Wikipedia

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Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphsfrom many different writing systems

Screenshot [show]

URL

wikipedia.org

Slogan

The Free Encyclopedia

Commercial?

No

Type of site

Internet encyclopedia

Registration

Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages or uploading files)

Availablelanguage(s) 275 active editions (285 in total)

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies

Owner

Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)

Created by

Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[1]

Launched

January 15, 2001 (11 years ago)

Alexa rank

6 (April 2012)[2]

Current status

Active
i

Wikipedia (

/wkpidi/ or

/wkipidi/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-) is a free, collaborative, multilingualInternet

encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 21 million articles (over 3.9 million in English 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,[3] and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.[4] As of April 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[5][6][7][8] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.[5][9] It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.[10] Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[11] Sanger coined the name Wikipedia,[12] which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from theHawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick")[13] and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received ample attention in print media. In its 2006Person of the Year article, Time magazine recognized the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world. It cited Wikipedia as an example, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[14] Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[15][16] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience. [17] Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, criticisms leveled at Wikipedia include allegations about quality of writing,[18] inaccurate or inconsistent information, and explicit content. Various experts (including founder Jimmy Walesand Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford University) have expressed concern over possible (intentional or unintentional) biases.[19][20][21][22] These allegations are variously addressed by Wikipedia policies.

While not a criticism per se, other disparagers of Wikipedia simply point out vulnerabilities inherent to any wiki that may be edited by anyone. These critics observe that much weight is given to topics that more editors are likely to know about, like popular culture,[23] and that the site is vulnerable to vandalism,[24][25] though some scholarship indicates that vandalism is quickly deleted. Critics point out that some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information,[26] though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopdia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[27]