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 1998.
A wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly. 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. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki. It was developed for use on Wikipedia in 2002, and given the name "MediaWiki" in 2003. MediaWiki was originally developed by Magnus Manske and improved by Lee Daniel Crocker. Its development has since then been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe. Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Fandom on the MediaWiki software. Doddema and Carlson retired from Memory Alpha in 2008 and 2005 respectively. Memory Alpha contains over 51,000 articles and 56,000 images in its English edition alone as of October 2021, making it one of the largest wiki projects. The site is also available in several other languages, including Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a comprehensive open 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.
wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, its aim is to create an extensive database of instructional content, using the wiki model of open collaboration to allow users to add, create, and modify content. It is a hybrid organization, a for-profit company run for a social mission. wikiHow uses the free and open-source MediaWiki software, and its text content is released under a Creative Commons license.
The Thai Wikipedia is the Thai language edition of Wikipedia. It was started on 25 December 2003. As of May 2022, it has 147,976 articles and 424,569 registered users. As of March 2022, Wikipedia was ranked 14th in Alexa's Top Sites Thailand.
Digital Universe was a free online information service founded in 2006. The project aimed to create a "network of portals designed to provide high-quality information and services to the public". Subject matter experts were to have been responsible for reviewing and approving content; contributors were to have been both experts and the public.
Jimmy Donal Wales, also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia, later renamed Fandom. Wales has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa; as of 2022, Wikipedia was ranked the 10th most popular site. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations.
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 a satirical 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. 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".
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia; like Wikipedia, it is available in many languages.
Bomis was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governing policy, such as "Neutral point of view". Sanger has worked on other online projects, including Nupedia, Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, WatchKnowLearn, Reading Bear, Infobitt, Everipedia, the Knowledge Standards Foundation and the encyclosphere. He also advises blockchain company Phunware and advised the nonprofit online American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia, but Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by committee, with experts to predefine the rules, and it had only 21 articles in its first year, compared to Wikipedia posting 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.
Fandom is a wiki hosting service which hosts wikis mainly on entertainment. Its domain is 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.
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative and multilingual encyclopedia website & project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It has more than 48 million articles written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.
