Wikipedia

User:Google9912/Wikipedia

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Wikipedia
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems
Screenshot
Wikipedia's homepage with links to many languages.
Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia
Available in284 active editions (295 in total)
HeadquartersMiami, Florida
OwnerWikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
Created byJimmy Wales (founder)
Larry Sanger (co-founder)
URLwikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, but needed to upload files, edit protected pages, or create pages in the English Wikipedia.
Users65,000,000+ (total registered in all editions)[1]
A simple video explanation how Wikipedia contributes to free knowledge

Wikipedia (audio speaker iconpronunciation (help·info)) is an Internet encyclopedia project in many languages. It is free of charge: users do not pay. They can choose to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is "open content". This means anyone can copy it, and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing.

Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.

Wikipedia's name is a combination of the two words wiki, Hawaiian for quick, and encyclopedia.[3] Because the word was made by combining parts of those words, it is a portmanteau.

Wikipedia was started on January 10, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier Internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. It is a wiki that runs using the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia projects).

Anyone who wishes to, can change the pages in Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.

As of September 2011, Wikipedia had about 18 million pages in about 300 languages, and more than 3.50 billion words across all Wikipedias. The regular English Wikipedia is the largest.

History

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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 and owned by Bomis, Inc which is a web portal company. The main people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the guy in charge of Bomis, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief for Nupedia. Nupedia was first licensed under the Nupedia Open Content License which was changed to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia was founded when Richard Stallman requested them.[4]

 
The Wikipedia Monument, October 2014

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the ones who started Wikipedia.[5][6] Wales is credited with defining the goals of the project.[7][8] Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales' goal.[9] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[10] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001. It was launched as an English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[11] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[7] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[12] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were not very many rules initially, and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[7]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and also from search engines. 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.[13] Nupedia and Wikipedia both existed until Nupedia's servers were stopped in 2003. After this, its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, even larger than the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.[14]

The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. The numbers of articles and of contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around spring 2007.[15]

In October 2014, the Wikipedia Monument was unveiled to the public in Poland to honor all the contributors of the Wikipedia.

10th anniversary

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The logo used on the English Wikipedia on January 15, 2011

On January 15, 2011, Wikipedia celebrated its 10th anniversary. It used a special logo (pictured) to celebrate its 10 years since it opened on January 15, 2001, and the logo was used for the whole day on the sidebar of the English Wikipedia.

Using Wikipedia

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Wikipedia is a free site just like the online encyclopedia that anybody can start or edit a page. A global site that is available in many languages. While people can use any searching engine, the Wikipedia page will come out in the first results of many searches. To use Wikipedia better, people should understand the basic function on the page. The page is organized while they are looking up the page. As Wikipedia users, they should have good understanding of Wikipedia.

  • Did you know: Trivia from new articles.
  • In the news: News of the world.
  • On this day: Anniversaries.[16]
  • Current events: Not available at present.
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References

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  1. ↑ Grand Total. Wikimedia.org. August 12, 2016. Retrieved August 12, 2016.
  2. ↑ "Wikipedia.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2016-08-12.
  3. ↑ Andreas Kaplan, Haenlein Michael (2014) Collaborative projects (social media application): About Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Business Horizons, Volume 57 Issue 5, pp.617-626
  4. ↑ Richard M. Stallman (2007-06-20). "The Free Encyclopedia Project". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2008-01-04.
  5. ↑ Jonathan Sidener (2004-12-06). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 2006-10-15.
  6. ↑ Meyers, Peter (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-11-22.  '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.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". Slashdot. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
  8. ↑ Sanger, Larry (January 17, 2001). "Wikipedia Is Up!". Internet Archive. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
  9. ↑ "Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?". Retrieved 2007-02-20.
  10. ↑ Sanger, Larry (2001-01-10). "Let's Make a Wiki". Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2003-04-14. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
  11. ↑ "Wikipedia: HomePage". Archived from the original on 2001-03-31. Retrieved 2001-03-31.
  12. ↑ "Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia (January 21, 2007)
  13. ↑ ""Multilingual statistics". Wikipedia. March 30, 2005. Retrieved 2008-12-25.
  14. ↑ "Encyclopedias and Dictionaries". Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed. Vol. 18. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. pp. 257–286.
  15. ↑ Bobbie Johnson. "Wikipedia approaches its limits".
  16. ↑ O' Neil, Mark (16 December 2014). "Everything You Need To Know About Wikipedia And More". MakeUseOf. Retrieved 21 February 2016.

Other websites

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