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Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-ee-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project[4] by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.[5] It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,[6][7][8] and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of January 2020.[9] It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads, and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[10][11][12][13]
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[14] Sanger coined its name,[15][16] as a portmanteau of "wiki" (the Hawaiian word for "quick")[17] and "encyclopedia". Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. With at least 6,011,851 articles,[note 3] the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages[18] and by February 2014 it had reached 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month.[19]
In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica,[20] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues.[21][22] The following year, 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.[23]
