36. This article is about the Internet encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Wikipedia

(disambiguation).
For Wikipedia's non-encyclopedic visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About. For the main page,
see Main Page.
Wikipedia (
i
/wkpidi/ or
i
/wkipidi/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-) is a collaboratively
edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia that is supported by the non-profitWikimedia
Foundation. Volunteers worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287
languages, including over 4.5 million in the English Wikipedia. Anyone who can access the site
can edit almost any of its articles, which on the Internet comprise
[4]
the largest and most popular
general reference work.
[5][6][7][8][9]
In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia
is 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."
[10]

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, the latter
[11]
creating its
name,
[12]
a portmanteau of wiki (the name of a type of collaborative website, from
the Hawaiian word for "quick")
[13]
and encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia-building and the presence of
much unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In
2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online
collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition
to YouTube, reddit, MySpace, and Facebook.
[14]
Wikipedia has also become known as a news
source because of the rapid update of articles related to breaking news.
[15][16][17]

The open nature of Wikipedia has led to various concerns, such as the quality of
writing,
[18]
vandalism
[19][20]
and the accuracy of information. Some articles contain unverified or
inconsistent information,
[21]
though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the 42 science
articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopdia Britannica and had
a similar rate of "serious errors".
[22]
Britannica replied that the study's methology and conclusions
were flawed.
[23]
The policies of Wikipedia combine verifiability and a neutral point of view.