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    <div class="col-sm-11" >Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ee-) is a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. It is the largest and most-read reference work in history,[3] and consistently one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa; as of 2021, Wikipedia was ranked the 13th most popular site.[3][4] It carries no advertisements and is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through small donations.[5]

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales[6] and Larry Sanger; Sanger coined its name as a blending of "wiki" and "encyclopedia".[7][8] Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Its combined editions comprise more than 57 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month, and more than 17 million edits per month (1.9 edits per second).[9][10] In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world", and is "a testament to the vision of one man, Jimmy Wales".[11]

Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced amount of commercial bias, but criticism for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and alleged ideological bias.[12][13] Its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, but has improved over time and has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.[3][12][14] Its coverage of controversial topics such as American politics and major events such as the COVID-19 pandemic has received substantial media attention. It has been censored by world governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. It has become an element of popular culture, with references in books, films and academic studies. In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking links to related Wikipedia articles.[15][16]


Contents
1	History
1.1	Nupedia
1.2	Launch and early growth
1.3	Milestones
2	Current state
3	Openness
3.1	Restrictions
3.2	Review of changes
3.3	Vandalism
3.4	Edit warring
4	Policies and laws
4.1	Content policies and guidelines
5	Governance
5.1	Administrators
5.2	Dispute resolution
6	Community
6.1	Studies
6.2	Diversity
7	Language editions
7.1	English Wikipedia editor numbers
8	Reception
8.1	Accuracy of content
8.2	Discouragement in education
8.3	Quality of writing
8.4	Coverage of topics and systemic bias
8.5	Explicit content
8.6	Privacy
8.7	Sexism
9	Operation
9.1	Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement affiliates
9.2	Software operations and support
9.3	Automated editing
9.4	Hardware operations and support
9.5	Internal research and operational development
9.6	Internal news publications
10	Access to content
10.1	Content licensing
10.2	Methods of access
10.3	Chinese access
11	Cultural impact
11.1	Trusted source to combat fake news
11.2	Readership
11.3	Cultural significance
11.4	Sister projects – Wikimedia
11.5	Publishing
11.6	Research use
12	Related projects
13	See also
14	Notes
15	References
16	Further reading
16.1	Academic studies
16.2	Books
16.3	Book review-related articles
16.4	Learning resources
16.5	Other media coverage
17	External links
History
Main article: History of Wikipedia


Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
Nupedia
Main article: Nupedia
Logo reading "Nupedia.com the free encyclopedia" in blue with the large initial "N"
Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful.[17] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process.[18] It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.[1][19] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[20] Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[21][22] while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[23] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[24]

Launch and early growth
The domains wikipedia.com (later redirecting to wikipedia.org) and wikipedia.org were registered on January 12, 2001,[25] and January 13, 2001,[26] respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001[18] as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[27] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[21] Its policy of "neutral point-of-view"[28] was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia.[21] Bomis originally intended it as a business for profit.[29]


The Wikipedia home page on December 20, 2001
English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[30]
Number of English Wikipedia articles[31]
Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of 2004.[32] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming Dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.[33]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[34] Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[35][36]

Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[37] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[38] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[39] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively.[40][41][42]

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[43][44] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[45] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology.[46] Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable".[47] A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Wikipedia", questioned this claim, revealing that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae.[48] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators was also in decline.[49] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis."[50]

Milestones

Cartogram showing number of articles in each European language as of January 2019. One square represents 10,000 articles. Languages with fewer than 10,000 articles are represented by one square. Languages are grouped by language family and each language family is presented by a separate color.
In January 2007, Wikipedia first became one of the ten most popular websites in the US, according to comscore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, it was ranked #9, surpassing The New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 million unique visitors.[51] As of March 2020, it ranked 13th[4] in popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight billion page views every month.[52] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore".[9] Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[53][54]

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[55] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.[56][57]

On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of i</div>
    
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