Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project that was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and is currently operated by the United States-based non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia.

As of April 2008, Wikipedia had over 10 million articles in 253 languages, about a quarter of which are in English.Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and nearly all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Wikipedia website. Having steadily risen in popularity since Wikipedia inception, Wikipedia is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.

Critics of Wikipedia target its systemic bias and inconsistencies and its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue. Other criticisms are centered on Wikipedia's susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information. Scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.

In addition to being an encyclopedic reference, Wikipedia has received major media attention as an online source of breaking news as it is constantly updated.

When Time magazine recognized "You" as its Person of the Year 2006, praising the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, Wikipedia was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.


Site URL : WIKIPEDIA

source : Wikipedia :))


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