Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the largest, fastest growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project founded by Wales, with Sanger as editor-in-chief.  Nupedia's articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process

Sanger coined the name Wikipedia. The origin of the term 'Wiki' comes from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki which means fast, quick or informal.

Wikipedia is "open content". This means anyone can copy from the site, and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing.

Wikipedia's early contributions came from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing.

The first edit in Wikipedia's database was made to the page HomePage on January 15, 2001. It was the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" by an anonymous person using the office.bomis.com server.

In 2002 Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements. He also changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.

The site grew to about 20,000 articles and 18 languages by the end of 2001. By late 2002 Wikipedia had 26 languages, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.

The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 5,870,387 articles By HenkvD 

English-language Wikipedia reached its one millionth article, Jordanhill railway station in 2006.

When Time Magazine recognized "You" as their Person of the Year 2006, Wikipedia was the first particular "Web 2.0" service mentioned, followed by YouTube and MySpace.

On September 9, 2007 Wikipedia surpassed The Great Canon of the Yongle Era as the largest overall encyclopedia in the history of the world (written or not).

In October 2014, the Wikipedia Monument was unveiled to the public in Słubice, Poland to honor all the contributors to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia monument. By Nostrix

The US House of Representatives was banned from editing Wikipedia after staff were caught making "persistent disruptive edits", including naming former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an alien wizard who eats Mexican babies.

If your definition of "famous" is "notable enough to have a Wikipedia page," then one out of every 10,000 people on Earth today are famous.

Monmouthpedia (stylised as MONMOUTHPEDIA) is a collaboration project linking Wikipedia and the town of Monmouth in South Wales. It was formally launched on May 19, 2012, and led to Monmouth being described as the "world's first Wikipedia town".

By John Cumming

The project uses QR codes to provide smart phone access to Wikipedia articles covering notable subjects in Monmouth, such as places, people, artefacts, flora and fauna,  and has been likened to QRpedia.

One man, Steven Pruitt, had been responsible for a third of Wikipedia's English content with nearly 3 million edits and more than 35,000 articles created. Nicknamed the Wizard of Wikipedia, he holds the highest number of edits for the English Wikipedia under the alias "Ser Amantio di Nicolao".

Source Wikipedia