Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of encyclopedias in every major language. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia grew exponentially in its first 4 to 5 years. Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia project and one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The English Wikipedia is the world's largest single wiki and it contains more than one million articles.

Main features

On the Wikipedia website for each language, any person on the Internet may create or edit an article, thanks to computer software known as wiki. Contributors may edit Wikipedia anonymously or create permanent "user" accounts. Currently, Wikipedia reportedly has more than 4 million users.

Wikipedia articles provide free and open information content. All contributions of text are licensed under the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL).

Wikipedia keeps fastidious track of its participants editing and much of its internal activities. All edits are tracked and the editing history for every Wikipedia page is available.

Wikipedia judges certain articles to be important enough and well-written enough to be considered featured articles, as of 9 May 2007, there are 1391 "Featured Articles" out of 1,776,624 articles on the English Wikipedia.

History

The project was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001 as an accidental spin-off of Nupedia.

Criticisms

The project wrote its own wiki software called MediaWiki and released this software under the GPL, so anyone may copy it and modify it freely.

While anyone may contribute anonymously, anonymous contributors may be identified by the IP address from which they contributed.

Wikipedia articles include both knowledge typical of general knowledge encyclopedias as well as relatively trivial subjects, such as information on small towns, sports figures, celebrities and popular culture. For example, each of the 493 Pokemon characters has an individual article.