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Wikipedia: English Wikipedia
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Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multi-lingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".
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Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles, and 18 language editions, by the end of 2001. By late 2002 it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the closing stages 2004.[25] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. As of December 2007, English Wikipedia had over 2 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for nearly 600 years.[26]
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Wikipedia started in January, 2001 and there are over 3,000,000 articles overall, including 25,458 in simple English. More than half the pages are in languages other than English. Every day hundreds of people from around the world make thousands of changes and create lots of new articles.
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Almost every article in Wikipedia may be edited anonymously or with a user account and changes are made available immediately, while only registered users may create a new article. All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work. Wikipedia has been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are currently incompatible.[33] Some language editions, such as the English Wikipedia, include non-free image files under fair use doctrine.
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Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia. It is created by volunteers using MediaWiki, the same wiki software that Wikia uses. Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia users have written over three million articles in hundreds of languages, with over two million in English Wikipedia (up to date:[1]) contains traditional encyclopedia topics as well as almanac or gazetteer style content, with some coverage of current events.
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Wikipedia judges certain articles to be important enough and well-written enough to be considered featured articles. As of 9 May 2007, there are 1391 "Featured Articles" out of 1,776,624 articles on the English Wikipedia.[5] In addition, various groups of users collaborate within topical "projects" to rate the quality of articles and upgrade weaker articles.
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