User:Google9912/Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia (pronunciation (help·info)) is an Internet encyclopedia project in many languages. It is free of charge: users do not pay. They can choose to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is "open content". This means anyone can copy it, and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing.
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
---|---|
Available in | 284 active editions (295 in total) |
Headquarters | Miami, Florida |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit) |
Created by | Jimmy Wales (founder) Larry Sanger (co-founder) |
URL | wikipedia |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Optional, but needed to upload files, edit protected pages, or create pages in the English Wikipedia. |
Users | 65,000,000+ (total registered in all editions)[1] |
Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.
Wikipedia's name is a combination of the two words wiki, Hawaiian for quick, and encyclopedia.[2] Because the word was made by combining parts of those words, it is a portmanteau.
Wikipedia was started on January 10, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier Internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. It is a wiki that runs using the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia projects).
Anyone who wishes to, can change the pages in Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.
As of September 2011, Wikipedia had about 18 million pages in about 300 languages, and more than 3.50 billion words across all Wikipedias. The regular English Wikipedia is the largest.