15 interesting facts about Wikipedia

ABOUT WIKIPEDIA :

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism.

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 470 million unique visitors monthly as of February 2012. There are more than 77,000 active contributors working on more than 30,000,000 articles in 285 languages. 

Here are 15 interesting Facts about Wikipedia that you might not know :)

1. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

2. The name Wikipedia is a combination of the words "wiki" meaning "shared website" and "Pedia" which is a shortened form of "Encyclopedia".

3. Wikipedia currently supports 260 languages.

4. Sex is one of the most popular wikipedia aricle in every language except french and spanish.

5.Wikipedia generates approximately 684 million pageviews each year.

6. The English Language Wikipedia has more than 3million articles. [ German -1.08 millions, French -958,000, Italian -697000, Spanish -608,000]

7. Wikipedia contains NO ADS.

8. Members of the Wikipedia Community are known as Wikipedians. But Anybody can write the Articles on Wikipedia.


9. Wikipedia mission is to make all of the information in the world available in every language.

10. There is no censorship on Wikipedia aricles But articles must meet certain Guidelines - ENCYCLOPEDIC, NEUTRAL, VERIFIABLE.

11. A 2008 study compared the accuracy of Wikipedia articles vs Similar Articles in Encyclopedia Britannica, The Dictionary of American History, and American National Biography Online.

Result :- WIKIPEDIA - 80% ACCURATE  OTHERS - 95-96 % ACCURATE.

12. The Wikimedia foundation runs a Wikiversity. Among the wide array of sister projects to Wikipedia, Wikiversity is one of the newest. It's a site dedicated to collaborative learning, where teachers can create and revise materials for helping other people learn things. While you won't get a degree from it, anyone can either take or teach a course.

13. Wikipedia has had more than 1 billion edits, across 17.6 million articles, from 27 million users.

14. There's a competition to guess what the last article in Wikipedia will be.