Wikipedia

**Wikipedia**
	Main page of www.wikipedia.org
URL	http://www.wikipedia.org/
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Need an account?	Optional
Owned by	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
Date started	January 15, 2001
Current status of site	Active

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Wikipedia ( pronunciation (info • help)) is a free,^{[note 1]} internet encyclopedia project in many languages . It is open content, which means anyone can copy it for any purpose, as long as they follow certain rules.

It is owned by the American organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which is based in San Francisco, California.

Its name is a mixture of the two words wiki , which is an Hawaiian word for quick, and encyclopedia to make a portmanteau.

It was started on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, based on an older internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. It is a wiki that runs using the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia projects).

Anyone can change the pages in Wikipedia, or even create new ones. Wikipedia has a standard format that must apply for all pages in the encyclopedia.

As of December 2007, Wikipedia had about 9.25 million articles in 253 languages, and more than 1.74 billion words across all Wikipedias.

The English Language Wikipedia has been criticized for showing a bias and unevenness.^[1] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.^[2] Wikipedia also uses very big words, so some people cannot read it well. Simple English Wikipedia was made as an easy Wikipedia for people who want to read about the same subjects, but cannot read hard or complicated words.