Wikipedia is incredible. It's free to use. It's one of most-popular site in the world. An energetic army of volunteers
keeps it current. And it pays its bills with donations. Lets see some interesting facts about Wikipedia :1. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001.
2. The site has an official theme song called "Hotel Wikipedia," a parody of The Eagles' "Hotel California."
3. At one point, Wikipedia instituted a week-long ban on IP addresses that belonged to Congress. It seems that Congresspeople were editing each other's articles a little too zealously.
4. There are 65,000 articles in the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia has more than 4.68 million English articles.
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| Jimmy Wales |
5. Wikipedia celebrates "Wikipedia Day" every January 15 to commemorate the site's launch on that date in 2001.
6. The most edited Wikipedia page ever belongs to George W. Bush.
7. There are about 282 different language versions of the website, although the English, German and French versions have the most articles.
8. On 9 September 2007, the English version of Wikipedia surpassed two million articles. It made it the largest encyclopaedia ever put together and took the record from the Yongle encyclopaedia, which had held it for 600 years.
9. The word “wiki” is the Hawain word for “quick” but now has its own definition as “a web application that allows anyone visiting a website to edit content on it.”
10. "You" were chosen in 2006 as Time magazine's Person of the Year. It recognized the millions of people who anonymously contribute user-generated content to wikis (including Wikipedia), YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the multitudes of other websites featuring user contribution.
11. The servers for Wikipedia are hosted in Florida, therefore content on the site is subject to the US state’s laws.
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| Richard Farmbrough |
13. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki (from the Hawaiian word for "quick") and encyclopedia.
14. Bad weather leads to more Wikipedia updates.
15. Wikipedia is an open source website. Meaning that everyone can basically jump right in and start editing articles as they see fit. There’s no ranking system that tells you which kind of articles you can edit or anything like that.
16. One of the most active editors of Wikipedia is Richard Farmbrough that has edited more then 985,000 articles on Wikipedia!
17. The members of the Wikipedia community is named Wikipedians.
