It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales (left) and Larry Sanger (right) Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s, having become an important fact-checking site. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against the Global South ( Eurocentrism). Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. 26% of Wikipedia's traffic is from the United States, followed by Japan at 5.9%, the United Kingdom at 5.4%, Germany at 5%, Russia at 4.8%, and the remaining 54% split among other countries, according to data provided by Similarweb. Wikipedia's editions, when combined, comprise more than 62 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 14 million edits per month (about 5.2 edits per second on average) as of November 2023. Initially only available in English, editions in other languages were quickly developed. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, on January 15, 2001, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization that employed a staff of over 700 people by October 2023. It has been ranked consistently one of the 10 most popular websites in the world, ranks number 7th as the most visited website on the Internet, and, as of 2023, ranks as the 4th most viewed website by Semrush.

Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia, written and maintained by a community of volunteers, collectively known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the use of wiki-based editing system MediaWiki.

Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies

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