Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia built through open collaboration.

It is maintained by a massive community of volunteers known as Wikipedians. These volunteers use a specific type of software called MediaWiki to edit content. The primary mission of the project is to make the sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world. This goal makes Wikipedia the largest and most-read reference work in human history. It is one of the most visited websites on the planet, serving as a global repository for information.

The mechanism of Wikipedia relies on a collaborative process. Instead of a single author, many people contribute to a single page.

This process is driven by the use of wiki software, which allows users to edit text easily. A central rule that guides this work is the "neutral point of view." This policy requires editors to present information fairly without taking sides on controversial topics. This structure allows the encyclopedia to grow through constant, small improvements made by many different people over time.

Wikipedia is not just one single website, but a collection of many different language editions.

While it began as a single English-language project, it now exists in over 340 languages. The English Wikipedia is the largest edition, containing more than one million articles. Other major language editions include German and Japanese. The scale of this work is immense. Every month, the site receives more than 1.5 billion unique device visits. During that same time, about 13 million edits are made. This averages out to roughly five edits occurring every second.

The history of Wikipedia began with a project called Nupedia.

Nupedia was an online encyclopedia founded in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It used a formal process where experts wrote and reviewed every article. However, this process was slow. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed creating a "wiki" to act as a feeder for Nupedia. Wikipedia officially launched on January 15, 2001. The name was a blend of the words "wiki" and "encyclopedia." By 2003, Nupedia's servers were shut down, and its text was moved into Wikipedia.

As Wikipedia grew, it reached several major milestones. In 2007, the English Wikipedia passed 2 million articles. This made it larger than the Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record since 1408. By 2009, the English version reached 3 million articles. The site's popularity also grew rapidly. In 2007, it became one of the ten most popular websites in the United States. By 2014, it was receiving 8 billion page views every month. These numbers show how the project transformed from a small experiment into a global necessity.

Despite its success, Wikipedia has faced various challenges and criticisms. Some national governments have censored the site or specific pages. Others have criticized the encyclopedia for systemic biases. These include a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. There have also been debates about the number of active editors. Some researchers noted a decline in editors or page views during certain years. Some experts suggested that search engine features, like Google's Knowledge Graphs, might have reduced the need for users to click through to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is also part of a larger ecosystem of "sister projects" managed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

These include Wiktionary, which is a dictionary project, and Wikibooks, which provides free textbooks. Other projects include Wikiquote for famous sayings and Wikimedia Commons for multimedia. There are even specialized projects like Wikispecies, a catalog of all species. These projects all work toward the same goal of sharing free knowledge. From being engraved on nickel plates for a Moon lander to being encoded into synthetic DNA, Wikipedia continues to represent the vast reach of human information.