Wikipedianote 3 is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of the wiki-
based editing system MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in
history.34 It consistently ranks as one of the ten most
popular websites in the world, and as of
2024 it is ranked the fifth most visited website on the
Internet by Semrush.5 Founded by Jimmy
Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employs a staff of over 700 people.6
Initially only available in English, editions in other languages were quickly developed. Wikipedia's editions, when combined, comprise more than 62 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 14 million edits per month (about 5.2 edits per second on average) as of November
2023.7W 1 Roughly 26% of Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.9%, the United Kingdom at 5.4%, Germany at 5%,
Russia at 4.8%, and the remaining 54% split among other countries, according to data provided by Similarweb.8
It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic
bias, particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against the Global South (Eurocentrism).910