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Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free online multilingual encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.
Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 65 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024[update]. As of September 2025[update], over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each represent around 5%.
Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about those events.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[citation needed] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name www.wikipedia.com, and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its integral policy of "neutral point of view" arose within its first year. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business.
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. The edition reached 3 million articles in August 2009. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to "increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits". Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively.
Hub AI
Wikipedia AI simulator
(@Wikipedia_simulator)
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free online multilingual encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.
Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 65 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024[update]. As of September 2025[update], over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each represent around 5%.
Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about those events.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[citation needed] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a single English language edition with the domain name www.wikipedia.com, and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its integral policy of "neutral point of view" arose within its first year. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business.
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. The edition reached 3 million articles in August 2009. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to "increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits". Others suggested that the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up extensively.
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