Wikipedia

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Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from

several writing systems
Screenshot
Type of site Online encyclopedia
Available in 303 languages
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Jimmy Wales
Created by
Larry Sanger[1]
Website www.wikipedia.org
Alexa rank 13 (Global, July 2020)
Commercial No
Registration Optional[notes 1]
>304,881 active users[notes 2] and
Users >90,647,501 registered users 1,184
administrators (English)
Launched January 15, 2001; 19 years ago
Current status Active
CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0
Content license Most text is also dual-licensed under
GFDL; media licensing varies
Written in LAMP platform[2]
OCLC number 52075003
Wikipedia ( pronunciation (help·info)) is an Internet encyclopedia website in many languages.
Users do not have to pay in order to use it. 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
"open content". 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 Internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a
separate website of its own. It is a wiki that runs using the software MediaWiki (like all other
Wikimedia projects).

Anyone who wishes to can change the pages in 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.

Contents
 1 History
o 1.1 10th anniversary
 2 Using Wikipedia
 3 Related pages
 4 Notes
 5 References
 6 Other websites

History

Wikipedia Monument
 Play media
Video about how Wikipedia contributes to free knowledge

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

The logo used on the English Wikipedia on January 15, 2011

Wikipedia began as a related project for Nupedia. Nupedia was a free online English-language
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 for 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 were
not 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 numbers 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 the Wikipedia.

10th anniversary

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
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 searching engine, the Wikipedia page
will come out in the first results of many searches. To use Wikipedia better, people should
understand the basic function on the page. The page is organized while they are looking up the
page. As Wikipedia users, they should have a good understanding of Wikipedia.

 Did you know: Trivia from new articles.

 In the news: News of the world.
 On this day: Anniversaries.[16]
 Current events: Not available at present.

Clickable
(view • discuss)
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 19 years, 6 months and 10 days – Wikipedia (as of February 10,
2020) has over 51,542,106 total articles (6,012,163 in English (stats); 151,656 in Simple English)
– *VITAL ARTICLES* => Top10–100–1000; *BEST ARTICLES* => over 29,800;
*POPULAR ARTICLES* (Last Week) => Top25; Top5000 – and has (for the Simple English
version) 18 administrators and 1,007 active editors – as of 13:28, July 25, 2020 (UTC).

Estimated size of a printed version of Wikipedia (August 2010).

Click here for updated image using volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica.
  Wikipedia => Is "over 85 times" the size of Encyclopedia Britannica. (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."

Related pages
 Simple English Wikipedia
 Epistemic community

Notes
1.

 Registration is required for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages in the
English Wikipedia, and uploading files.

1.  To be considered active, a user must make at least one edit or other action in a
given month.

References
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.
  Chapman, Roger (September 6, 2011). "Top 40 Website Programming Languages".
roadchap.com. Archived from the original on September 22, 2013. Retrieved September 6, 2011.
  Andreas Kaplan, Haenlein Michael (2014) Collaborative projects (social media
application): About Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Business Horizons, Volume 57 Issue 5,
pp.617-626
  Richard M. Stallman (2007-06-20). "The Free Encyclopedia Project". Free Software
Foundation. Retrieved 2008-01-04.
  Jonathan Sidener (2004-12-06). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-
Tribune. Archived from the original on 15 December 2004. Retrieved 2006-10-15.
  Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York
Times. The New York Times Company. 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.
  Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A
Memoir". Slashdot. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
  Sanger, Larry (January 17, 2001). "Wikipedia Is Up!". Internet Archive. Retrieved 2008-
12-26.
  "Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?". Retrieved 2007-02-20.
  Sanger, Larry (2001-01-10). "Let's Make a Wiki". Internet Archive. Archived from the
original on 2003-04-14. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
  "Wikipedia: HomePage". Archived from the original on 2001-03-31. Retrieved 2001-03-
31.
  "Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia (January 21, 2007)
  ""Multilingual statistics". Wikipedia. March 30, 2005. Retrieved 2008-12-25.
  "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. 18. Encyclopædia
Britannica. 2007. pp. 257–286.
  Bobbie Johnson. "Wikipedia approaches its limits".

1.  O' Neil, Mark (16 December 2014). "Everything You Need To Know About
Wikipedia And More". MakeUseOf. Retrieved 21 February 2016.

Other websites

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikipedia.

 Wikipedia - multilingual portal (contains links to all language editions of the project)
 Wikipedia at the Open Directory Project
 CBC News: I, editor
 Wikipedia - Citizendium

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 This page was last changed on 12 July 2020, at 19:17.

 Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License and the
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