Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles with the expectation that they follow the website’s policies. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites and constitutes the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001.
Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of more than 200 Wikipedias and is the largest with over 4.9 million articles. There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of nearly 35 million articles in 288 different languages. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month. Globally, Wikipedia had more than 25 million accounts out of which there were about 72,000 active editors as of May 2015.
Hide.