During 2000, Jimmy Wales, Nupedia's founder and Bomis' cofounder, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed for the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Because Nupedia required highly qualified contributors and had an elaborate peer review system, its content grew slowly.
Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia, begun by the online media company Bomis.
Including all language editions, Wikipedia has 58,491,463 articles, equivalent to around 21,900 print volumes. The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 6,472,941 articles, equivalent to around 3,000 print volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Readers who recognize this can obtain valid information (see Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia) and fix the articles. However, because anyone can edit them, articles may contain undetected misinformation, errors or vandalism. Over time, articles tend to become more comprehensive and balanced. In addition to the quantity of its articles, its contributors work on improving their quality, removing and repairing misinformation and other errors. Because everyone can help improve it, it has become more comprehensive than any other encyclopedia. It is continually created and updated, with articles on new events appearing within minutes rather than months or years. Wikipedia differs from printed references in important ways. Begin by simply clicking the Edit button at the top of any editable page!
Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia, as its software allows easy reversal of errors, and many experienced editors watch to ensure that edits are improvements. Editors' opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research will not remain. It must conform with Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source. To remain, the content must be free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. What is contributed is more important than who contributes it. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines however, being familiar with the pillars, policies, and guidelines is not a requirement for contributing.Īnyone is allowed to add or edit words, references, images, and other media here. The fundamental principles of Wikipedia are summarized in its five pillars. It currently has more than fifty-eight million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,472,941 articles in English with 127,608 active contributors in the past month. Since its creation on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has grown into the world's largest reference website, attracting 1.7 billion unique-device visitors monthly as of November 2021. Anyone with Internet access and in good standing can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide readers to related pages with more information. The name "Wikipedia" is a blending of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
It is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and consists of freely editable content. Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia helping to create a world where everyone can freely share and access all available knowledge.