From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Internet encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page. For
Wikipedia's visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About. For other uses, see Wikipedia
(disambiguation).
Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from

several writing systems[1]
Screenshot

Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20,

2010

Internet encyclopedia
292 languages
Wikimedia Foundation
Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2]
The free encyclopedia that anyone
Slogan(s)
can edit
Website
wikipedia.org
Alexa rank Global: 6[3] (September 2016)
Commercial No
Registration Optional[notes 1]
>275,111 active users[notes 2] and
Users
>64,619,157 registered users
Launched January 15, 2001; 15 years ago
Current status Active
CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0
Content license Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL;
Type of site
Available in
Owner
Created by

media licensing varies

Written in LAMP platform[4]

OCLC number 52075003
Wikipedia ( i/wkpidi/ or i/wkipidi/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-) is a free online encyclopedia
that allows its users to edit almost any article.[5] Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general
reference work on the Internet[6][7][8] and is ranked among the ten most popular websites.[3]
Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.[9][10][11]
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[12] Sanger[13]
coined its name,[14] a portmanteau of wiki[notes 3] and encyclopedia. There was only the English
language version initially, but it quickly developed similar versions in other languages, which
differ in content and in editing practices. With 5,268,952 articles, English Wikipedia is the
largest out of more than 290 versions of encyclopedias on Wikipedia. Overall, Wikipedia consists
of more than 40 million articles in more than 250 different languages[16] and as of February 2014,
it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.[17]
In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 science articles from Encyclopdia
Britannica and Wikipedia, and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached
Encyclopdia Britannica's.[18] Criticism of Wikipedia includes claims that it exhibits systemic
bias, presents a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods",[19] and that in controversial
topics, it is subject to manipulation and spin.[20]