage.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Argentina were the champions after winning the final against the title holder France 4–2 on penalties following a 3–3 draw after extra time. French player Kylian Mbappé became the first player to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final since Geoff Hurst in the 1966 final and won the Golden Boot as he scored the most goals (eight) during the tournament. Argentine captain Lionel Messi was voted the tournament's best player, winning the Golden Ball. Emiliano Martínez and Enzo Fernández, also from Argentina, won the Golden Glove, awarded to the tournament's best goalkeeper and the Young Player Award, awarded to the tournament's best young player, respectively.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The choice to host the World Cup in Qatar attracted significant criticism, with concerns raised over the country's treatment of migrant workers, women and members of the LGBT community, as well as Qatar's climate, lack of a strong football culture, scheduling changes, and allegations of bribery for hosting rights and wider FIFA corruption.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The FIFA World Cup is a professional football tournament held between national football teams. Organised by FIFA, the tournament, held every four years, was first played in 1930 in Uruguay, and has been contested by 32 teams since the 1998 event. The tournament was contested with eight round-robin groups followed by a knockout round for 16 teams. The defending champions were France, who defeated Croatia 4–2 in the 2018 FIFA World Cup Final. The event was scheduled to take place under a reduced length, from 20 November to 18 December in Qatar. Being held in Qatar, it was the first World Cup tournament to be held in the Arab world. Spectators were not required to follow most COVID-19 pandemic restrictions such as social distancing, wearing masks, and negative tests.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Unlike previous FIFA World Cups, which are typically played in June and July, because of Qatar's intense summer heat and often fairly high humidity, the 2022 World Cup was played in November and December. As a result, the World Cup was unusually staged in the middle of the seasons of domestic association football leagues, which started in late July or August, including all of the major European leagues, which had been obliged to incorporate extended breaks into their domestic schedules to accommodate the World Cup. Major European competitions had scheduled their respective competitions group matches to be played before the World Cup, to avoid playing group matches the following year.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The match schedule was confirmed by FIFA in July 2020. The group stage was set to begin on 21 November, with four matches every day. Later, the schedule was tweaked by moving the Qatar vs Ecuador game to 20 November, after Qatar lobbied FIFA to allow their team to open the tournament. The final was played on 18 December 2022, National Day, at Lusail Stadium.


2022 FIFA World Cup

FIFA confirmed the group stage venue and kick-off times on 1 April 2022, following the draw. On 11 August, it was confirmed that Qatar vs Ecuador had been brought forward one day, now becoming the tournament's opening match, while Senegal vs Netherlands, which would have opened the tournament under the original schedule, had been reallocated to the freed-up timeslot.


2022 FIFA World Cup

In April 2022, FIFA announced the prizes for all participating nations. Each qualified team received $1.5 million before the competition to cover preparation costs with each team receiving at least $9 million in prize money. This edition's total prize pool was $440 million, $40 million greater than the prize pool of the previous tournament.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The tournament featured new substitution rules whereby teams could make up to five substitutions in normal time, and an additional substitution in extra time. In addition, it was the first World Cup to feature concussion substitutions, whereby each team was permitted to use a maximum of one concussion substitute during a match. A concussion substitution did not count towards a team's quota of regular substitutions. Iranian goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand suffered a concussion in his country's opening match against England and was replaced by Hossein Hosseini. This was the first use of a dedicated concussion substitute during a World Cup.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The bidding procedure to host the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups began in January 2009. National associations had until 2 February 2009 to register interest. Initially, 11 bids were made for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, but Mexico withdrew from proceedings, and Indonesia's bid was rejected by FIFA in February 2010 after the Indonesian Football Association failed to submit a letter of Indonesian government guarantee to support the bid.


2022 FIFA World Cup

After UEFA were guaranteed to host the 2018 event, members of UEFA were no longer in contention to host in 2022. There were five bids remaining for the 2022 FIFA World Cup: Australia, Japan, Qatar, South Korea, and the United States.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The 22-member FIFA Executive Committee convened in Zürich on 2 December 2010 to vote to select the hosts of both tournaments. Two FIFA executive committee members were suspended before the vote in relation to allegations of corruption regarding their votes. The decision to host the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which was graded as having "high operational risk", generated criticism from media commentators. It was criticised by many as being part of the FIFA corruption scandals.


2022 FIFA World Cup

There have been allegations of bribery and corruption in the selection process involving FIFA's executive committee members. These allegations are being investigated by FIFA . In May 2011, allegations of corruption within the FIFA senior officials raised questions over the legitimacy of the World Cup 2022 being held in Qatar. The accusations of corruption were made relating to how Qatar won the right to host the event. A FIFA internal investigation and report cleared Qatar of any violation, but chief investigator Michael J. Garcia described FIFA's report on his enquiry as containing "numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations."


2022 FIFA World Cup

In May 2015, Swiss federal prosecutors opened an investigation into corruption and money laundering related to the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids. In August 2018, former FIFA president Sepp Blatter claimed that Qatar had used "black ops", suggesting that the bid committee had cheated to win the hosting rights. Some investigations found that Qatar sought an edge in securing hosting by hiring a former CIA officer turned private contractor, Kevin Chalker, to spy on rival bid teams and key football officials who picked the winner in 2010.


2022 FIFA World Cup

In September 2018, a delegation from al-Ghufran tribe lodged a complaint to FIFA's president to reject the establishment of the World Cup in Qatar unless its government restored the Qatari nationality to all those affected from the tribe and returned land allegedly stolen from them to build the sport facilities.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Qatar faced strong criticism for the treatment of foreign workers involved in preparation for the World Cup, with Amnesty International referring to "forced labour" and poor working conditions, while many migrant workers reported having to pay large "recruitment fees" to obtain employment. "The Guardian" newspaper reported that many workers were denied food and water, had their identity papers taken away from them, and that they were not paid on time or at all, making some of them in effect slaves. "The Guardian" estimated that up to 4,000 workers could die from lax safety and other causes by the time the competition was held. Between 2015 and 2021, the Qatari government adopted new labour reforms to improve working conditions, including a minimum wage for all workers and the removal of the kafala system. According to Amnesty International, however, living and working conditions of the foreign workers did not improve in the last years.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Qatar was the smallest nation by area ever to have been awarded a FIFA World Cup – the next smallest by area was Switzerland, host of the 1954 World Cup, which was more than three times as large as Qatar and only needed to host 16 teams instead of 32. Qatar also became only the second country (not including Uruguay and Italy, hosts of the first two World Cups) to be awarded a FIFA World Cup despite having never qualified for a previous edition: Japan was awarded co-hosting rights of the 2002 World Cup in 1996 without ever having qualified for the finals, although they qualified for the 1998 edition. Of the eight stadiums used in the tournament, six were located in the Doha metropolitan area, making it the first World Cup since 1930 in which most of the stadiums were in one city. While this decreased the distance that fans and players needed to commute, Qatar itself struggled to accommodate the numbers of arriving fans with its diminutive amount of space.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Due to Qatar's laws on alcohol consumption, World Cup organisers announced the creation of designated "sobering up" zones as an alternative to wide-scale arrests of intoxicated fans during the World Cup. Qatar's World Cup chief executive of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, Nasser Al Khater, stated that the purpose of the designated sobering-up areas was to ensure the fans' safety. If a fan was sent to the "sobering up" zone, they were permitted to leave when they could display clearheaded behaviour. Multiple news agencies described the controversy as a "cultural clash" between social conservatism and Islamic morality against the "norms" of secular Western liberal democracies.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The first five proposed venues for the World Cup were unveiled at the beginning of March 2010. Qatar intended that the stadiums should reflect its history and culture, and for the designs to meet the following terms of reference: legacy, comfort, accessibility, and sustainability. The stadiums were equipped with cooling systems that aim to reduce temperatures within the stadium by up to .


2022 FIFA World Cup

Their marketing included statements describing the stadiums as zero waste, and the upper tiers of the stadiums will be disassembled after the World Cup and donated to countries with less developed sports infrastructure. Qatar aspired to be compliant and certified by the Global Sustainability Assessment System (GSAS) for all the World Cup stadiums. All of the five stadium projects launched were designed by German architect Albert Speer & Partners. The Al Bayt and Al Wakrah stadiums were the only indoor stadiums of the eight used.


2022 FIFA World Cup

In an April 2013 report by Merrill Lynch, the organisers in Qatar requested that FIFA approve a smaller number of stadiums due to the growing costs. Bloomberg said that Qatar wished to cut the number of venues to eight or nine from the twelve originally planned. By April 2017, FIFA had yet to finalise the number of stadiums Qatar must have readied in five years' time. Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC) said it expected there would be eight in and near Doha, with the exception of Al Khor.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The most used stadium was the Lusail Stadium, which hosted 10 matches, including the final. The Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor hosted nine matches. All but the nine matches hosted in Al Khor in this tournament were held within a radius of the centre of Doha. In addition, the Khalifa, Al Thumama and Education City stadiums hosted eight matches each (Khalifa hosted the third place match, while Al Thumama and Education City hosted a quarter-final each) and the 974, Al Janoub and Ahmad bin Ali stadiums hosted seven matches each, including a round of 16 match each.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Stadium 974, formerly known as the Ras Abu Aboud Stadium, was the seventh FIFA World Cup 2022 venue to be completed by the SC. Its name comes from the number of shipping containers used in its construction and Qatar's international dialling code. The venue will be dismantled completely after the tournament – this stadium was the first temporary stadium ever used for a FIFA World Cup. All of the other stadiums used except Khalifa International were reduced in capacity by half.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Base camps were used by the 32 national squads to stay and train before and during the World Cup tournament. In July 2022, FIFA announced the hotels and training sites for each participating team. This World Cup was the most compact since the inaugural edition in 1930, with 24 of the 32 teams being within a radius of each other, and are concentrated within the Doha area. It was the first Cup since 1930 in which players did not need to take flights to matches and could remain at the same training base throughout the entire tournament.


2022 FIFA World Cup

FIFA's six continental confederations organised their own qualifying competitions. All 211 FIFA member associations were eligible to enter qualification. The Qatari national team, as hosts, qualified automatically for the tournament. However, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) obliged Qatar to participate in the Asian qualifying stage as the first two rounds also act as qualification for the 2023 AFC Asian Cup. Since Qatar reached the final stage as winners in their group, Lebanon, the fifth-best second place team, advanced instead. France, the reigning World Cup champions also went through qualifying stages as normal.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Saint Lucia initially entered CONCACAF qualification but withdrew from it before their first match. North Korea withdrew from the AFC qualifying round due to safety concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both American Samoa and Samoa withdrew before the OFC qualification draw. Tonga withdrew after the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption and tsunami. Due to COVID-19 outbreaks in their squads, Vanuatu and Cook Islands also withdrew because of the travel restrictions.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Of the 32 nations qualified to play at the 2022 FIFA World Cup, 24 countries competed at the previous tournament in 2018. Qatar were the only team making their debut in the FIFA World Cup, becoming the first hosts to make their tournament debut since Italy in 1934. As a result, the 2022 tournament was the first World Cup in which none of the teams that earned a spot through qualification were making their debut. The Netherlands, Ecuador, Ghana, Cameroon, and the United States returned to the tournament after missing the 2018 tournament. Canada returned after 36 years, their only prior appearance being in 1986. Wales made their first appearance in 64 years – the longest ever gap for any team, their only previous participation having been in 1958.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Italy, the four-time winners and reigning European champions, failed to qualify for a second successive World Cup for the first time in their history, losing in the qualification play-off semi-finals. The Italians were the only former champions that failed to qualify, and the highest ranked team in the FIFA Men's World Rankings to do so. Italy were also the fourth team to have failed to qualify for the upcoming World Cup, having won the previous UEFA European Championship, after Czechoslovakia in 1978, Denmark in 1994, and Greece in 2006. The previous World Cup hosts, Russia, were disqualified from competing due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Chile, the 2015 and 2016 Copa América winners, failed to qualify for the second consecutive time. Nigeria were defeated by Ghana on away goals in Confederation of African Football (CAF) final playoff round, having qualified for the previous three World Cups and six out of the last seven. Egypt, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Iceland, and Sweden, all of whom qualified for the 2018 World Cup, did not qualify for the 2022 tournament. Ghana were the lowest ranked team to qualify, ranked 61st.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The qualified teams, listed by region, with numbers in parentheses indicating final positions in the FIFA Men's World Ranking before the tournament were:


2022 FIFA World Cup

The final draw was held at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center in Doha, Qatar, on 1 April 2022, 19:00 AST, prior to the completion of qualification. The two winners of the inter-confederation play-offs and the winner of the Path A of the UEFA play-offs were not known at the time of the draw. The draw was attended by 2,000 guests and was led by Carli Lloyd, Jermaine Jenas and sports broadcaster Samantha Johnson, assisted by the likes of Cafu (Brazil), Lothar Matthäus (Germany), Adel Ahmed Malalla (Qatar), Ali Daei (Iran), Bora Milutinović (Serbia/Mexico), Jay-Jay Okocha (Nigeria), Rabah Madjer (Algeria), and Tim Cahill (Australia).


2022 FIFA World Cup

For the draw, the 32 teams were allocated into four pots based on the FIFA Men's World Rankings of 31 March 2022. Pot 1 contained host Qatar (who were automatically assigned to position A1) and the best seven teams. Pot 2 contained the next best eight teams, with the next best eight teams into pot 3. Pot 4 contained the five lowest-ranked teams, along with the placeholders for the two inter-confederation play-off winners and the UEFA Path A play-off winner. Teams from the same confederation could not be drawn into the same group except for UEFA teams, for which there was at least one and no more than two per group.


2022 FIFA World Cup

This principle also applied to the placeholder teams, with constraints applying based on the confederation of both potential winners of each play-off tie. The draw started with pot 1 and ended with pot 4, with each team selected then allocated into the first available group alphabetically. The position for the team within the group would then be drawn (for the purpose of the match schedule), with the pot 1 teams automatically drawn into position 1 of each group. The pots for the draw are shown below.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Before submitting their final squad for the tournament, teams named a provisional squad of up to 55 players. Teams were required to have their 55-player roster submitted to FIFA by 21 October. Teams were required to name their final squads by 13 November. In August 2022, FIFA increased the final squad size to 26 players from a total of 23 players at the 2018 edition. All teams had a total of 26 players in their final squads except for France, who decided not to replace Karim Benzema after he sustained an injury, and Iran, who chose 25 players.


2022 FIFA World Cup

In May 2022, FIFA announced the list of 36 referees, 69 assistant referees, and 24 video assistant referees for the tournament. Of the 36 referees, FIFA included two each from Argentina, Brazil, England, and France.


2022 FIFA World Cup

For the first time women referees officiated games at a major men's tournament. France's Stéphanie Frappart, Salima Mukansanga from Rwanda, and Yoshimi Yamashita from Japan became the first female referees to be appointed to a men's World Cup. Frappart previously oversaw the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup Final. They were joined by three female assistant referees, Neuza Back, Kathryn Nesbitt, and Karen Díaz Medina. Frappart then officially became the first ever female referee to officiate a World Cup match when she worked the Costa Rica vs Germany match in Group E on 1 December.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Gambian referee Bakary Gassama and Argentine assistant referee Juan Pablo Belatti were among the officials to serve at their third World Cup. Belatti was an assistant referee in the 2018 final. Other returning officials included referees César Arturo Ramos of Mexico and Janny Sikazwe of Zambia, and Iranian assistant referee Mohammadreza Mansouri.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The opening ceremony took place on Sunday, 20 November 2022 at the Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, prior to the opening match of the tournament between hosts Qatar and Ecuador. It included appearances by Morgan Freeman and Ghanim Al-Muftah, along with performances by South Korean singer and BTS member Jungkook and Qatari singer Fahad Al Kubaisi. It was the first time that the Qur'an had been recited as part of the opening ceremony.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The group stage was played from 20 November to 2 December. Competing countries were divided into eight groups of four teams (groups A to H). Teams in each group played one another in a round-robin, where the top two teams advanced to the knockout stage.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The first match of the tournament was held between Qatar and Ecuador in Group A. Ecuador had a disallowed goal in the opening minutes, but eventually won 2–0 with two goals from Enner Valencia. Qatar became the first host nation to lose their opening match at a World Cup. Many Qatar natives were seen leaving the game before the end, with ESPN reporting that two-thirds of the attendance had left. The other starting match in group A was won by the Netherlands 2–0 over Senegal. Cody Gakpo scored the opening goal in the 84th minute and Davy Klaassen added a second in stoppage time. Senegal faced Qatar in the third match of the group; Boulaye Dia capitalised on a slip by Boualem Khoukhi to put Senegal 1–0 ahead. Famara Diédhiou scored a second with a header, before Mohammed Muntari scored Qatar's first-ever goal at a World Cup to reduce the deficit back to one. Senegal eventually won the match 3–1 after an 84th-minute goal by Bamba Dieng. With this result, Qatar became the first team to be eliminated from the tournament, as well as becoming the first host nation to ever be knocked out of the tournament after two games. Gakpo scored his second goal of the tournament as the Netherlands led Ecuador; however, Valencia scored an equaliser in the 49th minute. The Netherlands won 2–0 against Qatar following goals by Gakpo and Frenkie de Jong to win the group, while Qatar attained the distinction of being the first home nation to lose all three group matches. Senegal faced Ecuador to determine the second knockout round qualifier. At the end of the first half, Ismaïla Sarr scored a penalty kick to put Senegal ahead. In the 67th minute, Moisés Caicedo scored an equaliser, but shortly after, Kalidou Koulibaly gave Senegal the victory. The win was enough to qualify Senegal as the runners-up of Group A.


2022 FIFA World Cup

England completed a 6–2 victory over Iran. Iranian keeper Alireza Beiranvand was removed from the game for a suspected concussion before England scored three first-half goals. Mehdi Taremi scored in the second half after which England defender Harry Maguire was also removed for a concussion. Timothy Weah, of the United States, scored a first-half goal against Wales; however, the match finished as a draw after a penalty kick was won and scored by Gareth Bale. Iran defeated Wales 2–0 following a red card to Welsh goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey after he committed a foul outside of his penalty area. Substitute Rouzbeh Cheshmi scored the first goal eight minutes into stoppage time, followed by Ramin Rezaeian scoring three minutes later. England and the United States played to a 0–0 draw, with only four shots on target between them. England won the group following a 3–0 win over Wales with a goal by Phil Foden and two by Rashford. Christian Pulisic scored the winning goal as the United States defeated Iran 1–0 to qualify for the round of 16.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Argentina took an early lead against Saudi Arabia after Lionel Messi scored a penalty kick after ten minutes; however, second-half goals by Saleh Al-Shehri and Salem Al-Dawsari won the match 2–1 for Saudi Arabia, a result described as "the biggest upset in the history of the World Cup." The match between Mexico and Poland ended as a goalless 0–0 draw after Guillermo Ochoa saved Robert Lewandowski's penalty kick attempt. Lewandowski scored his first career World Cup goal in a 2–0 win over Saudi Arabia four days later. Argentina defeated Mexico 2–0, with Messi scoring the opener and teammate Enzo Fernández scoring his first international goal. Argentina won their last game as they played Poland with goals by Alexis Mac Allister and Julián Álvarez which was enough to win the group. Mexico scored two goals against Saudi Arabia, and with the Argentina leading 2–0 over Poland they only required a single goal to qualify as the runner-up based on the tie-breaker of number of goals scored in all group matches, after Al-Dawsari scored a goal in stoppage time for Saudi Arabia. Despite losing by two goals to Argentina, Poland qualified for the knockout stage on goal difference.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The match between Denmark and Tunisia ended as a goalless draw; both teams had goals disallowed by offside calls. Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen made his first major international appearance since suffering a cardiac arrest at the UEFA Euro 2020. Defending champions France went a goal behind to Australia, after a Craig Goodwin goal within ten minutes. France, however, scored four goals, by Adrien Rabiot, by Kylian Mbappé, and two by Olivier Giroud to win 4–1. The goals tied Giroud with Thierry Henry as France's all-time top goalscorer. Mitchell Duke scored the only goal as Australia won against Tunisia. This was their first World Cup win since 2010. Mbappé scored a brace as France defeated Denmark 2–1. This was enough for France to qualify for the knockout round – the first time since Brazil in 2006 that the defending champions progressed through the opening round. Mathew Leckie scored the only goal as Australia defeated Denmark 1–0, qualifying for the knockout round as runners-up with the win. Wahbi Khazri scored for Tunisia against France in the 58th minute. Although Antoine Griezmann equalised in stoppage time it was overturned for offside. Tunisia finished third in the group, as they required a draw in the Denmark and Australia game.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Group E began with Japan facing 2014 champions Germany. After an early penalty kick was converted by Germany's İlkay Gündoğan, Japan scored two second-half goals by Ritsu Dōan and Takuma Asano in a 2–1 upset win. In the second group match, Spain defeated Costa Rica 7–0. First-half goals by Dani Olmo, Marco Asensio, and Ferran Torres were followed by goals by Gavi, Carlos Soler, Alvaro Morata, and a second by Torres. This was the largest defeat in a World Cup since Portugal's victory over North Korea in the 2010 event by the same scoreline. Costa Rica defeated Japan 1–0, with Keysher Fuller scoring with Costa Rica's first shot on target of the tournament. Germany and Spain drew 1–1, with Álvaro Morata scoring for Spain and Niclas Füllkrug scoring for Germany. Morata scored the opening goal for Spain against Japan as they controlled the first half of the match. Japan equalised on Ritsu Doan before a second goal by Kaoru Mitoma was heavily investigated by VAR for the ball being out of play. The goal was awarded, and Japan won the group following a 2–1 win. Serge Gnabry scored on ten minutes for Germany against Costa Rica and they lead until half-time. Germany required a win, and for Japan to not win their match to qualify. In the second half, goals by Yeltsin Tejeda and Juan Vargas gave Costa Rica a 2–1 lead, which would have qualified them into the knockout stages ahead of Spain. Germany scored three further goals—two by Kai Havertz and a goal by Niclas Fullkrug, ending in a 4–2 win for Germany—which was not enough to qualify them for the final stages. Japan won the group ahead of Spain.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Group F's first match was a goalless draw between Morocco and Croatia. Canada had a penalty kick in the first half of their match against Belgium which was saved by Thibaut Courtois. Belgium won the match by a single goal by Michy Batshuayi. Belgium manager Roberto Martínez confirmed after the game that he believed Canada to have been the better team. Belgium lost 2–0 to Morocco, despite Morocco having a long-range direct free kick goal by Hakim Ziyech overturned for an offside on another player in the lead up to the goal. Two second-half goals from Zakaria Aboukhlal and Romain Saïss helped the Morocco win their first World Cup match since 1998. The match sparked riots in Belgium, with residents fires and fireworks being set off. Alphonso Davies scored Canada's first World Cup goal to give Canada the lead over Croatia. Goals by Marko Livaja, Lovro Majer, and two by Andrej Kramarić for Croatia completed a 4–1 victory. Morocco scored two early goals through Hakim Ziyech and Youssef En-Nesyri in their game against Canada and qualified following a 2–1 victory. Croatia and Belgium played a goalless draw which eliminated Belgium, whose team is ranked second in the world, from the tournament.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Breel Embolo scored the only goal in Switzerland's 1–0 defeat of Cameroon. Richarlison scored two goals as Brazil won against Serbia, with star player Neymar receiving an ankle injury. Cameroon's Jean-Charles Castelletto scored the opening goal against Serbia, but they were quickly behind as Serbia scored three goals by Strahinja Pavlović, Sergej Milinković-Savić, and Aleksandar Mitrović either side of half time. Cameroon, however, scored goals through Vincent Aboubakar and Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, completing a 3–3 draw. An 83rd-minute winner by Casemiro for Brazil over Switzerland was enough for them to qualify for the knockout stage. Having already qualified, Brazil were unable to win their final group game, as they were defeated by Cameroon 1–0 following a goal by Vincent Aboubakar. He was later sent off for removing his shirt in celebrating the goal. Cameroon, however, did not qualify, as Switzerland defeated Serbia 3–2.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Uruguay and South Korea played to a goalless draw. A goalless first half between Portugal and Ghana preceded a penalty converted by Cristiano Ronaldo to give Portugal the lead. In scoring the goal, Ronaldo became the first man to score in five World Cups. Ghana responded with a goal by André Ayew before goals by João Félix, and Rafael Leão by Portugal put them 3–1 ahead. Osman Bukari scored in the 89th minute to trail by a single goal, while Iñaki Williams had a chance to equalise for Ghana ten minutes into stoppage time, but slipped before shooting. The match finished 3–2 to Portugal. Ghanaian Mohammed Salisu opened the scoring against South Korea, with Mohammed Kudus following it up. In the second half, Cho Gue-sung scored a brace for South Korea, levelling the score. Mohammed Kudus scored again in the 68th minute, winning the match 3–2 for Ghana. Portugal defeated Uruguay 2–0 with two goals from Bruno Fernandes, advancing them to the knockout stage. A controversial penalty decision was called late in the game, with a suspected handball from José María Giménez. Portugal led South Korea through Ricardo Horta after 10 minutes. However, goals by Kim Young-gwon and Hwang Hee-chan won the match 2–1 for South Korea. Giorgian de Arrascaeta scored two goals as Uruguay defeated Ghana 2–0. However, with South Korea winning, Uruguay required another goal to progress as they finished third on goals scored. Several Uruguay players left the pitch after the game surrounding the referees and followed them off the pitch.


2022 FIFA World Cup

In the knockout stage, if the scores were equal when normal playing time expired, extra time was played for two periods of 15 minutes each. This was followed, if required, by a penalty shoot-out to determine the winners.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The round of 16 was played from 3 to 7 December which for the first time ever included teams from all five continents. Group A winners Netherlands scored goals through Memphis Depay, Daley Blind and Denzel Dumfries as they defeated the United States 3–1, with Haji Wright scoring for the United States. Messi scored his third of the tournament alongside Julián Álvarez to give Argentina a two-goal lead over Australia and despite a Enzo Fernández own goal from a Craig Goodwin shot, Argentina won 2–1. Olivier Giroud's goal and Mbappé's brace enabled France to have a 3–1 victory over Poland, with Robert Lewandowski scoring the lone goal for Poland from a penalty. England beat Senegal 3–0, with goals coming from Jordan Henderson, Harry Kane and Bukayo Saka. Daizen Maeda scored for Japan against Croatia in the first half before a leveller from Ivan Perišić in the second. Neither team could find the winner, with Croatia defeating Japan 3–1 in a penalty shoot-out. Vinícius Júnior, Neymar, Richarlison and Lucas Paquetá all scored for Brazil, but a volley from South Korean Paik Seung-ho reduced the deficit to 4–1. The match between Morocco and Spain finished as a goalless draw after 90 minutes, sending the match to extra time. Neither team could score a goal in extra time; Morocco won the match 3–0 on penalties. A hat-trick by Gonçalo Ramos led Portugal to defeat Switzerland 6–1, with goals from Portugal's Pepe, Raphaël Guerreiro and Rafael Leão and from Switzerland's Manuel Akanji.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The quarter-finals were played on 9 and 10 December. Croatia and Brazil ended 0–0 after 90 minutes and went to extra time. Neymar scored for Brazil in the 15th minute of extra time. Croatia, however, equalised through Bruno Petković in the second period of extra time. With the match tied, a penalty shootout decided the contest, with Croatia winning the shoot-out 4–2. In the second quarter-final match, Nahuel Molina and Messi scored for Argentina before Wout Weghorst equalised with two goals shortly before the end of the game. The match went to extra time and then penalties, where Argentina would go on to win 4–3. Morocco defeated Portugal 1–0, with Youssef En-Nesyri scoring at the end of the first half. Morocco became the first African and the first Arab nation to advance as far as the semi-finals of the competition. Despite Harry Kane scoring a penalty for England, it was not enough to beat France, who won 2–1 by virtue of goals from Aurélien Tchouaméni and Olivier Giroud, sending them to their second consecutive World Cup semi-final and becoming the first defending champions to reach this stage since Brazil in 1998.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The semi-finals were played on 13 and 14 December. Messi scored a penalty kick before Julián Álvarez scored twice to give Argentina a 3–0 victory over Croatia. Théo Hernandez scored after five minutes as France led Morocco for most of the game and later Randal Kolo Muani scored on 78 minutes to complete a 2–0 victory for France over Morocco as they reached a second consecutive final.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The third place play-off was played on 17 December. Joško Gvardiol promptly scored for Croatia, with Achraf Dari equalising just 2 minutes later. Mislav Oršić scored the winner for Croatia as the match finished 2–1. Morocco earned 4th place, a record for the team and the best World Cup finish of any African or Arab nation.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The final was played on 18 December between Argentina and France. Both teams had won the event twice previously. Early goals from Lionel Messi and Angel Di Maria gave Argentina a head start against the French, leading 2–0. Despite multiple substitutions in the first half, France did not record a shot until after the 70th minute, but were energised by additional substitutions in the 71st. A few minutes later, France were awarded a penalty as Randal Kolo Muani was brought down in the penalty area. Mbappé scored the penalty, and added a second goal less than two minutes later to equalise the scores. With the score tied at two goals apiece, the match went to extra time. Messi scored his second goal in the 108th minute, once again giving Argentina the lead. However, Mbappé was awarded a second penalty in the 115th minute after his shot hit the arm of Gonzalo Montiel. Mbappé scored his third goal, becoming the second player ever to complete a hat-trick in the final of a World Cup. With the score tied at 3–3, the match was determined via a penalty shootout. Argentina won the final after scoring all of their penalties, winning 4–2. This marked their third World Cup win and their first since 1986. It also marked the first time that a South American team won the World Cup in 20 years and as Copa América champions.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The following World Cup awards were given at the conclusion of the tournament. The Golden Boot (top scorer), Golden Ball (best overall player) and Golden Glove (best goalkeeper) awards were all sponsored by Adidas.


2022 FIFA World Cup

The official emblem was designed by Lisbon-based Brandia Central branding agency and unveiled in September 2019, during simultaneous events at the Doha Tower, Katara Cultural Village Amphitheatre, Msheireb Downtown Doha and Zubarah. It was designed to resemble the tournament trophy, the infinity symbol, and the number "8", reflecting upon the "interconnected" event and the eight host stadiums. It also evoked imagery of shawls to signify the tournament's late fall scheduling, and contained waves resembling desert dunes. The typography of the emblem's wordmark incorporated kashida—the practice of elongating certain parts of characters in Arabic script to provide typographical emphasis.


2022 FIFA World Cup

Electronic Arts released the 2022 FIFA World Cup DLC in their video game "FIFA 23" on 9 November 2022. The expansion includes a World Cup tournament mode with all teams from the event, some theming, and a multiplayer online tournament mode. Instead of being connected to FIFA Ultimate Team, the DLC includes a "World Cup Live" mode, which lets players emulate that day's matches. Google released a mobile mini-game called "Mini Cup". For every live match of the World Cup, players could score penalties for their team, adding to the nation's total tally.


2022 FIFA World Cup

On 24 August 2022, the Panini Group produced themed stickers and a sticker album for a 14th consecutive World Cup. Collectors were meant to open player packs and use them to fill their sticker book with all 32 participating teams. This year, rare cards with coloured borders "parallels" could be found, and could be collected, traded, or sold.


2022 FIFA World Cup

On 12 April 2022, FIFA released an Over-the-top media service and app revolving around the World Cup called FIFA+, where fans could play games, predict matches, and compete with others.