Wikipedia.org

Most Popular Website # 7 on the Internet Today!

While the Wikipedia community members discuss and review articles that are posted on Wikipedia, and references are given for many of the statements that appear in articles, it is a an open and editable system and at the risk of being wrong, no one should cite any information contained on Wikipedia as facts. Still, millions visit the popular reference website each and every day, depending on what they read as a quality source of facts and information on just about every topic.

There is no doubt that the content on Wikipedia is rich and full of accurate information. It is run by a non profit company, the Wikimedia Foundation. It was created in 2001 by Bomis, Inc. CEO Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, editor of Nupedia, meant to facilitate and provide a feeder system for the submission and editorial process performed by actual real world paid experts and authors. Within a year however, it became apparent that the open wiki model worked, and Nupedia was phased out and its articles moved over to the public Wikipedia servers. Worried that the service would be commercialized with advertising, some jumped ship. To calm everyone down, wikipedia.org was registered and replaced the .com version.

While over the years a number of authors left Wikipedia due to massive changes in policies, the amount of content continued to rise with millions of articles. In 2009, Wikipedia.org became one of the most popular websites on the Internet.

A major boost to Wikipedia came as Google began listing wikipedia article links throughout the search engine's result pages for a massive amount of key terms. Google eventually dropped its own encyclopedia project called Knol, donated 2 million dollars to the Wikipedia Foundation in 2010 and one year later, co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife donated another half million dollars.

In this video below, Jimmy Wales speaks about how Wikipedia was created and talks about the project.

If you are interesting in creating articles on Wikipedia, this how to video might be helpful to you:

and finally, here are several clips that will give you more insights regarding the quality and accuracy of wikipedia content:

Wikipedia.org Is Worth an Estimated Value of 401.5 Million

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