Wikipedia is a collaboratively
edited, multilingual,
free Internet
encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia
Foundation. Its 24 million articles, over 4.1
million in the English Wikipedia alone,
have been written collaboratively by volunteers
around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with
access to the site, and it has about 100,000 active contributors. As of January
2013, there are editions of
Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most
popular general reference
work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an
estimated 365 million readers worldwide. In 2011, Wikipedia received an
estimated 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.
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. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its
main figures were the Bomis CEO Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for
Nupedia and later Wikipedia.
While Wales is credited with
defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually
credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.
On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list
to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.Wikipedia was
formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger
on the Nupedia mailing list. Wikipedia's policy of "neutral
point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, and was similar to
Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were
relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.
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