Wikipedia
June 13, 2008 – 8:15 am
Wikipedia is a multilingual, free and an open content encyclopedia project which is operated by Non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia’s name is portmanteau of the terms wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched in the year 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. At present, it is the largest, most popular and the fastest-growing common reference work accessible on the internet.
The free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia started as a corresponding project for Nupedia that have articles written and reviewed by the experts under an official process. On March 9, in the year 2000, Nupedia was founded under the rights of Bomis, Inc, a website company. Its chief figures were Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief, Bomis CEO and Jimmy Wales for Nupedia and afterwards Wikipedia. For the year 2008, Wikipedia attracted around 683 million visitors reading more than ten million articles in over 253 languages which comprise a pooled total of about 1.74 billion terms for all Wikipedias. The Wikipedia of English edition passed 2,000,000 content marks on 9 September in the year 2007 and in the year 2008; it had more than 2,399,000 contents that consisted of around 1,034,000,000 terms. The articles in Wikipedia are written collaboratively by the volunteers throughout the world, and almost all the articles can be abbreviated by any Internet user. Due to the gradual rise in the popularity ever since its foundation, wikipedia presently ranks amid the top 10 most-visited websites internationally. The critics of Wikipedia aim its universal partiality and inconsistencies and its strategy of favoring the consensus over the certificate in its perspective process. Consequently, the modern admired icons with comparatively low overall impact are often more significantly featured than chronological figures with elevated global significance. Wikipedia’s accuracy and reliability have also been a major issue. The other criticisms are based on its inclination to vandalism. However, the scholarly work says that vandalism and these weaknesses are normally short-lived.
Wikipedia being a high quality encyclopedia reference, it has also received a lot of media consideration as an Internet basis of breaking news which is continuously updated. It has been recognized by the Time Magazine as the first particular Web 2.0 service available.