The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Wikipedia [note 1] is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of the wiki-based editing system MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. [1] [2] It is consistently ranked as one of the ten most popular websites in the world, and as of 2024 is ranked the fifth most visited website on the Internet by Semrush. [3] Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employs a staff of over 700 people. [4]
Initially only available in English, editions in other languages have been developed. Wikipedia's editions, when combined, comprise more than 62 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 14 million edits per month (about 5.2 edits per second on average) as of November 2023 [update] . [5] [6] Roughly 26% of Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.9%, the United Kingdom at 5.4%, Germany at 5%, Russia at 4.8%, and the remaining 54% split among other countries, according to data provided by Similarweb. [7]History of Wikipedia – Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was created to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of additional reference projects.
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.
A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through 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.
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 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.
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 11 May 2001, and first edited on 11 June 2001. As of 23 March 2024, it has 1,855,382 articles and more than 2,494,693 registered accounts. It is the 9th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles.
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.
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is a British-American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of Wikipedia and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.
Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of the wiki-based editing system MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently ranked as one of the ten most popular websites in the world, and as of 2024 is ranked the fifth most visited website on the Internet by Semrush. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employs a staff of over 700 people.
Conservapedia is an English-language, wiki-based, online encyclopedia written from a self-described American conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view. The website was established in 2006 by American homeschool teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly, son of the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias in Wikipedia. It uses editorials and a wiki-based system for content generation.
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.
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.
WikiTrust was 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.
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. 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 a committee of experts who predefined the rules. It had only 21 articles in its first year, compared with Wikipedia having 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.
WikiBhasha is a multi-lingual content creation application for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry.
QRpedia is a mobile Web-based system which uses QR codes to deliver Wikipedia articles to users, in their preferred language. A typical use is on museum labels, linking to Wikipedia articles about the exhibited object. QR codes can easily be generated to link directly to any Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), but the QRpedia system adds further functionality. It is owned and operated by a subsidiary of Wikimedia UK (WMUK).
The first edit in Wikipedia's database, to HomePage was made on January 15, 2001, and states in its entirety "This is the new WikiPedia!". In December 2021, co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that he would sell a website containing a re-creation of an earlier edit that he said he made and then later deleted, which contained the text "Hello, World!", to the highest bidder as a non-fungible token (NFT).
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ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)The article mentions WikiNodes, while discussing the Britannica app, noting that "This kind of visual array of related items isn't a new idea. In fact, there is an iPad app called WikiNodes which does something similar for Wikipedia content."
Those who express this view are on the far right of American politics (Though they often describe themselves as defenders of "traditional" American Values). The Website Conservapedia for example...
What were some ways to troll and cause trouble? Create an article about something extremely controversial and offensive, but otherwise adhere to every rule of Wikipedia and use the system against itself. This was the case with creating an article that had an intentionally offensive name, the Gay Niggers Association of America. GNAA was a name that caused immediate alarm in anyone with a semblance of good taste. It was a phenomenon for many years in the online tech communities, as legions of trolls attempted to have an article in Wikipedia about the mischievous group. It's not clear a defined group ever existed as GNAA. Supposed GNAA "members" were simply troublemakers online who unified under a common moniker in an effort to disrupt Wikipedia for amusement.