This article is about the free encyclopedia. For the different, similar terms related to Wikipedia, see
Wikipedia (terminology).
Wikipedia's multilingual portal, showing the project's different language editions.
Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project, operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001, it is the largest and, fastest-growing general reference work currently available on the Internet, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407) that had held the record for nearly 600 years. As of April 2008, Wikipedia attracts 684 million visitors in 253 languages, receiving between 20,000 and 45,000 page requests per second, depending on time of day. Wikipedia currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.
2. Wikipedia, founded jointly by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project founded in 2000 under the ownership of Bomis Inc., a web portal company founded in 1996. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the counter-intuitive strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing.
3. Almost every article in Wikipedia may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica, no article in Wikipedia is submitted to formal peer-review process and changes to articles are made available immediately. To ensure its quality, the project relies on its community members, called Wikipedians, to remove vandalism or identify problems such as violation of neutrality or material that cannot be referenced to an external source. Articles in Wikipedia are subject to the law in Florida, United States and several internal policies and guidelines. All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
4. The operation of Wikipedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of GNU/Linux servers, 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul. It employed a single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture.
5. Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
6. Critics target its systematic bias and inconsistencies, and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. As a result, contemporary popular icons with relatively low overall significance (TV hosts, pop singers etc.) are often more prominently featured than historical figures with high global importance. Various other projects have since forked from Wikipedia for editorial reasons. New Wikipedia-inspired projects — such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Amapedia and Google's Knol — have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research and commercial advertising. more... at Wikipedia
