For trivia, research and more: Use Wikipedia!
While many of you do, we encourage all of you to make regular use of this amazing resource. Here is some information about Wikipedia from its own website.
Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; with rare exceptions, its millions of articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Web site. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its primary servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to Nupedia, an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia. Today, Wikipedia is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia has been described as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".[1] According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity since its inception[2] and currently ranks among the thirteen most visited websites worldwide.[3] It has spawned several sister projects,[4] and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.
Wikipedia has over six million articles in many languages, including 1,611,218 articles in the English-language version and more than half a million in the German-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, of which 22 have more than 50,000 articles.[5] The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Information can be found on Wikipedia by using search engines, article hyperlinks, or Wikipedia's topical organization of categories[6] and portals.[7]
Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy have been questioned.[8] The site has also been criticized for being susceptible to vandalism,[9] for having uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[10] and for favouring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[11]
Several of the project's policies and guidelines attempt to address these concerns, specifying that articles should not contain unverifiable material[12] or unpublished research,[13], topics should be presented from a neutral point of view,[14] and assertions should be supported with reliable references.[15] Wikipedia's editors have formed specialized groups to tackle these and related issues.[16]
Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; with rare exceptions, its millions of articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Web site. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Its primary servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to Nupedia, an expert-written and now defunct encyclopedia. Today, Wikipedia is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia has been described as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".[1] According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity since its inception[2] and currently ranks among the thirteen most visited websites worldwide.[3] It has spawned several sister projects,[4] and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.
Wikipedia has over six million articles in many languages, including 1,611,218 articles in the English-language version and more than half a million in the German-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, of which 22 have more than 50,000 articles.[5] The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Information can be found on Wikipedia by using search engines, article hyperlinks, or Wikipedia's topical organization of categories[6] and portals.[7]
Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy have been questioned.[8] The site has also been criticized for being susceptible to vandalism,[9] for having uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies,[10] and for favouring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.[11]
Several of the project's policies and guidelines attempt to address these concerns, specifying that articles should not contain unverifiable material[12] or unpublished research,[13], topics should be presented from a neutral point of view,[14] and assertions should be supported with reliable references.[15] Wikipedia's editors have formed specialized groups to tackle these and related issues.[16]
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