Wikipedia

Wikipedia (ⁱ/ˌwɪkᵻˈpiːdiə/ or ⁱ/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of 291 Wikipedia editions and is the largest with 5,081,662 articles (having reached 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 38 million articles in over 250 different languages. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.

English Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001, it is the first edition of Wikipedia and, as of November 2015, has the most articles of any of the editions. As of February 2016, nearly 13.1% of articles in all Wikipedias belong to the English-language edition. This share has gradually declined from more than 50 percent in 2003, due to the growth of Wikipedias in other languages. There are 5,083,677 articles on the site (live count). In October 2015, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totalled 11.5 gigabytes when compressed. On November 1, 2015, the English Wikipedia announced it had reached 5,000,000 articles and ran a special logo to reflect the milestone.

The Simple English Wikipedia is a variation in which most of the articles use only basic English vocabulary. There is also the Old English (Ænglisc/Anglo-Saxon) Wikipedia (angwiki).

Pioneering edition

The English Wikipedia was the first Wikipedia edition and has remained the largest. It has pioneered many ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by some of the other-language Wikipedia editions. These ideas include "featured articles", the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories,dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.

Wikipedia for World Heritage

Wikipedia for World Heritage refers to the efforts put forth to get Wikipedia listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The idea was originally proposed to the Wikipedia chapter by Wikimedia at the 2011 Wikimedia Conference in Berlin. An online petition was started at the German Wikipedia on May 23, 2011. The bid is considered to be the first for a digital entity and is expected to be controversial with the list's maintainers who are notably conservative.

Jimbo Wales has stated that "the basic idea is to recognize that Wikipedia is this amazing global cultural phenomena that has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people."

If Wikipedia fails to get listed as a World Heritage Site, it has been suggested that they apply for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.

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