(Taken from Wikipedia’s ‘About’ page
Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia
project. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau (combination) of the
words wiki (a type of collaborative website) 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. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly
into one of the largest reference Web sites. There are more than
75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in
more than 250 languages. As of today, there are 2,293,986 articles
in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around
the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of
new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia
encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics).
