This article is about the encyclopedia. For the English edition, see English Wikipedia.

For the
English Wikipedia's homepage, see Main Page. For Wikipedia's introduction,
see Wikipedia:About. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from

various writing systems

show
Screenshot

Type of site Online encyclopedia

Available in 285 languages

Country of United States

origin

Owner Wikimedia Foundation

Jimmy Wales
Created by
Larry Sanger[1]

URL wikipedia.org

Alexa rank  14 (Global, August 2020)[2]

Commercial No

Registration Optional[note 1]
 Users >304,107 active users[note
2]
 and >91,433,195 registered users

1,145 administrators (English)

Launched January 15, 2001; 19 years ago

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[3]

OCLC number 52075003

Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) wik-ee-PEE-dee-ə;

abbreviated as WP) is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open
collaboration project[4] by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.[5] It
is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web.[6][7][8] It is also one
of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa, as of August 2020.[9] It features
exclusively[dubious  –  discuss] free content and has no advertising. It is hosted[10] by the Wikimedia
Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[11][12][13][14]
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, and was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry
Sanger.[15] Sanger coined its name[16][17] as a portmanteau of the terms "wiki" and "encyclopedia".
Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly
developed. With 6.2 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 300
Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 54 million articles[18] attracting
1.5 billion unique visitors per month.[19][20]
In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia
Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that
of Britannica,[21] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of
a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues.[22]
[23]
 The following year, Time stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made
Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to
the vision of Jimmy Wales.[24]
Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias and for being subject to manipulation
and spin in controversial topics;[25] Edwin Black[definition needed] has criticized Wikipedia for presenting a
mixture of "truth, half truth, and some falsehoods".[26] Wikipedia has also been criticized for
gender bias, particularly on its English-language version, where the dominant majority of editors
are male. However, edit-a-thons have been held to encourage female editors and increase the
coverage of women's topics.[27][28] Facebook announced that by 2017 it would help readers
detect fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar
plan in 2018.[29]

Contents

 1History
 o 1.1Nupedia
o 1.2Launch and early growth
o 1.3Milestones
 2Openness
o 2.1Restrictions
o 2.2Review of changes
o 2.3Vandalism
o 2.4Edit warring
 3Policies and laws
o 3.1Content policies and guidelines
 4Governance
o 4.1Administrators
o 4.2Dispute resolution
 5Community
o 5.1Studies
o 5.2Diversity
 6Language editions
o 6.1English Wikipedia editor decline
 7Reception
o 7.1Accuracy of content
o 7.2Discouragement in education
o 7.3Quality of writing
o 7.4Coverage of topics and systemic bias
o 7.5Explicit content
o 7.6Privacy
o 7.7Sexism
 8Operation
o 8.1Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates
o 8.2Software operations and support
o 8.3Automated editing
o 8.4Hardware operations and support
o 8.5Internal research and operational development
o 8.6Internal news publications
 9Access to content
o 9.1Content licensing
o 9.2Methods of access
 10Cultural impact
o 10.1Trusted source to combat fake news
o 10.2Readership
o 10.3Cultural significance
o 10.4Sister projects—Wikimedia
o 10.5Publishing
o 10.6Research use
 11Related projects
 12See also
 13Notes
 14References
 15Further reading
o 15.1Academic studies
o 15.2Books
o 15.3Book review-related articles
 o 15.4Learning resources
o 15.5Other media coverage
 16External links