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Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 18 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger[4] and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers. The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger[9] and is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic content has been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.[10] Some have noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.[11][12] Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.[13] Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture),[14] and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes.[15] Its reliability and accuracy are also targted.[16] Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information;[17] however, scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.[18][19] A 2005 investigation in Nature found that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[20] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[21] Main Page of the English Wikipedia on October 20, 2010. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.[22][23] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[24][25] Sanger is usually credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[26] On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[27] Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[28] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[24] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[29] was codified in its initial months, and was similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbiased" policy. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[24] Graph of number of articles and rate of increase showing article count doubling each year until the end of 2006, and becoming a linear increase in 2007. Graph of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007 (the date of the two-millionth article). Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.[30] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the two 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 600 years.[31] Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[32] Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to wikipedia.org.[33] Various other wiki-encyclopedia projects have been started, largely under a different philosophy from the open and NPOV editorial model of Wikipedia. Wikinfo does not require a neutral point of view and allows original research. New Wikipedia-inspired projects - such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia, Conservapedia, and Google's Knol where the articles are a little more essayistic[34] - have been started to address perceived limitations of Wikipedia, such as its policies on peer review, original research, and commercial advertising. Number of articles in the English Wikipedia plotted against Gompertz function trending to 4.4 million articles. Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[35] In 2006, about 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; by 2010 that average was roughly 1,000.[36] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[37] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors over the long term, resulting in stagnation in article creation. Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because the low-hanging fruit already exist.[38][39] In November 2009, a Ph.D thesis written by Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[40][41] The Wall Street Journal reported that "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police [Wikipedia] are quitting." The array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content are among the reasons for this trend that are cited in the article.[42] These claims were disputed by Jimmy Wales, who denied the decline and questioned the methodology of the study.[43] For the first time in January 2011, Wikipedia cracked the top ten list of the most popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks Inc. With 42.9 million unique visitors and rank #9, Wikipedia surpassed New York Times (#10) and Apple Inc. (#11). It is a significant increase as in January 2010 the rank was #33 with just 18.3 million unique visitors.[44]

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