Wikipedia

Wikipedia (Listeni/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or Listeni/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia that is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Volunteers worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including over 4.5 million in the English Wikipedia. Anyone who can access the site can edit almost any of its articles, which on the Internet comprise[4] the largest and most popular general reference work.[5][6][7][8][9] In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia is ranked fifth globally among all websites stating, "With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month..., Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors."[10]

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, the latter[11] creating its name,[12] a portmanteau of wiki (the name of a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word for "quick")[13] and encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia-building and the presence of much unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, reddit, MySpace, and Facebook.[14] Wikipedia has also become known as a news source because of the rapid update of articles related to breaking news.[15][16][17]

The open nature of Wikipedia has led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing,[18] vandalism[19][20] and the accuracy of information. Some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information,[21] though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[22] Britannica replied that the study's methology and conclusions were flawed.[23] The policies of Wikipedia combine verifiability and a neutral point of view.

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