Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should

control editing. This characteristic was in stark contrast to contemporary digital

encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopdia Britannica, and even
Bomis's Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for
Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the
concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham.[5]
Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia
project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for
it. In practice, Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in
multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.

According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website in

terms of overall visitor traffic.[6] Wikipedia's total worldwide monthly readership is
approximately 495 million.[7] Worldwide in August 2015, WMF Labs tallied 18 billion
page views for the month.[8] According to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 117
million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[