Wikipedia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the Internet encyclopedia. For other uses, see Wikipedia ( disambiguation). For Wikipedia's visitor introduction, see Wikipedia:About. For the Wikipedia home page, see Wikipedia:Main Page. Wikipedia A white sphere made of large jigsaw pieces, with letters from several alphabets shown on the pieces Wikipedia wordmark The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems for the letter W or sounds "wi", "wo" or "wa" Screenshot [show] Web address wikipedia.org Slogan The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit Commercial? No Type of site Internet encyclopedia Registration Optional[notes 1] Available in 288 editions[1] Users 132,786 active editors[notes 2] and 27,643,029 registered editors Content license CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0 Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies Written in L A M P platform[2] Owner Wikimedia Foundation Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[3] Launched January 15, 2001; 15 years ago Alexa rank Decrease 7[4] (January 2016) Current status Active Wikipedia (Listeni/?w?k?'pi?di?/ or Listeni/?w?ki'pi?di?/ 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.[5] Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites,[4] and co nstitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.[6][7][ 8] Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger[9] c oined its name,[10] a portmanteau of wiki[notes 3] and encyclopedia. Initially o nly in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar ve rsions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of 291 Wikipedia editions and is the largest with 5,093,857 articles (having reached 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There i s a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 38 million articles in over 2 50 different languages.[12] As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views an d nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.[13] A peer review of 42 science articles found in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wik ipedia was published in Nature in 2005, and found that Wikipedia's level of accu racy approached Encyclopedia Britannica's.[14] Criticisms of Wikipedia include c laims that it exhibits systemic bias, presents a mixture of "truths, half truths , and some falsehoods",[15] and that in controversial topics it is subject to ma nipulation and spin.[16] Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Openness 2.1 Restrictions 2.2 Review of changes 2.3 Vandalism 3 Policies and laws 3.1 Content policies and guidelines 4 Governance 4.1 Administrators 4.2 Dispute resolution 5 Community 5.1 Diversity 6 Language editions 7 Critical reception 7.1 Accuracy of content 7.2 Quality of writing 7.3 Coverage of topics and systemic bias 7.4 Explicit content 7.5 Privacy 7.6 Sexism 8 Operation 8.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters 8.2 Software operations and support 8.3 Automated editing 8.4 Wikiprojects, and assessments of articles' importance and quality 8.5 Hardware operations and support 8.6 Internal research and operational development 8.7 Internal news publications 9 Access to content 9.1 Content licensing 9.2 Methods of access 10 Impact 10.1 Readership 10.2 Cultural significance 10.3 Sister projects Wikimedia 10.4 Publishing 10.5 Scientific use 11 Related projects 12 See also 13 References 13.1 Notes 14 Further reading 14.1 Academic studies 14.2 Books 14.3 Book reviews and other articles 15 External links History Main article: History of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with large initial "N". Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia but non e were so successful.[17] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-la nguage encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownershi p of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were the Bomis CEO Jimmy Wale s and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Ric hard Stallman.[18] Sanger and Wales founded Wikipedia.[19][20] While Wales is cr edited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[21][22 ] Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[23] O n January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[24] File:How Wikipedia contributes to free knowledge.webm Wikipedia according to Simpleshow 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-languag e edition at www.wikipedia.com,[25] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia maili ng list.[21] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[26] was codified in i ts first months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipe dia operated independently of Nupedia.[21] Originally, Bomis intended to make Wi kipedia a business for profit.[27] Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web sea rch engine indexing. By August 8, 2001, Wikipedia had over 8,000 articles.[28] O n September 25, 2001, Wikipedia had over 13,000 articles.[29] 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.[30] 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 Septembe r 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing even th e 1408 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for almost 600 years.[31] Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users o f the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre i n February 2002.[32] These moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia wou ld not display advertisements, and to change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.c om to wikipedia.org.[33] 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.[34] Around 1,800 articles were added d aily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[35] A te am at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the pro ject's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[36] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-ha nging fruit"topics that clearly merit an articlehave already been created and buil t up extensively.[37][38][39] In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid (Spai n) found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first thr ee months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules a pplied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for thi s trend.[42] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questi oning the methodology of the study.[43] 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.[44] In the same interview, Wales a lso claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable", a claim which wa s questioned by MIT's Technology Review in a 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia."[45] In July 2012, the Atlantic reported that the number of administ rators is also in decline.[46] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magaz ine, 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 onlin e encyclopedia's millions of pages and those still there have focused increasing ly on minutiae."[47] Wikipedia blackout protest against SOPA on January 18, 2012 File:Wikipedia Edit 2014.webm 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 mo st popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks. With 4 2.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked number 9, surpassing the New Y ork 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.[48] As of March 2015, Wikipedia has rank 6[4][49] among websit es in terms of popularity according to Alexa Internet.