15 years of Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopedia project in many languages. It is free of charge: users do not pay. Also, it is "open content". This means anyone can copy it, and anyone can edit it. However, there are rules which must be followed for copying or editing.

Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.

Its name is a combination of the two words wiki, a Hawaiian word for quick, and encyclopedia. Because the word was made by combining parts of those words, it is a portmanteau.

It was started on January 10, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier Internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. Anyone who wishes to, can change the pages in Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.

Origins

Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.

Wikipedia began as a related project for Nupedia. Nupedia was a free online English-language encyclopedia project. Nupedia's articles were written and owned by Bomis, Inc which is a web portal company. 

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the ones who started Wikipedia. Wales is credited with defining the goals of the project, Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales' goal. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001. It was launched as an English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and also from search engines. It grew to about 20,000 articles, and 18 languages by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia both existed till Nupedia's servers were stopped in 2003. After this, its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.

The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. The numbers of articles and of contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around spring 2007.

This week Wikipedia has been celebrating its 15th anniversary.

Basics for contributors and users

Wikipedia is a free site just like the online encyclopedia that anybody can start or edit a page. A global sites that available in many languages. While you use any searching engine, the Wikipedia page will often comes out in the first results.To use the Wikipedia more comfortably and currently, you should understand the basic function on the page. The page usually organized while you’re looking up the page. 

However, as a Wikipedia user, you should have sufficient understanding of the Wikipedia.

Did you know: Trivia from new articles.

In the news: News of the world.

On this day: Anniversaries. 

Current events: Not available at present.

Text from Simple Wikipedia, the version of Wikipedia in simple English.