Wikipedia: "The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit"

Wikipedia is, as their slogan suggests, a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  Currently, there is over 300 million articles in 287 languages.  It is the most popular reference site and is the sixth most visited site in the entire world.

The original proposal for an internet encyclopedia came from Rick Gates in 1993.  However, it was not until January 15, 2001 that Gates' idea was made into a reality when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales

Larry Sanger

Originally, Wikipedia was designed to supplement an earlier project, Nupedia, an online encyclopedia that contained only peer-reviewed articles.  After seeing how slowly Nupedia was developing (only twelve articles were published in the first year), the two decided to create Wikipedia.  Wikipedia was able to quickly expand content because it is a wiki (see later post), while Nupedia was not.

          Read more about Nupedia here.




References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger