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# Wikipedia

Wikipedia (Q52 on Wikidata) is probably one of the most famous of websites - and for good reason. If you search up almost anything online, be it a song, a city, an artist, or an episode of a TV show, it's almost guaranteed that one of the top links - if not the top - will be Wikipedia. This is partly due to search engines like Google paying massive amounts to this online encyclopedia so it can embed zero-click results for things, and YouTube (owned by Google) also sometimes showing a banner at the bottom of videos about a subject, but also thanks to Wikipedia just simply being, at least for the most part, a reliable place to find information.

In short, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute and which is written by volunteers from all over the world. With over 50 million articles in various languages, it is the world's largest encyclopedia and often ranks among top 15 most visited Internet websites.¹

There are over 300 language versions of Wikipedia including languages such as Esperanto or Simple English (that describes topics in simple words). English is the largest (over 6 million articles, 1 billion edits and 140000 active users), followed by Cebuano and Swedish, which are however mostly written by automated bots.

One of Wikipedia's golden rules is that if you write something, you should have a reliable source for said fact. It's a solid foundation for sure, although false or deliberately misleading information can slip through at times on the side; still, it's a forever-changing and evolving beast. If there's an error, someone will probably edit it or point it out so that other, more advanced Wikipedians can correct said section of an article, this is thanks to it allowing anyone to contribute to it, even anonymously and without registration. But of course, there are exceptions, e.g. blocking of spammers or protecting certain pages by only allowing some registered users to make edits.

Wikipedia is almost entirely a free cultural work, i.e. it legally allows anyone to freely and without charge read it, copy it, share its copies, modify its copies and use its copies in any way, even commercially. This is thanks to the free CC-BY-SA license, under which Wikipedia's text is licensed. The media on Wikipedia, i.e. images, videos etc., are mostly hosted by the sister project Wikimedia Commons and these media are all free in the sense of copyright. However, in certain special cases Wikipedia allows to use non-free media in its articles under fair use which technically makes these articles non-free. It also practically ignores trademarks and other kinds of intellectural property which might limit its freedom, and it allows citations of non-free media.

The software that powers Wikipedia is a free software (this is, again, free as in freedom) wiki engine called MediaWiki, created specially for Wikipedia. The engine is used by many other projects not affiliated with Wikipedia.

# Did You Know?

• WikiHitler is a surprisingly fun game that can be played on Wikipedia and is especially entertaining with someone else playing this game. You select a random article, and from the new page, you click on other links and more links until you find the Adolf Hitler biography page. This game can legit be a lot of fun, and is even more fun if you try and make it harder, like only being allowed five clicks, not being able to click on the World War I or II page and no clicking on countries. Sounds kinda lame, but you're reading a page all about Wikipedia, so you'll probably find it very fun.
• In 2005, Wikipedia launched Nostalgia Wikipedia, a read-only archive of the site as it appeared in December 2001.
• In the early days of the site, after the 9/11 attacks, Wikipedia started sep11.wikipedia.org, a memoriam wiki where people could write about where they were when the attack was happening as well as pages for victims. It's a strange part of Wikipedia's history, as it's very opinion-based, and so, as a result, the wiki was deleted and now redirects to a meta page about it.

# Credits and Notes

This page was last edited on 2026-09-22 22:37:31.

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