Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
favicon of Wikipedia Wikipedia
Wikipedia logo.
Detail of Wikipedia's multilingual portal. Here, the project's largest language editions are shown.
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

Wikipedia (Loudspeaker.png pronunciation (info • help)) is an internet encyclopedia project in many languages. It is free of charge,[note 1]. 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 located in San Francisco, California.

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

It was started on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It is 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 make 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 pages in 253 languages, and more than 1.74 billion words across all Wikipedias.

The English Language Wikipedia has been talked badly about for showing a bias and unfairness.[1] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[2]

Contents

History

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

Wikipedia began as a related project for Nupedia. Nupedia was a free online English-language encyclopedia project. Nupedia's articles were written by and owned by Bomis, Inc which was a web portal company. The main people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief for Nupedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under Nupedia Open Content License which was changed to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia was founded when Richard Stallman requested them.[3]

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia.[4][5] Wales is credited with defining the goals of the project,[6][7] Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales' goal.[8] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[9] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001. It was launched as an English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[10] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[6] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[11] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[6]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and also from search engine indexing. It grew to about 20,000 articles, and 18 languages by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.[12] Nupedia and Wikipedia both existed till Nupedia's servers were stopped in 2003. After this, its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[13]

The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. In terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors it appeared to have been reduced around Spring 2007.[14]

Other pages

Notes

  1. ^ note 1  Some language versions such as the English Wikipedia contain non-free images.

References

  1. ↑ Simon Waldman, Who knows? The Guardian, October 26, 2004
  2. ↑ Robert McHenry, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Tech Central Station, November 15, 2004.
  3. ↑ Richard M. Stallman (2007-06-20). The Free Encyclopedia Project. Free Software Foundation. Retrieved on 4 January 2008.
  4. ↑ Jonathan Sidener. "Everyone's Encyclopedia", The San Diego Union-Tribune, 2004-12-06. Retrieved on 15 October 2006.
  5. ↑ Meyers, Peter. "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", New York Times, The New York Times Company, 2001-09-20. Retrieved on 22 November 2007. “ 'I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph,' said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales.”
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Sanger, Larry. "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir", Slashdot, April 18, 2005. Retrieved on 26 December 2008.
  7. ↑ Sanger, Larry. "Wikipedia Is Up!", Internet Archive, January 17, 2001. Retrieved on 26 December 2008.
  8. ↑ Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?. Retrieved on 20 February 2007.
  9. ↑ Sanger, Larry. "Let's Make a Wiki", Internet Archive, 2001-01-10. Retrieved on 26 December 2008.
  10. ↑ Wikipedia: HomePage. Archived from the original on 31 March 2001. Retrieved on 31 March 2001.
  11. ↑ "Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia (January 21, 2007)
  12. ↑ "statistics Multilingual statistics. Wikipedia (March 30, 2005). Retrieved on 26 December 2008.
  13. ↑ "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. 18. (2007). Encyclopædia Britannica. 257–286. 
  14. ↑ Bobbie Johnson. "Wikipedia approaches its limits".

Other websites

Listen to this article · (info)
Wikipedia.ogg
Spoken Wikipedia
This audio file was created from an article revision dated July 19, 2006, and does not play the most recent changes to the article. (Audio help)
v • d • e
Projects of the Wikimedia Foundation
v • d • e
List of Wikipedias in different languages by number of articles
1,000,000+
500,000+
German (de) · French (fr) · Polish (pl) · Japanese (ja) · Italian (it) · Dutch (nl) · Spanish (es) · Portuguese (pt)
250,000+
Russian (ru) · Swedish (sv) · Chinese (zh)
100,000+
Arabic (ar) · Catalan (ca) · Czech (cs) · Danish (da) · Esperanto (eo) · Finnish (fi) · Hungarian (hu) · Indonesian (id) · Korean (ko) · Norwegian (Bokmål) (no) · Romanian (ro) · Slovak (sk) · Turkish (tr) · Ukrainian (uk)  · Vietnamese (vi)
50,000+
Bulgarian (bg) · Croatian (hr) · Estonian (et) · Haitian Creole (ht) · Hebrew (he) · Lithuanian (lt) · Persian (fa) · Simple English (simple) · Serbian (sr) · Slovene (sl) · Thai (th)
10,000+
Afrikaans (af) · Albanian (sq) · Aragonese (an) · Asturian (ast) · Azerbaijani (az) · Basque (eu) · Bengali (bn) · Bishnupriya Manipuri (bpy) · Bosnian (bs) · Breton (br) · Cantonese (zh-yue) · Cebuano (ceb) · Galician (gl) · Georgian (ka) · Greek (el) · Hindi (hi) · Icelandic (is) · Ido (io) · Javanese (jv) · Kurdish (ku) · Latin (la) · Latvian (lv) · Luxembourgish (lb) · Macedonian (mk) · Malay (ms) · Malayalam (ml) · Neapolitan (nap) · Norwegian (Nynorsk) (nn) · Quechua (qu) · Sicilian (scn) · Serbo-Croatian (sh) · Swahili (sw)  · Tagalog (tl) · Tamil (ta) · Telugu (te) · Urdu (ur) · Welsh (cy) · Walloon (wa)
1,000+
Amharic (am) · Armenian (hy) · Classical Chinese (zh-classical) · Dutch Low Saxon (nds-nl) · Egyptian Arabic (arz) · Friulian (fur) · Gan (gan) · Hawaiian (haw) · Irish (ga) · Kazakh (kk) · Khmer (km) · Ladino (lad) · Limburgish (li) · Lombard (lmo) · Lingála (ln) · Maltese (mt) · Māori (mi) · Nahuatl (nah) · Northern Sámi (se) · Pennsylvania German(pdc) · Punjabi (pnb) · Romansh (rm) · Samogitian (bat-smg) · Scottish Gaelic (gd) · Scots (sco) · Silesian (szl) · Tajik (tg) · Tongan (to) · Saterland Frisian (stq) · Turkmen (tk) · Tatar (tt) · Venetian (vec) · Wu (wuu) · Yiddish (yi) · Yoruba (yo)

Note: This page uses information from the English Wikipedia.

Retrieved from "http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia"
In other languages