Wikipedia

This article is about the online encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page. For the primary English-language Wikipedia, see English Wikipedia. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

Wikipedia
An incomplete sphere made of large, white jigsaw puzzle pieces. Each puzzle piece contains one glyph from a different writing system, with each glyph written in black.
The Wikipedia wordmark which displays the name Wikipedia, written in all caps. The W and the A are the same height and both are taller than the other letters which are also all the same height. It also displays Wikipedia's slogan: "The Free Encyclopedia".
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from various writing systems
Screenshot
Wikipedia portal showing the different languages sorted by article count
Wikipedia's desktop homepage
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
Available in339 languages
Country of originUnited States
Owner
Created by
URLwikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional[a]
Users>292,742 active editors[b]
>116,589,355 registered users
LaunchedJanuary 15, 2001
(23 years ago) (2001-01-15)
Current statusActive
Content license
CC Attribution / Share-Alike 4.0
Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies
Written inLAMP platform[2]
OCLC number52075003

Wikipedia[c] is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history,[3][4] and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of August 2024, it was ranked fourth by Semrush,[5] and seventh by Similarweb.[6] Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.[7]

Initially only available in English, editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 other languages have been developed. The English Wikipedia, with its over 6.9 million articles, is the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 64 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024.[W 1] As of November 2024, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic was from the United States, followed by Japan at 6.2%, the United Kingdom at 5.6%, Russia at 5.0%, Germany at 4.8%, and the remaining 53.3% split among other countries.[8]

Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against the Global South (Eurocentrism).[9][10] While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward[3][11][12] while becoming an important fact-checking site.[13][14] Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.[15][16] Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events.[17][18]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference autogenerated1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ "Developer hub". MediaWiki. Retrieved September 9, 2024.
  3. ^ a b "Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher". The Economist. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on January 7, 2021. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  4. ^ Anderson, Chris (May 8, 2006). "Jimmy Wales – The 2006 Time 100". Time. Archived from the original on October 12, 2022. Retrieved November 11, 2017.
  5. ^ "Most Visited Websites in Worldwide 2024". Semrush. August 2024. Retrieved September 14, 2024.
  6. ^ "Most viewed website". Similarweb. Retrieved September 14, 2024.
  7. ^ Seitz-Gruwell, Lisa (October 23, 2023). "7 reasons you should donate to Wikipedia". Wikimedia Foundation. Archived from the original on December 27, 2023. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  8. ^ "wikipedia.org". similarweb.com. Retrieved November 14, 2024.
  9. ^ Noor, Poppy (July 29, 2018). "Wikipedia biases". The Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2024.
  10. ^ Hern, Alex (September 15, 2015). "Wikipedia's view of the world is written by the west". The Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2024.
  11. ^ "Happy Birthday, Wikipedia". The Economist. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on January 1, 2023. Retrieved January 22, 2023.
  12. ^ Cooke, Richard (February 17, 2020). "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet". Wired. Archived from the original on December 17, 2022. Retrieved October 13, 2020.
  13. ^ Hughes, Taylor; Smith, Jeff; Leavitt, Alex (April 3, 2018). "Helping People Better Assess the Stories They See in News Feed with the Context Button". Meta. Archived from the original on January 11, 2023. Retrieved January 23, 2023.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference auto was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Treisman, Rachel (April 1, 2022). "Russia threatens to fine Wikipedia if it doesn't remove some details about the war". NPR. Archived from the original on December 2, 2022. Retrieved January 22, 2023.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Kelly, Samantha Murphy (May 20, 2022). "Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started". CNN. Archived from the original on October 12, 2022. Retrieved May 24, 2022.
  18. ^ McNamee, Kai (September 15, 2022). "Fastest 'was' in the West: Inside Wikipedia's race to cover the queen's death". NPR. Archived from the original on January 15, 2023. Retrieved January 22, 2023.


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