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.
The French Wikipedia is the French-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia. It has 2,596,050 articles as of 4 March 2024, making it the fourth-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-, Cebuano- and German-language editions, and is the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-most edits, and ranks 6th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was also the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010. In April 2016, the project had 4657 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001, and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of March 4, 2024, it has 1,851,914 articles and more than 2,488,258 registered accounts. It is the 9th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles.
The Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers is the main collecting society for songwriters, composers and music publishers in Spain. It is similar to AGADU, ASCAP, GEMA, SADAIC, SACEM and SAYCO. The philologist, poet, composer, scriptwriter, movie and television director and producer Antón Reixa (1957) is the chairman of the Board of Directors since May 2012. SGAE was founded in 1889 as Society of Authors of Spain. In 1995, its name changed to Society of Authors and Publishers, seeking to accommodate cultural editors.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
References to Wikipedia in popular culture have been widespread. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with individuals vandalizing or modifying articles in nonconstructive ways. Others feature individuals using Wikipedia as a reference work, or positively comparing their intelligence to Wikipedia. In some cases, Wikipedia is not used as an encyclopedia at all, but instead serves more as a character trait or even as a game, such as Wikiracing. Wikipedia has also become culturally significant with many individuals seeing the presence of their own Wikipedia entry as a status symbol.
The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; it has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
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".
WikiPilipinas is an online, free content website which bills itself as a combination "non-academic encyclopedia", web portal, directory and almanac for Philippine-based knowledge. Like Wikipedia, it contains various articles on Philippine-related topics. Unlike Wikipedia, many of the articles cover topics that would otherwise be deemed unencyclopedic by the stricter Wikipedia. The service for example, promotes the concept of original research and eschews the larger encyclopedia's neutral point-of-view principle.
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 Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has 1,936,155 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006, and 1,000,000 articles on May 16, 2013. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and has the 4th-most edits. It also ranks 12th in terms of article depth among Wikipedias.
The Japanese Wikipedia is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of March 2024, it has over 1,406,000 articles with 13,535 active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.
The Scots Wikipedia is the Scots-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was established on 23 June 2005, and it first reached 1,000 articles in February 2006, and 5,000 articles in November 2010. As of March 2024, it has about 35,000 articles. The Scots Wikipedia is one of the ten Wikipedias written in an Anglic language or English-based pidgin or creole, the others being the English Wikipedia, the Simple English Wikipedia, the Old English Wikipedia, the Pitkern-Norfuk Wikipedia, the Tok Pisin Wikipedia, the Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, the Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, the Nigerian Pidgin Wikipedia, and the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikipedia.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who was the editor-in-chief of the online encyclopedia Nupedia and co-founded its successor Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote many of Wikipedia's early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Sanger later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
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).
