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This article is about the Internet encyclopedia. For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

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Wikipedia

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems

Screenshot [show]

Web address Wikipedia.org

Slogan The Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit

Commercial? No

Type of site Internet encyclopedia

Registration Optional, but is required for certain tasks such as editing protected pages, creating pages in English Wikipedia and uploading files

Available language(s) 276 active editions (286 in total)

Users Over 71,000 active editors,[1] 20,335,224 total accounts.

Content license CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0

Most text also dual-licensed under GFDL, media licensing varies.

Owner Wikimedia Foundation

Created by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger[2]

Launched January 15, 2001 (12 years ago)

Alexa rank 6 (December 2013)[3]

Current status Active

Wikipedia (i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia that the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation supports. Volunteers worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including over 4.4 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] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa, and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.[5][10]

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

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia-building and the presence of much unacademic content have...