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• Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia consisting of articles exclusively written by its users. Anyone can create an account and edit the entries, and thousands of people participate in the creation and maintenance of its content.

  A Wikipedia arbitration council made up of 11 people (one absent from judging) has ruled to ban edits from URLs that come from the Church of Scientology. The unanimous decision comes after a number of deceptive edits were made to Scientology-related pages on the open-source encyclopedia.The Register: Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology (May 29, 2009)

• Fast Facts

  1. Launched on January 15, 2001
  2. Has strictly neutral point of view
  3. The English language version has over 2 million articles
  4. Largest encyclopedia in the world
  5. Founders: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger
  6. Built on MediaWiki Software
  7. Maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation
  8. Wikipedia has 23 paid members of staff
  9. The site relies on 150,000 volunteers
  10. There are currently more than 11 million Wikipedia articles
  11. The site has translations in 265 languages

• Cultural Importance

  Wikipedia has reached cultural saturation. It has become a starting point for many a research project, and its vast breadth makes even obscure details readily available for a searcher. Just as many people learned to "Google" something to get results, the public at large has learned to look something up on Wikipedia to get quick and relatively reliable information on a wide variety of subjects, from American presidents to Pokemon characters.

• History

  According the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia, Wikipedia began as an offshoot of a project called Nupedia, which was a free English language online encyclopedia written by experts. The founders of Wikipedia are Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, who together established the publicly editable encyclopedia using a wiki format.

• Controversy

  The main issues that Wikipedia has had to face are charges of bias and unreliability. The openly editable format leads some to believe the content on Wikipedia is unreliable, as anyone can edit the text to read anything they want. Wikipedia solves this problem by locking down hot button pages, such as George W. Bush, from editing, and by having a team of trusted editors check edits. They also rely on users to catch and report errors.

• Wikipedia Finances

  Wikipedia is free and doesn't run advertising, so it depends on donations, grants and gifts to operate. Since Wikimedia launched its fundraising campaign in November 2009, more than more than 125,000 donors have participated in raising a total of $6.2 million. The company's goal was to raise $6 million so that it can make it through this fiscal year which ends in June. Wikimedia is still accepting donations. Any monies received over the $6 million mark will be reserved for expenses during the next fiscal year.

• Related Projects

  • Wiktionary
  • Wikiquote
  • Wikibooks

• Other Wiki-based Encylopedias

  • h2g2
  • Veropedia
  • Citizendium
  • Everything2

• Related Pages on Mahalo

  MediaWiki | Wikimedia Foundation | How to Become a Non Profit Organization | Jimmy Wales | Wiki | SourceForge | Creative Commons | Web 2.0 | Veropedia | Chickipedia

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