Wikipedia

 Overview
Wikipedia is probably one of most popular "wiki" sites on the internet. Wikipedia defines itself as, a free, web based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia foundation. Since it's launch on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has hosted over 17 million articles in over 260 languages and dialects. Last year Wikipedia received over 250 million visitors making it the 7th most visited website on the internet. Wikipedia's founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger named the site after the Hawaiian word for quick, "Wiki" and the English word, "encyclopedia". The site is designed to be edited by anyone, meant to be a collaborative work of the general public. However, in an effort to improve the reliability of the information entered on the site, those who wish to edit or create a page are required to sign in and become a "registered poster". Another feature added recently to improve Wikipedia's content reliability is the history function. A visitor to Wikipedia can click on the history button and view all of the changes to a specific page since its creation. People use Wikipedia for a verity of tasks including, research, education, leisure, and the playing the “Wikipedia game” (popular amongst high school students looking to waste time). More information on Wikipedia can be found at the Wikipedia Wikipedia page.

 History
Wikipedia began as a project in conjunction with Nupedia as an online encyclopedia that was edited and monitored by scholars and experts. Nupedia was founded on March 9,2000, and its chief editor was Larry Sanger.Wikipedia was created on January 10, 2001 as a feeder project to Nupedia. Sanger wanted to have a wiki that members of the Nupedia mailing list could contribute too as well as access for information. In its first year, wikipedia grew to 20,000 articles in 18 languages; three years later, at the end of 2004, wikipedia featured articles in over 161 languages. in 2003 because of Wikipedia's growth, the Nupedia servers were taken offline permanently, by that point the english language section of wikipedia had surpassed the million article mark, by 2007 that number had doubled. In 2007 after several spanish users groups threatened to create splinter sites, Sanger moved wikipedia to the .org domaine removing all of the ads, gaining funding from donations completely. In January 2010, wikipedia made its first appearance in the top 10 most visited websites, since then it has not fallen from that list

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