Wikipedia[note 3] is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a

community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use
of the wiki-based editing system MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-
read reference work in history.[3][4] It is consistently ranked as one of the ten most
popular websites in the world, and as of 2024 is ranked the fifth most visited website on
the Internet by Semrush.[5] Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15,
2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit
organization that employs a staff of over 700 people.[6]
Initially only available in English, editions in other languages have been developed.
Wikipedia's editions, when combined, comprise more than 62 million articles, attracting
around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 14 million edits per month
(about 5.2 edits per second on average) as of November 2023.[7][W 1] Roughly 26% of
Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.9%, the United
Kingdom at 5.4%, Germany at 5%, Russia at 4.8%, and the remaining 54% split among
other countries, according to data provided by Similarweb.[8]
Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge,
extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for
exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and geographical
bias against the Global South (Eurocentrism).[9][10] While the reliability of Wikipedia was
frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in
the late 2010s and early 2020s,[3][9][11][note 4] having become an important fact-checking
site.[12][13]
Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific
pages to the entire site.[14][15] Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources
for frequently updated information about those events.[16][17]
History
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Nupedia
Main article: Nupedia

Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales (left) and Larry Sanger (right)

Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia,
but with limited success.[18] 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.[19] 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][20] Nupedia
was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia
was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging
of Richard Stallman.[W 2] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly
editable encyclopedia,[21][W 3] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to
reach that goal.[W 4] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list
to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[W 5]
Launch and growth
The domains wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com (later redirecting to wikipedia.org) were
registered on January 13, 2001,[W 6] and January 12, 2001,[W 7] respectively. Wikipedia
was launched on January 15, 2001[19] as a single English-language edition at
www.wikipedia.com,[W 8] and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.
[21] The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.[22][23] Its
integral policy of "neutral point-of-view"[W 9] was codified in its first few months.
Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of
Nupedia.[21] Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business.[24]

The Wikipedia home page on December 20,

2001[note 5]
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.[W 10][W 11] 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.[25]
Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[W
12] Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed
Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[26][W 13]
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.[27] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the
encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[W 14] A team at the Palo
Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing
exclusivity and resistance to change.[28] 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.[29][30][31]
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, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. [32][33] The
Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such
content among the reasons for this trend.[34] Wales disputed these claims in 2009,
denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology.[35] 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".[36] 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.[37] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number
of administrators was also in decline.[38] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New
York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is
facing an internal crisis."[39]
The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long
period of decline.[40][41]
Milestones

Cartogram showing number of articles in

each European language as of January 2019. One square represents
10,000 articles. Languages with fewer than 10,000 articles are
represented by one square. Languages are grouped by language family
and each language family is presented by a separate color.
In January 2007, Wikipedia first became one of the ten most popular websites in the
United States, according to Comscore Networks.[42] With 42.9 million unique visitors, it
was ranked #9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11).[42] This marked
a significant increase over January 2006, when Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with around
18.3 million unique visitors.[43] In 2014, it received eight billion page views every month.
[W 15] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had
18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the
ratings firm comScore".[7] As of March 2023, it ranked 6th in popularity, according
to Similarweb.[44] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long
tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal
through "stigmergic accumulation".[45][46]
On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated
protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online
Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24
hours.[47] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that
temporarily replaced its content.[48][W 16]