Wikipedia

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia logo, a globe showing puzzle pieces with glyphs from several writing systems
Screenshot Wikipedia portal showing the different languages sorted by article count
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	334 languages
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger[1]
URL	wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional[notes 1]
Users	>271,339 active users[notes 2] and >114,637,777 registered users 1,067 administrators (English)
Launched	January 15, 2001; 23 years ago (2001-01-15)
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[2]
OCLC number	52075003

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia website in 336 languages of the world. 324 languages are currently active and 13 are closed.

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 give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is an open content website. This means anyone can copy or edit 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 combination of two words, wiki and encyclopedia.^[3]

Wikipedia was started on January 9, 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.

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.
2. ↑ Chapman, Roger (September 6, 2011). "Top 40 Website Programming Languages". roadchap.com. Archived from the original on September 22, 2013. Retrieved September 6, 2011.
3. ↑ Andreas Kaplan, Haenlein Michael (2014) Collaborative projects (social media application): About Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Business Horizons, Volume 57 Issue 5, pp.617-626