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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the online encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see Main
Page. For the primary English-language Wikipedia, see English Wikipedia. For other
uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs
from various writing systems

Screenshot

Type of site Online encyclopedia

Available in 342 languages

Headquarte San Francisco, California,

rs U.S.

Country of United States

origin

Owner Wikimedia Foundation (since

2003)
Created by ​ Jimmy Wales
[1]
​ Larry Sanger

URL wikipedia.org

Commercial No

Registration [a]
Optional

Users 120 million (as of July 14,

2025)

Launched January 15, 2001

(24 years ago)

Current Active
status

Content CC Attribution / Share-Alike

license 4.0

Most text is also

dual-licensed under GFDL;
media licensing varies.

Written in PHP
 OCLC 52075003
number

[b]
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of

volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software
MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been
hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization
[2]
funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read
[3][4]
reference work in history.

Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the
world's eighth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million
articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 65
million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million
[W 1]
edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024. As of

May 2025, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while
[5]
Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each account for around 5%.

Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its
extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored by
[6][7]
some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.

Although Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of

topics, the encyclopedia has been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias
[8][9]
against women and a geographical bias against the Global South. While the

reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over
[3][10][11]
time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward. Articles on

breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about those
[12][13]
events.
History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Nupedia

Main article: Nupedia

Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales (left) and Larry Sanger (right)

Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of

[14]
Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia began as a complementary project

for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles

[15]
were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. 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
[1][16]
and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open
Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU
[W 2]
Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is
[17][W 3]
credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,
[W 4]
while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On

January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a
[W 5]
"feeder" project for Nupedia.

Launch and rapid growth

[15]
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day) as a
[W 6]
single English language edition with the domain name www.wikipedia.com, and
[17]
was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. The name originated from
[18][19]
a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its integral policy of "neutral
[W 7]
point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially
[17]
relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally
[20]
intended for it to be a for-profit business.
 [c]
The Wikipedia home page on December 20, 2001

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web
search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001,
[W 8][W 9]
with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. 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 2
million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever
assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming
[21]
dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish
[W 10]
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.

Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and
[22][W 11]
changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
 [23]
After an early period of exponential growth, the growth rate of the English

Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have
[24]
peaked around early 2007. The edition reached 3 million articles in August 2009.

Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that
[W 12]
average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed

this slowing of growth to "increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of

[23]
newcomers, and resistance to new edits". 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
[25][26][27]
extensively.

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain
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
[28][29]
2008. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and
[30]
disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed

these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's
[31]
methodology. 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
[32]
sustainable". A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Wikipedia",

questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Wikipedia had lost a third of its
volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on
[33]
minutiae. In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators
[34]
was also in decline. In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine,

Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal

 [35]
crisis." The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady
[36][37]
after a long period of decline.

Milestones

Due to Wikipedia's increasing popularity, some editions, including the English

version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. For instance,
on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only registered
[W 16]
users may create a new article. On the English Wikipedia, among others,

particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been

[W 17][60]
protected to varying degrees. A frequently vandalized article can be

"semi-protected" or "extended confirmed protected", meaning that only

[W 17]
"autoconfirmed" or "extended confirmed" editors can modify it. A

particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can

[W 18]
make changes. A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review

identified Wikipedia's page-protection policies as "perhaps the most

[61]
important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas".