What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a free, open content online encyclopedia created through the collaborative effort of a community of users known as Wikipedians. Anyone registered on the site can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles. The site’s name comes from wiki, a server program that enables anyone to edit Web site content through their Web browser. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of an earlier encyclopedia project, Nupedia, in January 2001. Originally, Wikipedia was created to provide content for Nupedia. However, as the wiki site became established it soon grew beyond the scope of the earlier project. Wikipedia.com went live on Jan. 15, 2001, and the new model quickly eclipsed its older sibling. By the end of the first year, Wikipedia contained more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages. Since then, the site has grown rapidly, swelling to 250,000 articles by 2004 and a million by 2006. As impressive a milestone as 3 million articles is, it simply makes the English Wikipedia the largest component of a massive international enterprise. Wikipedia now contains more than 13 million articles in 271 different languages.

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