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Celebrating Wikipedia Day

wikipedia    Do you remember when we all used to go to a set of encyclopedias to find detailed information about a subject? For many of us, the way we look for information changed when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001.

    Rick Gates first came up with the proposal for an on-line encyclopedia in 1993. However, the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was first proposed by Richard Stallman in December of 2000.

    One of the keys of Stallman’s concept was that no central organization should control editing. This principle was in stark contrast with the other digital encyclopedias, such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica and Nupedia (Wikipedia’s direct predecessor), where the content was edited solely by experts.

    Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. They originally intended for Wikipedia to compliment Nupedia by providing additional articles and ideas for it. However, it wasn’t long before Wikipedia overtook Nupedia and became a global project in multiple languages.

    Today, Wikipedia includes nearly 34 million freely usable articles in 288 languages. The site receives over 85 million monthly unique visitors from the United States, alone. They have a total worldwide readership of about 495 million and are now the world’s sixth-most-popular website. This free site is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

    While Wikipedia is fast and very convenient, they do not guarantee the validity of all of the articles because anyone can contribute or edit the subject matter. If you are doing academic research, you need to be cautious when using information gathered on this site.

    Wikipedia Day is on the 15th of January – the day it all started!