Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006 by 2013 that average was roughly 800. Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from to. Ĭiting fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched on Janu as a single English-language edition at and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The domains and (later redirecting to ) were registered on January 13, 2001, and January 12, 2001, respectively.
On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales (left) and Larry Sanger (right) Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s, having become an important fact-checking site.
Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. Roughly 26% of Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.9%, the United Kingdom at 5.4%, Germany at 5%, Russia at 4.8%, and the remaining 54% split among other countries, according to data provided by Similarweb. Wikipedia's editions, when combined, comprise more than 62 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 14 million edits per month (about 5.2 edits per second on average) as of November 2023. Initially only available in English, editions in other languages have been developed.
Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employs a staff of over 700 people. It is consistently ranked as one of the ten most popular websites in the world, and as of 2024 is ranked the fifth most visited website on the Internet by Semrush. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of the wiki-based editing system MediaWiki. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies