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Wikipedia

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Revision as of 12:52, 6 August 2008 by Weapon (Talk | contribs) (History)

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Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia founded on January 15, 2001 by two American citizens, pornography entrepreneur and options trader Jimmy Wales and philosophy professor Larry Sanger. It is controlled by the United States-based Wikimedia Foundation. Although it has editions in 250 languages, only 130 have more than 1000 articles.[1] After about four years from the date of its foundation, Wikipedia had about 450,000 articles,[2] and after six years it had about 1.7 million entries.[3]

History

In 1996 Jimmy Wales moved to San Diego, California, to establish the Bomis pornography ring. In March 2000, Wales founded Nupedia, a free online encyclopaedia, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia was organized in a manner so that articles were to be written by experts and to be reviewed under a formal process. By January 2001, less than twenty four articles were completed in that project, and Sanger proposed supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopaedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia.com, but following objections from the advisory board, it was relaunched some days later as an independent website. In its first year, Wikipedia expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages. In 2003 Nupedia was closed down and all its articles were moved into Wikipedia.

Is wikipedia free?

It receives support from Bomis Inc. in the form of free bandwidth and this connection with a for-profit corporation is seen as a burden affecting the functioning of Wikipedia as a free encyclopedia as it claims to be.

References

  1. List of Wikipedias - Wikimedia, accessed August 1, 2008.
  2. Aaron Weiss, The Unassociated Press, N.Y. Times, Feb. 10, 2005, at G5.
  3. English Wikipedia statistics accessed August 1, 2008

External links