Wikipedia (i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free, collaboratively edited and multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 22 million articles (over 0 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors. As of June 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media. In its 2006 Person of the Year article, Time magazine recognized the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world. It cited Wikipedia as an example, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.
Antony Hopkins CBE (born 21 March 1921) is an English composer, pianist, conductor, and radio broadcaster.
Hopkins was born in London under the name Ernest William Antony Reynolds; his surname was changed to Hopkins after he was adopted by a master at Berkhamsted School following the death of his father.
His works include the operas Lady Rohesia (1947) (based on the Ingoldsby Legends of sixteenth-century England), The Man from Tuscany, and Three's Company (1953); the ballet Café des Sports; and Scena for soprano and strings (which was later arranged for three solo voices and full orchestra).[1]
Hopkins has written extensively for films, including Here Come the Huggetts (1948), The Pickwick Papers (1952), Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), and Billy Budd (1962).[2]. In the 1970s, he revived the long forgotten oratorio Ruth (infamous as 'the Worst Oratorio in the World' ) by English composer George Tolhurst; this was heard again in 2009 on BBC Radio 3 programme "The Choir".
However, he is perhaps best known for his books of musical analysis and, particularly, for his radio programmes Talking About Music broadcast for many years by the BBC.