Wikipedia ( i/?w?k??pi?di?

/ or
i/?w?ki?pi?di?/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-?) is an Internet encyclopedia,
supported and hosted by the non-profitWikimedia Foundation. It is a free-of-cost encyclopedia
with its articles being free-content; those who use Wikipedia can edit almost any article
accessible.[4] Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, [3] and constitutes
the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.[5][6][7]
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger [8] coined its
name,[9] a portmanteau of wiki[notes 3]and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was only in the English
language initially, but it quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other
languages which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one
of 292 Wikipedia editions and holds the largest amount of articles, with more than 5,164,942,
having surpassed 5,000,000 articles in November 2015. Wikipedia consists of a grand total of
more than 38 million articles in more than 250 different languages throughout all current
encyclopedias.[11] As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500
million unique visitors each month.[12]
A peer review was published in Nature in 2005 assessing 42 science articles that were found
in both Encyclopdia Britannica and Wikipedia. The review found that Wikipedia's level of
accuracy approaches that of Encyclopedia Britannica's.[13] However,Wikipedia has been
subjectively criticized;[14] claims show that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias, presenting a
mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods", [15] and controversial topics could be
manipulated or spun.[16]

Contents
[hide]

1History
1.1Nupedia
1.2Launch and early growth
1.3Recent milestones
2Openness
2.1Restrictions
2.2Review of changes
2.3Vandalism
3Policies and laws
3.1Content policies and guidelines
4Governance
4.1Administrators
4.2Dispute resolution
5Community
5.1Diversity
6Language editions
7Critical reception
7.1Accuracy of content
7.2Quality of writing

7.3Coverage of topics and systemic bias

7.4Explicit content
7.5Privacy
7.6Sexism
8Operation
8.1Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates
8.2Software operations and support
8.3Automated editing
8.4Wikiprojects, and assessments of articles' importance and quality
8.5Hardware operations and support
8.6Internal research and operational development
8.7Internal news publications
9Access to content
9.1Content licensing
9.2Methods of access
10Impact
10.1Readership
10.2Cultural significance
10.3Sister projects Wikimedia
10.4Publishing
10.5Scientific use
11Related projects
12See also
12.1Special searches
13References
13.1Notes
14Further reading
14.1Academic studies
14.2Books
14.3Book reviews and other articles
15External links

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger

Nupedia

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project calledNupedia

Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were so
successful.[17]
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online Englishlanguage encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a
formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, aweb
portal company. Its main figures were the Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editorin-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own
Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before
Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[18] Sanger and Wales founded
Wikipedia.[19][20] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable
encyclopedia,[21][22] Sanger is credited with the strategy of using awiki to reach that goal.
[23] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a
"feeder" project for Nupedia.[24]

Wikipedia according to Simpleshow

External audio

The Great Book of Knowledge, Part 1, Ideas with Paul Kennedy,CBC, January 15,
2014Launch and early growth
Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at
www.wikipedia.com,[25] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. [21] Wikipedia's
policy of "neutral point-of-view"[26] was codified in its first months. Otherwise, there were
relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia. [21] Originally,
Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit. [27]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search
engine indexing. By August 8, 2001, Wikipedia had over 8,000 articles. [28] On September 25,
2001, Wikipedia had over 13,000 articles. [29] By the end of 2001 it had grown to
approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions. It had reached 26 language editions
by late 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004. [30] 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 two million
articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled,
surpassing even the 1408 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for almost
600 years.[31]
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create theEnciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[32] These
moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and
to change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[33]
Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the
edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked
around early 2007.[34] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006;
by 2013 that average was roughly 800. [35] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed
this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.
[36] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be
called "low-hanging fruit"topics that clearly merit an articlehave already been created
and built up extensively.[37][38][39]
In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid (Spain) found
that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in
comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. [40][41] The

Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such
content among the reasons for this trend.[42] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying
the decline and questioning the methodology of the study. [43] Two years later, Wales
acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than
36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. [44] In the same interview, Wales also
claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable", a claim which was questioned by
MIT's Technology Review in a 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia." [45] In July
2012, the Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline. [46] In the
November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the
sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis. In 2013, MIT's Technology
Review revealed that since 2007, the site has lost a third of the volunteer editors who update
and correct the online encyclopedia's millions of pages and those still there have focused
increasingly on minutiae."[47]

Wikipedia blackout protest againstSOPA on January 18, 2012

A promotional video of the Wikimedia Foundation that encourages viewers to edit Wikipedia, mostly
reviewing 2014 via Wikipedia content

Recent milestones
In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular
websites in the United States, according tocomScore Networks. With 42.9 million unique
visitors, Wikipedia was ranked number 9, surpassing the New York Times (#10)
and Apple(#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was
number 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors. [48] As of March
2015, Wikipedia has rank 6[3][49] among websites in terms of popularity according to Alexa
Internet. In 2014, it received 8 billion pageviews every month. [50] On February 9, 2014, The
New York Times reported that Wikipedia has 18 billionpage views and nearly 500
million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore." [12]
On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests
against two proposed laws in the Unite