WikiPedia:About

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world. The site is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit articles, simply by clicking on the edit this page link. It runs on MediaWiki software.

Wikipedia is a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Help: A full list of help topics is available here.
Questions: Please ask at the Help Desk.
Contacts: Find contact details at Wikipedia:Contact us.

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Exploring Wikipedia

3 Contributing to Wikipedia

4 How to contact project members

5 Opinions and objections

6 Other links

7 Versions in other languages

8 Sister projects

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Introduction

Wikipedia began on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and a few enthusiastic English-language collaborators. Four years later, as of December 2004, there were 13,000 active contributors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm) working on over 1,300,000 articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm) in more than 100 languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm). As of today, there are 0 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands (http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsageVisits.htm) of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles.

All text in Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information).

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Exploring Wikipedia

Recent changes — articles revised in the last few minutes.
Featured articles, new articles, requested articles, or a random article.
The local reference desk, for requesting help or research information.

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Contributing to Wikipedia

Reference pages: policies and guidelines for contributors, our welcome page, an introduction for newcomers, and general help with editing and navigating the site.

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How to contact project members

Standard places to ask policy and project-related questions are the village pump, online, and the Wikipedia mailing lists, over email. You can also reach other Wikipedians via IRC and instant messenger.

There is also a meta-Wikipedia, a site for coordinating the various Wikipedia projects (and abstract discussions of policy and direction), and there are many different places for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

See also: Wikipedia:Contact us.

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Opinions and objections

The strengths of Wikipedia and some replies to common objections.

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Versions in other languages

Wikipedia encyclopedia languages with over 100,000 articles: Deutsch (German) · Français (French) · 日本語 (Japanese)

Wikipedia encyclopedia languages with over 10,000 articles; italicized encyclopedias have over 50,000 articles: Български (Bulgarian) · Català (Catalan) · Česká (Czech) · Dansk (Danish) · Eesti (Estonian) · Esperanto · Español (Spanish) · Suomi (Finnish) · עברית (Hebrew) · Magyar (Hungarian) · Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) · Italiano (Italian) · 한국어 (Korean) · Nederlands (Dutch) · Norsk (Norwegian) · Polski (Polish) · Português (Portuguese) · Română (Romanian) · Русский (Russian) · Slovenščina (Slovenian) · Српски (Serbian) · Svenska (Swedish) · Українська (Ukrainian) · 中文 (Chinese)

Wikipedia encyclopedia languages with over 1,000 articles: Afrikaans · العربية (Arabic) · Asturianu (Asturian) · Беларуская (Belarusian) · Bosanski (Bosnian) · Cymraeg (Welsh) · Ελληνικά (Greek) · Euskara (Basque) · فارسی (Persian) · Frysk (Western Frisian) · Gaeilge (Irish) · G�idhlig (Scots Gaelic) · Galego (Galician) · हिन्दी (Hindi) · Hrvatski (Croatian) · Interlingua · Ido · Íslenska (Icelandic) · Basa Jawa (Javanese) · ქართული (Georgian) · Kurdî / كوردی (Kurdish) · Latina (Latin) · Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish) · Lietuvių (Lithuanian) · Latviešu (Latvian) · मराठी (Marathi) · Bahasa Melayu (Malay) · Plattd��tsch (Low Saxon) · Nynorsk · Ирон (Ossetic) · संस्कृतम् (Sanskrit) · Sicilianu (Sicilian) · Simple English · Slovenčina (Slovak) · Shqip (Albanian) · ภาษาไทย (Thai) · Türkçe (Turkish) · Tatar�a (Tatar) · Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese) · Walon (Walloon)

Complete list · Multilingual coordination · Start a Wikipedia in another language

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Sister projects

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates several other multilingual and free-content projects:

	Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus		Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals		Wikiquote Collection of quotations		Wikisource Free source documents
	Wikispecies Directory of species		Wikinews Free content news source		Commons Shared media repository		Meta-Wiki Wikimedia project coordination