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This article is about Wikipedia. For Simple English Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page. For a formal introduction to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:About.

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia logo, a globe showing puzzle pieces with glyphs from several writing systems
Screenshot Wikipedia portal showing the different languages sorted by article count
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	327 languages
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger[1]
URL	wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional[notes 1]
Users	>281,214 active users[notes 2] and >103,397,077 registered users 1,067 administrators (English)
Launched	January 15, 2001; 21 years ago  (2001-01-15)
Current status	Active
Content license	CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0 Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies
Written in	LAMP platform[2]
OCLC number	52075003

Wikipedia ( pronunciation(help·info) ) is a free online encyclopedia website in 327 languages of the world, 316 languages which are currently active and 11 are closed. People can freely use it, share it, and change it, without having to pay. It is also one of the biggest wiki organizations. People can choose to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is an open content website. This means anyone can copy it, and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing.

Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.

Wikipedia's name is a portmanteau of two words, wiki and encyclopedia. ^[3]

Wikipedia was started on January 10, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier online encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. It is a wiki that uses the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia Foundation projects).

Anyone who wishes to can change the pages on Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.

As of September 2011, Wikipedia had about 18 million pages in about 300 languages and more than 3.50 billion words across all Wikipedias. The regular English Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia edition.

History [change | change source]

Wikipedia began as a related project for Nupedia. Nupedia was a free English-language online encyclopedia project. Nupedia's articles were written and owned by Bomis, Inc which was a web portal company. The main people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the guy in charge of Bomis, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief of Nupedia. Nupedia was first licensed under the Nupedia Open Content License which was changed to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia was founded and made their first article when Richard Stallman requested them.^[4]

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the ones who started Wikipedia.^{[5] [6]} Wales is credited with defining the goals of the project.^{[7] [8]} Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales' goal.^[9] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.^[10] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001. It was launched as an English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,^[11] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.^[7] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"^[12] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there weren't very many rules initially, and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.^[7]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and also from search engines. It grew to about 20,000 articles, and 18 languages by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.^[13] Nupedia and Wikipedia both existed until Nupedia's servers were stopped in 2003. After this, its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, even larger than the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.^[14]

The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. The number of articles and contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around spring 2007.^[15]

In October 2014, the Wikipedia Monument was unveiled to the public in Poland to honor all the contributors of Wikipedia.

According to the TechCrunch website, on 23 January 2020, Wikipedia had surpassed more than 6 million articles on the English Wikipedia.^[16]

10th anniversary [change | change source]

On January 15, 2011, Wikipedia celebrated its 10th anniversary. It used a special logo (pictured) to celebrate its 10 years since it opened on January 15, 2001. The logo was used for the whole day on the sidebar of English Wikipedia.

Using Wikipedia [change | change source]

Wikipedia is a free site where anybody can start or change a page. It is a global site that is available in many languages. While people can use any search engine, the Wikipedia page will come out in the first results of many searches. To use Wikipedia better, people should understand the basic function of the page. The page is organized while they are looking up the page. As Wikipedia users, they should have a good understanding of Wikipedia and its features.

• Did you know: Trivia from new articles.
• In the news: News of the world.
• On this day: Anniversaries.^[17]
• Current events: Available on some wikipedias. It can be on main pages, in articles, or at wikinews.org

WIKIPEDIA – The Free Encyclopedia

WIKIPEDIA – The 5th most popular site on the Internet was launched on January 15, 2001 (1st edit by co-founder Jimmy Wales), is currently published in over 300 languages, has been freely available worldwide for 21 years, 6 months and 16 days – Wikipedia (as of June 1, 2022) has over 58,843,809 total articles ( 6,506,916 in English (stats); 211,010 in Simple English) – *VITAL ARTICLES* => Top10–100–1000; *BEST ARTICLES* => over 46,325; *POPULAR ARTICLES* (Last Week) => Top25; Top5000 – and has (for the Simple English version) 17 administrators and 958 active editors – as of 02:46, July 31, 2022 (UTC).

• Wikipedia => Is "over 90 times" the size of Encyclopedia Britannica/online – as of January 2021. (calc)
• Wikipedia => Is encoded in synthetic DNA strands – as of June 2019.
• Wikipedia => Is laser-etched in glass on the Moon – as of April 2019.
• Wikipedia => Is available as 7,473 Books for $500,000 – as of July 2015.
• Wikipedia => Is honored with a Monument – as of October 2014.
• Wikipedia => Is the name of an Asteroid – as of January 2013.
• Wikipedia => "Is one of the Jewels in the internet's crown."
• Wikipedia => "Nos Auxilium Facere Interrete Non Lactaverunt."
• Wikipedia => "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's what we're doing."

[change | change source]

• Simple English Wikipedia
• Epistemic community

Notes [change | change source]

1. ↑ Registration is required for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages in the English Wikipedia, and uploading files.
2. ↑ To be considered active, a user must make at least one edit or other action in a given month.

References [change | change source]

1. ↑ >Sidener, Jonathan (December 6, 2004). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". U-T San Diego. Archived from the original on January 14, 2016. Retrieved October 15, 2006.
2. ↑ Chapman, Roger (September 6, 2011). "Top 40 Website Programming Languages". roadchap.com. Archived from the original on September 22, 2013. Retrieved September 6, 2011.
3. ↑ Andreas Kaplan, Haenlein Michael (2014) Collaborative projects (social media application): About Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Business Horizons, Volume 57 Issue 5, pp.617-626
4. ↑ Richard M. Stallman (2007-06-20). "The Free Encyclopedia Project". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2008-01-04 .
5. ↑ Jonathan Sidener (2004-12-06). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Archived from the original on 2004-12-15. Retrieved 2006-10-15 .
6. ↑ Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times . Retrieved 2007-11-22 .  'I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph,' said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales.
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1 7.2} Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". Slashdot . Retrieved 2008-12-26 .
8. ↑ Sanger, Larry (January 17, 2001). "Wikipedia Is Up!". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2001-05-06. Retrieved 2008-12-26 . {{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
9. ↑ "Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?". Retrieved 2007-02-20 .
10. ↑ Sanger, Larry (2001-01-10). "Let's Make a Wiki". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2003-04-14. Retrieved 2008-12-26 .
11. ↑ "Wikipedia: HomePage". Archived from the original on 2001-03-31. Retrieved 2001-03-31 .
12. ↑ "Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia (January 21, 2007)
13. ↑ ""Multilingual statistics". Wikipedia. March 30, 2005. Retrieved 2008-12-25 .
14. ↑ "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. Vol. 18. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. pp. 257–286.
15. ↑ Bobbie Johnson. "Wikipedia approaches its limits".
16. ↑ "Wikipedia now has more than 6 million articles in English".
17. ↑ O' Neil, Mark (16 December 2014). "Everything You Need To Know About Wikipedia And More". MakeUseOf . Retrieved 21 February 2016.

Other websites [change | change source]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikipedia .

• Wikipedia - multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
• Wikipedia Archived 2007-08-31 at the Wayback Machine at the Open Directory Project
• CBC News: I, editor
• Wikipedia - Citizendium

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