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The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a combination of 'wiki' (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia'. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic content has been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Some have noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience. Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse and a , critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture), and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes. Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted. Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information; however, scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived. A 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors." |