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 an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, 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.
Wiki software, is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.
MediaWiki is a 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 since been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers most websites hosted by the foundation other than Wikipedia, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software.
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 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 1,361,296 articles and 3,358,065 registered users, of whom 66 have administrative privileges.
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a software interface for Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a bridge to the actual kernel interfaces.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
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".
WikiScanner was a publicly searchable database that linked anonymous edits on Wikipedia to the organizations where those edits apparently originated. It did this by cross-referencing the edits with data on the owners of the associated block of IP addresses, though it did not investigate edits made under a username. It was created by Virgil Griffith and released on August 13, 2007.
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 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 June 2023, it has over 1,378,000 articles with 14,225 active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.
WikiTrust is a software product, available as a Firefox Plugin, which aimed to assist editors in detecting vandalism and dubious edits, by highlighting the "untrustworthy" text with a yellow or orange background. As of September 2017, the server is offline, but the code is still available for download.
In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages is the Ripuarian edition of Wikipedia. It was started on July 6, 2005, as WiKoelsch on a private server, and was converted to an official Wikipedia during April 2006. As only about a million people speak the Ripuarian languages, the Ripuarian Wikipedia is relatively small. Since both the use of Ripuarian, and the population capable of using a Ripuarian language, are decreasing, it is also an endangered language Wikipedia. The total number of edits on this Wikipedia is 1,607,539.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.
Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia on a regular basis, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is outright deletion of articles that are clearly in violation of rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a full discussion, and full discussion at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be carried out by a subset of editors who have been assigned particular technical privileges by the community, called administrators. A deletion that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator, or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).
