Wikipedia turns 20: Everything you need to know about the free encyclopedia

Despite being the nightmare for teachers everywhere, online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has gone on to become one of the most popular websites the world over.

Started back in January 2001, Wikipedia has turned 20 now and has become the 13th most popular website in the world. The name Wikipedia comes from ‘Wiki’, a Hawaiian word that means ‘quick’ and ‘encyclopedia’.

Wikipedia is overseen by a non-profit organisation called Wikimedia Foundation. Using collaborative software called ‘Wiki, anyone can edit articles or, for that matter write their own, on Wikipedia. This caused quite a bit of debate about inaccuracies within the website.

The website was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, originally working on a website called Nupedia. Nupedia, however, had articles written by experts.

In its first year alone, Wikipedia hosted close to 20,000 articles in 18 different languages. These included French, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese and Polish, among others. Today, the website hosts more than 55 million articles in more than 300 different languages.

With more than 2,80,000 volunteers, Wikipedia is edited more than 350 times per minute and read more than 8,000 times a second. Wikipedia is visited about 22 billion times by users each each month. This is up from 18 billion just in 2016.

In January, 2020, an editor from China created a page called China pneumonia outbreak which later changed to COVID-19 once the virus became known. To date, hundreds of editors have contributed to the article on every aspect about the virus. Despite the disinformation about the virus, Wikipedia’s policy on medical information tries to keep up the quality of the article.

Even today, despite the monetary incentive in most big tech companies like Facebook and Google, Wikipedia’s non-profit status speaks of an idealistic time in the internet. One where volunteer-work and free information were at the forefront of efforts.

Wikipedia continues to be volunteer driven and while there are still notions that not everything on the website is accurate, Wikipedia’s guidelines and policies ensure that articles are as accurate as they can be. Wikipedia, today, is used by a number of people ranging from students, to businessmen, to politicians to even journalists who visit the website to get a briefing about any topic. There are 13 Wikimedia projects, 179 Wikimedia movement affiliates and dozens of global campaigns.