Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpi diə/ (About this soundlisten), /ˌwɪkiˈpi diə/ (About this soundlisten) WIK-ih-
PEE-
dee-ə) is a multilingual, web-
based, free encyclopedia based on a model of openly editable and viewable content, a wiki. It is the largest and most
popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,345 and is one of the most
popular websites by Alexa rank.6 It is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that operates on money it receives from donors.789
Wikipedia was launched on
January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.10 Sanger coined its name,1112 as a portmanteau of wikinotes 3 and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions in other languages were quickly developed. With 5,767,640 articles,notes 4 the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in
301 different languages14 and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million
unique visitors per month.
15In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42
science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica.16 Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.17
