Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that allows its users to edit almost any article. Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet and is ranked among the ten most popular websites. Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by
Jimmy Wales and
Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name]], a
portmanteau of
wiki and encyclo
pedia. It was only in the English language initially, but it quickly developed similar versions in other languages which differ in content and in editing practices. With
24,562 articles,
English Wikipedia is the largest out of more than 290 versions of encyclopedias on Wikipedia. Overall, Wikipedia consists of more than 40 million articles in more than 250 different languages.
