Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Internet encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).
For Wikipedia's visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About.
Wikipedia A white sphere made of large jigsaw pieces, with letters from several alphabets shown on the pieces
Wikipedia wordmark
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems[1]
Screenshot
[show]
Web address wikipedia.org
Slogan The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Commercial No
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia
Registration Optional[notes 1]
Available in 292 languages
Users >263,618 active users[notes 2] and >62,976,506 registered users
Content license
CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0
Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies
Written in LAMP platform[2]
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[3]
Launched January 15, 2001; 15 years ago
Alexa rank
Global: Increase 6[4] (July 2016)
OCLC number 52075003
Current status Active
Wikipedia, (Listeni/ˌwɪkᵻˈpiːdiə/ or Listeni/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) owned by the nonprofit organization Wikimedia Foundation,[5][6][7] is a free Internet encyclopedia that allows its users to edit almost any article accessible.[8] Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet[9][10][11] and is ranked among the ten most popular websites.[4]
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger[12] coined its name,[13] a portmanteau of wiki[notes 3] and encyclopedia. It was only in the English language initially, but it quickly developed similar versions in other languages which differ in content and in editing practices. With 5,197,291 articles, English Wikipedia is the largest out of more than 290 versions of encyclopedias on Wikipedia. Overall, Wikipedia consists of more than 38 million articles in more than 250 different languages[15] and as of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.[16]
In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached Encyclopedia Britannica's.[17] Criticism of Wikipedia includes claims that it exhibits systemic bias, presents a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods",[18] and that in controversial topics, it is subject to manipulation and spin.[19] |