Wikipedia

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Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems
Screenshot [show]Screenshot of Wikipedia's multilingual portal.
URL wikipedia.org
Slogan The Free Encyclopedia
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia
Registration Optional (required only for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages in English Wikipedia or uploading files)
Available language(s) 275 active editions (285 in total)
Users 35,000,000 (total registered inall editions)[1]
Content license Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 3.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies
Owner Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit)
Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2]
Launched January 15, 2001 (2001-01-15) (11 years ago)
Alexa rank 6 (September 2012[update])[3]
Current status Active
Wikipedia (i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ ori/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 23 million articles, over 4 million in the English Wikipedia alone, have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,[4] and it has about 100,000 activecontributors.[5][6] As of October 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[7][8][9][10] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.[7][11] In 2011, Wikipedia received an estimated 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.[12]Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[13] Sanger coined the name Wikipedia,[14] which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick")[15] and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensiveattention in print media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[16] Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source due to articles related to breaking news often being rapidly updated.[17][18][19]

The open nature of Wikipediahas led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing,[20] the amount of vandalism[21][22] and the accuracy of information. Some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information,[23] though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[24]Britannica replied that the study's methology and conclusions were flawed.[25]

Contents [hide]
1 Nature
1.1 Editing
1.2 Organization of article pages
1.3 Vandalism
1.4 Rules and laws governing content and editor behavior
1.4.1 English Wikipedia
1.4.1.1 Content policies
1.4.1.2 Dispute resolution
1.4.1.3 Arbitration
1.5 Privacy
1.6 Community
1.6.1 Power structure
1.6.2Contributors
1.6.3 Interactions
1.6.4 Positive re-inforcement
1.6.5 New users
1.6.6 Demographics
1.7 Language editions
2 History
3 Analysis of content
3.1 Accuracy of content
3.2 Quality of writing
3.3 Coverage of topics and systemic bias
3.4 Citing Wikipedia
3.5 Explicit content
4 Operation
4.1 Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia chapters
4.2 Software and hardware...