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.
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 illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms 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 192 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.
Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. The project's objective is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films, proverbs, etc. and writings about them. The website aims to be as accurate as possible regarding the provenance and sourcing of the quotations.
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.
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that 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." Wikinews's neutral point of view policy aims to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews. In contrast to most Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikinews allows original work in the form of original reporting and interviews. In contrast to newspapers, Wikinews does not permit op-ed.
The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. This community directly builds and administers these projects with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software.
The Hindi Wikipedia is the Modern Standard Hindi edition of Wikipedia. It was launched in July 2003. As of March 2024, it has 161,073 articles, and ranks 10th in terms of depth among Wikipedias.
The Latvian Wikipedia is the Latvian-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was created on 6 June 2003. With more than 126,000 articles, it is currently the 68th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and the second-largest Wikipedia in a Baltic language after the Lithuanian Wikipedia.
The Bengali Wikipedia or Bangla Wikipedia is the Bengali language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Launched on 27 January 2004, it surpassed 10,000 articles in October 2006, becoming the second South-Asian language to do so. On 25 December 2020, the site achieved the milestone of 100k articles. As of 14 March 2024, the Bengali Wikipedia has 149,150 articles. Though it joined later compared to top wikipedias, it ranks 5th in terms of article depth among 318 active wikipedias by language.
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".
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 Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is best known as the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. However, the foundation also hosts 14 other related content projects. It also supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all.
Wikimedia Commons, or simply Commons, is a wiki-based media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikitravel is a web-based collaborative travel guide based on the wiki format and owned by Internet Brands. It was most active from 2003 through 2012, when most of its editing community left and brought their contributions to the nonprofit Wikivoyage guide.
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. It is available in many languages.
The Alemannic Wikipedia is the Alemannic language edition of the Web-based free-content encyclopedia Wikipedia. The project was started on November 13, 2003, as an Alsatian language edition. A year later it was expanded to encompass all Alemannic dialects because of low activity in the first year. Since 2004 all Alemannic dialects are accepted on als:wp.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Balinese Wikipedia is the edition of Wikipedia in the Balinese language. The Balinese Wikipedia generally follows the basic rules of Indonesian Wikipedia. The Balinese Wikipedia has been in the project incubator Wikimedia, since the incubator page was created in 2005 until October 2019.
