Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

wikipedia.org

Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
P.O. Box 78350
San Francisco, CA 94107-8350
USA
Phone: +14158396885
Fax: +1-415-882-0495
Email: info@wikimedia.org

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/ or /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/) is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau (a combination of portions of two words and their meanings) of the words wiki (a type of collaborative Web site) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Anyone with internet access can make changes to Wikipedia articles. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. As of today, there are 2,866,827 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics.)

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fourth most visited website in the world.

The license Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and that acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement). Copied Wikipedia content will therefore remain free under the GFDL and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom.

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity.

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