What is Wikipedia (The Free Encyclopedia)
Wikipedia:
Its titular appositive is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” and its mission statement says it exists “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” The plea for donations on the Wikimedia’s Foundation’s homepage implores potential givers to “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of human knowledge.”
Wikipedia is a free, open content online encyclopedia created through the collaborative effort of a community of users known as Wikipedians. Anyone registered on the site can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles. The site's name comes from wiki, a server program that enables anyone to edit Web site content through their Web browser.
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia consists of millions of articles in more than 270 languages. The name comes from the Hawaiian word wiki meaning 'quick', which has gradually been adopted to denote a kind of technology that enables collaborative websites and ‘encyclopedias’.
Founders:
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of an earlier encyclopedia project, Nupedia, in January 2001. Originally, Wikipedia was created to provide content for Nupedia. However, as the wiki site became established it soon grew beyond the scope of the earlier project. As of January 2015, the website provided well over five million articles in English and more than that number in all other languages combined. At that same time, Alexa ranked Wikipedia as the seventh-most popular site on the Internet. Wikipedia was the only non-commercial site of the top ten.
Other Projects like Wikipedia:
In addition to the encyclopedia, the non-profit Wikipedia foundation oversees several other open-content projects, including:
- Wiktionary, a dictionary and thesaurus
- Wikibooks, a collection of free texts and other books
- Wikiquote, a collection of quotations
- Wikisource, a collection of free source documents
- Wikiversity, a collection of free learning materials
- Wiki species, a directory of species
- Meta-Wiki, which coordinates all the other projects.
- Wikipedia was one of the first social media websites Etc.
Key benefits and features of Wikipedia:
- It's easy to search.
- The contents page acts as a guide and breaks down articles by subject.
- The collection of ‘featured content’ articles represent the very best of Wikipedia.
- Excellent linking within articles takes you to content on different aspects of the same subject.
- External sources are listed at the end of most articles.
- Articles often include images and/or audio/video content.
- Within the 'Community portal', you can interact with others contributing to Wikipedia, find out what's being worked on and what still needs to be added.
- You can join and contribute edits or new articles.
- The forum is a great place to discuss all things Wikipedia.
- Content can be found in multiple languages – although, as the illustration above shows, English is by far the most popular.
