Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It is a free-of-cost encyclopedia with its articles being free-content; those who use Wikipedia can edit almost any article accessible. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was only in the English language initially, but it quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of 292 Wikipedia editions and holds the largest amount of articles, with more than 5,178,708, having surpassed 5,000,000 articles in November 2015. Wikipedia consists of a grand total of more than 38 million articles in more than 250 different languages throughout all current encyclopedias. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.
A peer review was published in Nature in 2005 assessing 42 science articles that were found in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia. The review found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approaches that of Encyclopedia Britannica's. However, Wikipedia has been subjectively criticized; claims show that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias, presenting a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods", and controversial topics could be manipulated or spun.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Content_policies_and_guidelines/
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was only in the English language initially, but it quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of 292 Wikipedia editions and holds the largest amount of articles, with more than 5,178,708, having surpassed 5,000,000 articles in November 2015. Wikipedia consists of a grand total of more than 38 million articles in more than 250 different languages throughout all current encyclopedias. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.
A peer review was published in Nature in 2005 assessing 42 science articles that were found in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia. The review found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approaches that of Encyclopedia Britannica's. However, Wikipedia has been subjectively criticized; claims show that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias, presenting a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods", and controversial topics could be manipulated or spun.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Content_policies_and_guidelines/
