Wikipedia () is a free online encyclopedia website in 320 languages of the world. 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.

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 

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.

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the ones who started Wikipedia. Wales is credited with defining the goals of the project. Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales' goal. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001. It was launched as an English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view" 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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 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. 
Current events: Not available at present.

Related pages 
 Simple English Wikipedia
 Epistemic community

Notes

References

Other websites 

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

2001 establishments in the United States
Encyclopedias
Wikimedia
Wikis
Websites established in 2001