Wikipedia ( /wkpidi/ or

/wkipidi/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-) is a free-access, free-content Internet

encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access
the site can edit most of its articles, with the expectation that they follow the website's
policies.[6] Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites[5] and constitutes the Internet's
largest and most popular general reference work.[7][8][9]
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger[10] coined its
name,[11] aportmanteau of wiki[notes 3] and encyclopedia. Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly
became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and
in editing practices. The English Wikipediais now one of more than 200 Wikipedias and is the largest
with over 4.9 million articles. There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of nearly 35 million
articles in 288 different languages.[13] As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly
500 million unique visitors each month.[14] Globally, Wikipedia had more than 25 million
accounts,[15] out of which there were about 72,000 active editors as of May 2015.[2]
Supporters of Wikipedia cite a 2005 survey of Wikipedia published in Nature based on a comparison
of 42 science articles with Encyclopedia Britannica, which found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy
approached Encyclopedia Britannica's.[16] Criticisms of Wikipedia include claims that it exhibits
systemic bias, presents a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods",[17] and is subject to
manipulation and spin.[18]

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia but none were so
successful.[19]
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, a web
portal company. Its main figures were the Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,editor-inchief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open
ContentLicense, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at
the urging of Richard Stallman.[20] Sanger and Wales founded Wikipedia.[21][22] While Wales is credited
with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[23][24] 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]

External audio
The Great Book of Knowledge,
Part 1, Ideas with Paul
Kennedy,CBC, January 15, 2014

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at
www.wikipedia.com,[27] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[23] Wikipedia's policy of
"neutral point-of-view"[28] was codified in its first months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules
initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[23] Originally, Bomis intended to make
Wikipedia a business for profit.[29]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search
engine indexing. By August 8, 2001, Wikipedia had over 8,000 articles.[30] On September 25, 2001,
Wikipedia had over 13,000 articles.[31] And 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.[32] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's
servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. 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 600 years.[33]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[34] These moves
encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and to change
Wikipedia's domain fromwikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[35]
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.[36] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average
was roughly 800.[37] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the
project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[38] 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.[39][40][41]
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.[42][43] The Wall Street Journal cited the
array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this
trend.[44] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology
of the study.[45] 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.[46] 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."[47] In July
2012, the Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[48] 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."[49]

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

In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites in
the United States, according to comScore 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.[50] As of March 2015, Wikipedia has rank 6[5][51] among websites in terms of
popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received 8 billion pageviews every month.[52] On
February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia has 18 billion page views and nearly
500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore."[14]
On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against
two proposed laws in the United States Congressthe Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and
the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[53] More than 162 million people
viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[54][55]
Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical
encyclopedias that accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[56][57]
On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had
Wikipedia growth flattened but that it has "lost nearly 10 per cent of its page-views last year. That's a
decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions
are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by 12 per cent, those of German
version slid by 17 per cent and the Japanese version lost 9 per cent."[58] Varma added that, "While
Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that
Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia
users."[58] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University
and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for internet and Security indicated that he suspected much
of the page view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question
answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]