Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales (left) and Larry Sanger (right) Articles on breaking news are often accessed as a source of frequently updated information about those events. On 3 April 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking links to related Wikipedia articles. It has been censored by world governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. The website's coverage of controversial topics such as American politics and major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has received substantial media attention. The reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, but has improved over time, as Wikipedia has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and alleged ideological bias. Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the 'biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world'. Its combined editions comprise more than 60 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 15 million edits per month (about 5.7 edits per second on average) as of January 2023. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed.

Wales was influenced by the ' spontaneous order' ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics after being exposed to these ideas by the libertarian economist Mark Thornton. Sanger coined its name as a blend of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001.

It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by Similarweb and formerly Alexa as of 2023, Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies

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