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sxcasdcasdcasd) is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 18 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[3] Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and LarrySanger[4] and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[2][5][6][7] ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers.[2][8]

The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger[9] and is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic content has been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services,along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[10] Some have noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[11][12] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[13]Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[14] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes.[15] Its reliability and accuracy are also targeted.[16] Other criticisms center on itssusceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information;[17] however, scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.[18][19] A 2005 investigation in Nature found that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[20]

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Nature of Wikipedia2.1 Editing
2.2 Rules and laws governing content
2.3 Content licensing
2.4 Reusing Wikipedia's content
2.5 Defenses against undesirable edits
2.6 Coverage of topics
2.7 Quality of writing
2.8 Reliability
2.9 Plagiarism concerns
2.10 Sexual content
2.11 Privacy
2.12 Community
2.12.1 Power structure
2.12.2 Contributors
2.12.3 Interactions
2.12.4 Recognition
2.12.5 New users2.12.6 Demographics
2.13 Language editions
3 Operation
3.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
3.2 Software and hardware
3.3 Mobile access
4 Impact
4.1 Impact on publishing
4.2 Cultural significance
4.2.1 Awards
4.2.2 Satire
5 Related projects
6 See also
7 Notes
8 Further reading
9 External links


HistoryMain article: History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia originallydeveloped from another encyclopedia project, Nupedia.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. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger,editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[21]


Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20, 2010.Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[22][23] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of...