Wikipedia (
/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (
listen)
wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or
/ˌwɪki-/ (
listen)
wik-ee-) is a free,
multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by
a community of volunteer contributors using a
wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest general reference work on the
Internet,
[3] and one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by
Alexa; in 2021, it was ranked as the 13th most visited.
[4][note 3] The project carries no
advertisements and is hosted by the
Wikimedia Foundation, an
American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations, 80% of which are small donations from individual users.
[6] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by
Jimmy Wales and
Larry Sanger; Sanger coined its name as a
portmanteau of "
wiki" and "
encyclopedia".
[7][8] Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. The
English Wikipedia, with 6.3 million articles as of March 2021, is the largest of the
321 language editions. Combined, Wikipedia's editions comprise more than 56 million articles, and attract more than 17 million edits and more than 1.7 billion unique visitors per month.
[9][10] Wikipedia
has been criticized for its uneven accuracy and for exhibiting
systemic bias, particularly
gender bias, with the majority of editors being
male.
[11] In 2006,
Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest and perhaps the best encyclopedia in the world", and a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.
[12] The project's reputation improved further in the 2010s, as it received praise for its unique structure, culture, and absence of commercial bias.
[3][11] In 2018,
Facebook and
YouTube announced that they would help users detect
fake news by suggesting links to related Wikipedia articles.
[13]