Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia created in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The project is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteer editors from around the world and is available in over 300 languages, with the English edition containing more than 6 million articles as of 2023. The platform is built on a wiki model, allowing anyone with internet access to create, edit, and revise articles, except for certain protected pages or those under edit restrictions. The Wikimedia Foundation's budget is funded primarily through donations, with an annual fundraising campaign that raises tens of millions of dollars from millions of donors. The project uses MediaWiki, a free and open-source wiki software developed by the foundation, which supports features like talk pages, categories, and references. Wikipedia's servers are hosted across multiple data centers worldwide, including in the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States, to ensure high availability and load balancing. The platform strictly follows a neutral point of view policy and verifiability standards, with articles requiring reliable citations and consensus-building among editors. As of 2021, Wikipedia ranked among the top 10 most visited websites globally, attracting over 15 billion monthly page views. The foundation also oversees other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikisource, and Wikimedia Commons, which collectively serve as vast repositories of free knowledge.