Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.
A wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using 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.
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms in all natural languages and in a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustrations, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of words into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 182 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It was developed for use on Wikipedia in 2002, and given the name "MediaWiki" in 2003. It remains in use on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki. MediaWiki was originally developed by Magnus Manske and improved by Lee Daniel Crocker. Its development has since then been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was founded on 15 January 2001 as Wikipedia's first edition and, as of October 2021, has the most articles of any edition, at 6,398,109. As of October 2021, 11% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English-language edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50 percent in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages. The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021. The English Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of democratization of knowledge and extent of coverage.
Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.
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.
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive free content catalogue of all species; the project is directed at scientists, rather than at the general public. Jimmy Wales stated that editors are not required to fax in their degrees, but that submissions will have to pass muster with a technical audience. Wikispecies is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and CC BY-SA 3.0.
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article." The neutral point of view policy that Wikinews claim to have, has an aim to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews. In contrast to most projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikinews allows original work under the form of original reporting and interviews.
The Chinese Wikipedia is the written vernacular Chinese edition of Wikipedia. It is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started on 11 May 2001, the Chinese Wikipedia currently has 1,236,794 articles and 3,146,037 registered users, of whom 65 have administrative privileges.
wikiHow is an online wiki-style community consisting of an extensive database of how-to, step-by-step guides featuring expert-verified illustrations and videos. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, wikiHow is a hybrid organization, a for-profit company run for a social mission. wikiHow software is open source and its text content is released under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license. wikiHow states that it was inspired by Wikipedia, but it is not related to Wikimedia/Wikipedia in any way. Both organizations use the free and open-source MediaWiki software.
The Thai Wikipedia is the Thai language edition of Wikipedia. It was started on 25 December 2003. As of December 2019, it had more than 134,000 content pages and 371,363 registered users. As of December 2017, Wikipedia was ranked 13th in Alexa's Top Sites Thailand.
Wikipedia is a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. It is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and consistently one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa; as of 2021, Wikipedia was ranked the 13th most popular site. A visitor spends an average time on Wikipedia of 3 minutes and 45 seconds each day. It carries no advertisements and is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through small donations.
AboutUs.com is a wiki Internet domain directory. It lists websites along with information about their content. As a wiki, AboutUs allows Internet users to add entries or modify information. AboutUs.com has since become a wiki for more than just websites. The site now allows pages to be created for people, places, and almost anything else.
Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".
Uncyclopedia is an online encyclopedia that parodies Wikipedia. Its logo, a hollow "puzzle potato", parodies Wikipedia's globe puzzle logo, and it styles itself "the content-free encyclopedia", parodying Wikipedia's slogan of "the free encyclopedia." Founded in 2005 as an English-language wiki, the project spans over 75 languages as well as several subprojects parodying other wikis. The English version has approximately 36,000 pages of content, second only to the Portuguese, and its name is a portmanteau of the prefix "un-" and the word "encyclopedia".
The history of wikis begins 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 Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a non-profit, fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible.
Fandom is a wiki hosting service and domain operated by Fandom, Inc., a for-profit Delaware company founded in October 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Capital and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.
