Notes

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and millions already have.

Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by containing information on all branches of knowledge. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it consists of freely editable content, whose articles also have numerous links to guide readers to more information.

Written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers, known as Wikipedians, Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with Internet access (and who is not presently blocked), except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Since its creation on January 15, 2001, it has grown into the world's largest reference website, attracting over a billion visitors monthly. Wikipedia currently has more than sixty-one million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,723,835 articles in English with 122,350 active contributors in the past month.

Wikipedia's fundamental principles are summarized in its five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines, although editors do not need to be familiar with them before contributing.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia's text, references, and images. What is written is more important than who writes it. The content must conform with Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable by published sources. Editors' opinions, beliefs, personal experiences, unreviewed research, libelous material, and copyright violations will not remain. Wikipedia's software allows easy reversal of errors, and experienced editors watch and patrol bad edits.

Wikipedia differs from printed references in important ways. It is continually created and updated, and encyclopedic articles on new events appear within minutes rather than months or years. Because anyone can improve Wikipedia, it has become more comprehensive than any other encyclopedia. Its contributors enhance the quality and quantity of the articles and remove misinformation, errors, and vandalism. Any reader can fix a mistake or add more information to articles (see Researching with Wikipedia).

Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success.[17] 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.[18] 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][19] 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.[20] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[21][22] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[23] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[24]

Launch and growth
The domains wikipedia.com (later redirecting to wikipedia.org) and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001,[25] and January 13, 2001,[26] respectively. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001[18] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[27] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[21] The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.[28][29] Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view"[30] was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia.[21] Bomis originally intended it as a business for profit.[31]
wikipedia.org

Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/