science & techWikipedia

Wikipedia is a volunteer-written encyclopedia with over 7 million English articles

the gist

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by volunteer editors using the wiki software MediaWiki. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded it in 2001, and since 2003 it has been run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit funded mainly by reader donations. It now has more than 68 million articles across over 300 language editions, and the English edition alone has over 7 million. Edits happen about five times a second on average. Its reliability was often questioned in the 2000s, though it has been more widely praised since the late 2010s, and it is criticised for gender and regional bias in its coverage.

so what

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet and a common starting point for research, so how it is edited and funded affects what people believe. Its volunteer model of open collaboration is a rare large-scale experiment in shared knowledge.

fun fact

Wikipedia is funded mainly by small donations from readers and does not run advertising.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · text CC BY-SA 4.0

Illustrative photo · Biel8729, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons