Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from various writing systems
Screenshot Wikipedia's desktop homepage
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	331 languages
Country of origin	United States
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger[1]
URL	wikipedia.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional[a]
Users	>283,612 active editors[b] >114,263,851 registered users
Launched	January 15, 2001 (23 years ago) (2001-01-15)
Current status	Active
Content license	CC Attribution / Share-Alike 4.0 Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies
Written in	LAMP platform[2]
OCLC number	52075003

Wikipedia^[c] is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history,^[3][4] and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of May 2024^[update], it was ranked fifth by Semrush,^[5] and sixth by Similarweb.^[6] Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.^[7]

Initially only available in English, editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 other languages have been developed. The English Wikipedia, with its 6.8 million articles, is the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 63 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024^[update].^{[W 1]} Roughly 25% of Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.8%, the United Kingdom at 5.7%, Germany at 5%, Russia at 4.9%, and the remaining 54% split among other countries, according to 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 from the late 2010s onward^[3][11][12] while becoming an important fact-checking site.^[13][14] Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.^[15][16] Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events.^[17][18]

History

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 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,^{[22][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^[20] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,^{[W 8]} and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.^[22] The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.^[23][24] 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.^[22] Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business.^[25]

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 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.^[26]

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.^{[27][W 13]}

Though the English Wikipedia reached 3 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.^[28] 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.^[29] 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.^[30][31][32]

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.^[33][34] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.^[35] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology.^[36] 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".^[37] 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.^[38] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators was also in decline.^[39] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis."^[40]

The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline.^[41][42]

Milestones

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