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Wikipedia (pronunciation(infohelp)) is an Internet encyclopedia project in many languages. It is free of charge: users do not pay. Also, it is "open content". This means anyone can copy it, and anyone can edit it (write things in it). However, there are rules which must be followed for copying or editing.

Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.

Its name is a combination of the two words wiki, a Hawaiian word for quick, and encyclopedia.[3] Because the word was made by combining parts of those words, it is a portmanteau.

It was started on January 10, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier Internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. It is a wiki that runs using the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia projects).

Anyone can change the pages in Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.

As of December 2007, Wikipedia had about 9.25 million pages in 253 languages, and more than 1.74 billion words across all Wikipedias. English Wikipedia is the largest.

Wikipedia began as a related project for Nupedia. Nupedia was a free online English-language encyclopedia project. Nupedia's articles were written and owned by Bomis, Inc which was a web portal company. The main people of the company were Jimmy Wales, the guy in charge of Bomis, and Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief for Nupedia. Nupedia was first licensed under the Nupedia Open Content License which was changed to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia was founded when Richard Stallman requested them.[4]

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the ones who started Wikipedia.[5][6] Wales is credited with defining the goals of the project,[7][8] Sanger created the strategy of using a wiki to reach Wales' goal.[9] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[10] Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001. It was launched as an English-language edition at http://www.wikipedia.com,[11] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[7] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[12] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were not that many rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[7]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot, and also from search engine indexing. It grew to about 20,000 articles, and 18 languages by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.[13] Nupedia and Wikipedia both existed till Nupedia's servers were stopped in 2003. After this, its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the 2 million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600years.[14]

The English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009. The numbers of articles and of contributors appeared to be growing less quickly around spring 2007.[15]

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Wikipedia - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia