Wikipedia

This article is regarding this on-line encyclopaedia itself. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page. For Wikipedia's traveler introduction, see Wikipedia:About. For different uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

"The Free Encyclopedia" redirects here. For different encyclopedias, see Lists of encyclopedias.
Wikipedia

An incomplete sphere fabricated from giant, white, puzzle items. every puzzle piece contains one glyptography from a distinct writing, with every glyptography written in black.
The Wikipedia wordmark that displays the name Wikipedia, written all told caps. The W and therefore the A ar identical height and each ar taller than the opposite letters, that also are all identical height.


Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ee-PEE-dee-ə) could be a bilingual on-line encyclopaedia created associate degreed maintained as an open collaboration project[3] employing a wiki-based piece of writing system.[4] it's the biggest and most well-liked general book of facts on the globe Wide net,[5][6][7] and is one in every of the foremost common websites hierarchical  by Alexa as of June 2019.[8] It options solely free content and no industrial ads, and is in hand and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[9][10][11][12]

Wikipedia was launched on Gregorian calendar month fifteen, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[13] Sanger coined its name,[14][15] as a portmanteau of "wiki" (the Hawai'ian word for "quick"[16]) and "encyclopedia". at the start associate degree English-language encyclopaedia, versions in different languages were quickly developed. With a minimum of five,925,085 articles,[note 3] English Wikipedia is that the largest of the quite 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia contains quite forty million articles in 301 completely different languages[17] and by February 2014 it had reached eighteen billion page views and nearly five hundred million distinctive guests per month.[18]

In 2005, Nature printed a critique examination forty two arduous science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and located that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica,[19] though critics advised that it would not have fared thus well in an exceedingly similar study of a sampling of all articles or one centered on scientific discipline or contentious social problems.[20][21] the subsequent year, Time magazine explicit  that the trade policy of permitting anyone to edit had created Wikipedia the largest and presumably the simplest encyclopaedia within the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.[22]

Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting general bias, for presenting a combination of "truths, misinformation, and a few falsehoods",[23] and for being subject to manipulation and spin in polemical topics.[24] but, Facebook declared that by 2017 it might facilitate readers sight faux news by suggesting links to connected Wikipedia articles. YouTube declared an analogous set up in 2018.[25]