Wikipedia

This article is about the online encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main Page. For the primary English-language Wikipedia, see English Wikipedia. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

Wikipedia
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe made out of puzzle pieces featuring glyphs from various writing systems
Screenshot
Wikipedia's desktop homepage
Type of site
Online encyclopedia
Available in343 languages
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California, U.S.
Country of originUnited States
OwnerWikimedia Foundation (since 2003)
Created by
URLwikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional[a]
Users122 million (as of September 19, 2025)
LaunchedJanuary 15, 2001 (2001-01-15)
Current statusActive
Content license
CC Attribution / Share-Alike 4.0[b]
Written inPHP
OCLC number52075003

Wikipedia[c] is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.[2] Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.[3][4]

Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 65 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024.[W 1] As of May 2025, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each account for around 5%.[5]

Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.[6][7] Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.[8][9] While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward.[3][10][11] Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about those events.[12][13]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference autogenerated1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Seitz-Gruwell, Lisa (October 23, 2023). "7 reasons you should donate to Wikipedia". Wikimedia Foundation. Archived from the original on December 27, 2023. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  3. ^ a b "Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher". The Economist. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on January 7, 2021. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  4. ^ Anderson, Chris (May 8, 2006). "Jimmy Wales – The 2006 Time 100". Time. Archived from the original on October 12, 2022. Retrieved November 11, 2017.
  5. ^ "wikipedia.org". similarweb.com. Archived from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved November 14, 2024.
  6. ^ Treisman, Rachel (April 1, 2022). "Russia threatens to fine Wikipedia if it doesn't remove some details about the war". NPR. Archived from the original on December 2, 2022. Retrieved January 22, 2023.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Noor, Poppy (July 29, 2018). "Wikipedia biases". The Guardian. Archived from the original on November 9, 2020. Retrieved May 31, 2024.
  9. ^ Hern, Alex (September 15, 2015). "Wikipedia's view of the world is written by the west". The Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2024.
  10. ^ "Happy Birthday, Wikipedia". The Economist. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on January 1, 2023. Retrieved January 22, 2023.
  11. ^ Cooke, Richard (February 17, 2020). "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet". Wired. Archived from the original on December 17, 2022. Retrieved October 13, 2020.
  12. ^ Kelly, Samantha Murphy (May 20, 2022). "Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started". CNN. Archived from the original on October 12, 2022. Retrieved May 24, 2022.
  13. ^ McNamee, Kai (September 15, 2022). "Fastest 'was' in the West: Inside Wikipedia's race to cover the queen's death". NPR. Archived from the original on January 15, 2023. Retrieved January 22, 2023.


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This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.