Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ (listen) wik-ee-)

is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of

volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. Its editors
are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in
history.[3] It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by the
Similarweb and formerly Alexa; as of 2022, Wikipedia was ranked the 7th most
popular site.[3][4][5] It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-
profit organization funded mainly through donations.[6]

On January 15, 2001, Jimmy Wales[7] and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia. Sanger
coined its name as a blend of "wiki" and "encyclopedia."[8][9] Wales was influenced
by the "spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian
School of economics after being exposed to these ideas by Austrian economist and
Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton.[10] Initially available only in
English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Its combined editions
comprise more than 59 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device
visits per month and more than 17 million edits per month (1.9 edits per second) as
of November 2020.[11][12] In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing
anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in
the world."[7]

Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of

knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of
commercial bias; but criticism for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender
bias against women and alleged ideological bias.[13][14] The reliability of
Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has improved over time, as
Wikipedia has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.[3][13][15]
The website's coverage of controversial topics such as American politics and major
events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has received
substantial media attention. It has been censored by world governments, ranging
from specific pages to the entire site. In April 2018, Facebook and YouTube
announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking
links to related Wikipedia articles.[16][17] Articles on breaking news are often
accessed as a source of frequently updated information about those events.[18]

Contents
1 History
1.1 Nupedia
1.2 Launch and growth
1.3 Milestones
2 Openness
2.1 Restrictions
2.2 Review of changes
2.3 Vandalism
2.4 Edit warring
3 Policies and laws
3.1 Content policies and guidelines
4 Governance
4.1 Administrators
4.2 Dispute resolution
5 Community
5.1 Studies
5.2 Diversity
6 Language editions
6.1 English Wikipedia editor numbers
7 Reception
7.1 Accuracy of content
7.2 Discouragement in education
7.3 Coverage of topics and systemic bias
7.4 Explicit content
7.5 Privacy
7.6 Sexism
8 Operation
8.1 Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates
8.2 Software operations and support
8.3 Automated editing
8.4 Hardware operations and support
8.5 Internal research and operational development
8.6 Internal news publications
8.7 The Wikipedia Library
9 Access to content
9.1 Content licensing
9.2 Methods of access
9.3 Chinese access
10 Cultural impact
10.1 Trusted source to combat fake news
10.2 Readership
10.3 Cultural significance
10.4 Sister projects – Wikimedia
10.5 Publishing
10.6 Research use
11 Related projects
12 See also
13 Notes
14 References
15 Further reading
15.1 Academic studies
15.2 Books
15.3 Book review-related articles
15.4 Learning resources
15.5 Other media coverage
16 External links
History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger

Nupedia
Main article: Nupedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with the large initial "N"
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of
Wikipedia, but with limited success.[19] Wikipedia began as a complementary project
for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles
were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.[20] It was founded on
March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures
were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later
Wikipedia.[1][21] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content
License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free
Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[22] Wales is credited with
defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[23][24] while Sanger
is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[25] On January
10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a
"feeder" project for Nupedia.[26]

Launch and growth

The domains wikipedia.com (later redirecting to wikipedia.org) and wikipedia.org
were registered on January 12, 2001,[27] and January 13, 2001,[28] respectively,
and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001,[20] as a single English-language
edition at www.wikipedia.com,[29] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing
list.[23] Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] was codified in its
first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it
operated independently of Nupedia.[23] Bomis originally intended it as a business
for profit.[31]

The Wikipedia home page on December 20, 2001

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[32]
Number of English Wikipedia articles[33]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search
engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a
total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.[34][35] 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 the Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming Dynasty in 1408, which had
held the record for almost 600 years.[36]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[37]
Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed
Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[38][39]

Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the
growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors,
appears to have peaked around early 2007.[40] Around 1,800 articles were added
daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[41] A team
at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's
increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[42] Others suggest that the growth
is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—
topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up
extensively.[43][44][45]

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found
that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of
2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[46]
[47] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and
disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[48] Wales
disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's
methodology.[49] Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting
a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June
2011. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and
sustainable".[50] A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Wikipedia",
questioned this claim, revealing that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its
volunteer editors, and that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae.
[51] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators was also
in decline.[52] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine
Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal
crisis."[53]