Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
---|---|
Available in | 334 languages |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
Created by | Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger[1] |
URL | wikipedia.org |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional[notes 1] |
Users | >271,002[broken anchor] active users[notes 2] and >115,076,271[broken anchor] registered users and 1,067 administrators (English) |
Launched | January 15, 2001 |
Current status | Active |
Content license | CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0 Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL; media licensing varies |
Written in | LAMP platform[2] |
OCLC number | 52075003 |
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia website in 344 languages of the world. 331 languages are currently active and 13 are closed.
People can freely use it, share it, and change it, without having to pay. It is also one of the biggest wiki organizations. People can choose to give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is an open content website. This means anyone can copy or edit it and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing.
Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.
Wikipedia's name is a combination of two words, wiki and encyclopedia.[3]
Wikipedia was started on January 9, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier online encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. It is a wiki that uses the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia Foundation projects).
Anyone who wishes to can change the pages on Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.
As of September 2011, Wikipedia had about 18 million pages in about 300 languages and more than 3.50 billion words across all Wikipedias. The regular English Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia edition.
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