A free, multilingual, collaboratively edited online encyclopedia supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. It was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as an open-content project to create and distribute knowledge globally. Since its founding, Wikipedia has grown into one of the world’s most visited websites and the largest general reference work ever created.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project to Nupedia, a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia. Its adoption of open editing—allowing volunteers worldwide to create and revise articles directly—led to rapid expansion. Within its first year, Wikipedia had grown to tens of thousands of articles in multiple languages. Over the next 25 years, it evolved into a global knowledge platform supported by a vast volunteer editor community and a structured governance framework.

Wikipedia’s mission is to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Its operating model is based on:

• Open collaboration, allowing global volunteer participation
• A neutral point-of-view content standard
• Verifiability through reliable sourcing
• Community-led governance and moderation
• Nonprofit technical and financial infrastructure

All content is published under open licenses, enabling free reuse and redistribution.

Wikipedia’s activities extend beyond hosting encyclopedia articles and include:

• Knowledge curation and preservation
• Multilingual information access
• Open-source software development (MediaWiki platform)
• Community governance and editor training
• Digital literacy and public knowledge initiatives
• Partnerships with libraries, archives, and educational institutions

 Wikipedia is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in the United States. Funding is provided primarily through individual donations, supplemented by grants and institutional support. The Foundation also oversees related knowledge-sharing projects, including Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikisource.

Growth and Scale over 25 Years

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has demonstrated sustained global growth:

• Expansion from hundreds to tens of millions of articles across more than 300 languages
• Hundreds of millions of monthly readers worldwide
• A large international volunteer editor community
• Development of mobile platforms, structured data tools (Wikidata), and AI-supported content moderation
• Integration into educational, research, and information-discovery ecosystems

 Wikipedia has become a foundational element of the global information environment, influencing how knowledge is created, accessed, and shared in the digital age.

Resource

Wikipedia: https://www.wikipedia.org