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Wikipedia: Jump To Navigationjump To Search

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and owned by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It contains over 40 million articles in over 300 languages and is one of the largest general reference websites. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and articles can be edited by anyone with access to the internet. It has become a significant source of information, but has also been criticized for potential biases and manipulation of content in controversial topics.

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49 views2 pages

Wikipedia: Jump To Navigationjump To Search

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and owned by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It contains over 40 million articles in over 300 languages and is one of the largest general reference websites. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and articles can be edited by anyone with access to the internet. It has become a significant source of information, but has also been criticized for potential biases and manipulation of content in controversial topics.

Uploaded by

Eureka Jane Rivera
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Jump to navigationJump to search
This article is about the online encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Wikipedia's Main
Page. For Wikipedia's visitor introduction, see Wikipedia's About page. For other uses,
see Wikipedia (disambiguation).
"The Free Encyclopedia" redirects here. For other encyclopedias, see Lists of encyclopedias.

Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphsfrom several writing systems

show
Screenshot

Type of site Online encyclopedia

Available in 303 languages

Owner Wikimedia Foundation

Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1]

Website wikipedia.org

Alexa rank 5 (Global, February 2019)

Commercial No
Registration Optional[notes 1]

Users >317,094 active users[notes 2]and >81,342,881 registered users

1,184 administrators (English)

Launched January 15, 2001; 18 years ago

Current status Active

Content license CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0

Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing

varies

Written in LAMP platform[2]

OCLC number 52075003

Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ ( listen), /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ ( listen) WIK-ih-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual online


encyclopedia with exclusively free content, based on open collaboration through a model of content
edit by web-based applications like web browsers, called wiki. It is the largest and most popular
general reference work on the World Wide Web,[3][4][5] and is one of the most popular websites
by Alexa rank as of October 2018.[6] It is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-
profit organization that operates on money it receives from donors.[7][8][9]
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[10] Sanger coined
its name,[11][12] as a portmanteauof wiki (the Hawai'ian word for "quick"[13]) and "encyclopedia". Initially
an English-language encyclopedia, versions in other languages were quickly developed.
With 5,836,991 articles,[notes 3] the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia
encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different
languages[14] and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million
unique visitors per month.[15]
In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia
Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that
of Britannica,[16] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a
random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social
issues.[17][18] Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made
Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the
vision of Jimmy Wales.[19]
Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of "truths, half
truths, and some falsehoods",[20] and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial
topics.[21] In 2017, Facebook announced that it would help readers detect fake news by suitable links
to Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.[22]

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