Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project ; multiple Wikisources make up the overall project of Wikisource. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on the famous Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia is the Vietnamese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, publicly editable, online encyclopedia supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Like the rest of Wikipedia, its content is created and accessed using the MediaWiki wiki software.
Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
WikiDumper.org is a blog created by US author Clifford A. Pickover with the aim to permanently record a snapshot of the "best of the Wikipedia rejects", articles that are slated for deletion at the site.
Uncyclopedia is several forks of satirical online encyclopedias that parody Wikipedia. Its logo, a hollow "puzzle potato", parodies Wikipedia's globe puzzle logo, and it styles itself as "the content-free encyclopedia", parodying Wikipedia's slogan of "the free encyclopedia". Founded in 2005 as an English-language wiki, the project spans more than 75 languages as well as several subprojects parodying other wikis. Uncyclopedia's name is a portmanteau of the prefix un- and the word encyclopedia.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
The Tagalog Wikipedia is the Tagalog language edition of Wikipedia, which was launched on December 1, 2003. It has 46,446 articles and is the 102nd largest Wikipedia according to the number of articles as of February 6, 2024.
Deletionism and inclusionism are opposing philosophies that largely developed within the community of editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The terms reflect differing opinions on the appropriate scope of the encyclopedia and corresponding tendencies either to delete or to include a given encyclopedia article.
PediaPress GmbH is a software development and print-on-demand company located in Mainz, Germany. The company is a spin-off of Brainbot Technologies AG.
Sanskrit Wikipedia is the Sanskrit edition of Wikipedia, a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its five thousand articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, with major concentration of contributors in India and Nepal.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Lsjbot is an automated Wikipedia article-creating program, or Wikipedia bot, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot primarily focuses on articles about living organisms and geographical entities.
Various publications and commentators have offered a range of predictions of the end of Wikipedia since it rose to prominence. Multiple potential dangers have been proposed, such as poor quality control and inconsistent editors/administrators.
Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia regularly, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is the outright deletion of articles that clearly violate the rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a complete discussion, and a whole debate at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be done by a subset of editors assigned particular specialized privileges by the community, called administrators. An omission that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).
The first edit in Wikipedia's database, to HomePage was made on January 15, 2001, and states in its entirety "This is the new WikiPedia!". In December 2021, co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that he would sell a website containing a re-creation of an earlier edit that he said he made and then later deleted, which contained the text "Hello, World!", to the highest bidder as a non-fungible token (NFT).
