Wikipedia

Wikipedia or is a free, collaborative, multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 21 million articles in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors. As of , there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia , which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki , meaning "quick") and encyclo pedia .

Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received ample attention in print media. In its 2006 Person of the Year article, Time magazine recognized the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world. It cited Wikipedia as an example, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.

Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse and a , criticisms leveled at Wikipedia include allegations about quality of writing, inaccurate or inconsistent information, and explicit content. Various experts (including founder Jimmy Wales and Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford University) have expressed concern over possible (intentional or unintentional) biases. These allegations are variously addressed by Wikipedia policies.

While not a criticism per se, other disparagers of Wikipedia simply point out vulnerabilities inherent to any wiki that may be edited by anyone. These critics observe that much weight is given to topics that more editors are likely to know about, like popular culture, and that the site is vulnerable to vandalism, though some scholarship indicates that vandalism is quickly deleted. Critics point out that some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information, though a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".

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