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Wikipedia:About

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 66.161.74.248 (talk) at 16:46, 11 August 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world. The site is a wiki, which means that anyone, even stupid people like Andrew Gibson can edit articles, simply by clicking on the edit this page link.

Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

For help topics, questions and contact information, see the help contents here.

History

Wikipedia began on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and some enthusiastic collaborators. Three years later, as of December 2004, there were 13,000 active contributors working on over 1,800,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there are 6,860,495 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 amount of knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

All text in Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information).

Exploring Wikipedia

The main reason visitors come to this site is to acquire knowledge. The second reason is to share knowledge. In fact, at this very instant, several articles are being improved. You can view the changes at the Recent changes page. New articles are also being recorded.

Wikipedia also has lots of projects. The hope of any contributor is to provide useful information to others, and the projects help coordinate efforts. Most articles start as stubs, but after many contributions, they can end as featured articles.

If you're searching for free information about subject you can't find in Wikipedia, you may want to request articles or ask a question on the reference desk. You can also decide to view a random article.

Contributing to Wikipedia

Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia by clicking on the edit tab in an article. Before starting to contribute however, you should check out some handy helping tools such as the tutorial and the policies and guidelines, as well as our welcome page.

Behind Wikipedia

Wikipedia uses the MediaWiki software. It's an open-source program, which is used on all WikiMedia projects.

The hardware supporting the various projects is based on almost 100 servers hosted in various hosting centers around the world. Full descriptions of the various servers are available on this meta page.

For technical information about Wikipedia you can check out the Technical FAQ.

How to contact project members

If you need more information, the first place to go is the Help:Contents. To contact individual contributors, you should leave them a message on their talk page. Standard places to ask policy and project-related questions are the village pump, online, and the Wikipedia mailing lists, over email. You can also reach other Wikipedians via IRC and instant messenger.

There is also a meta-Wikipedia, a site for coordinating the various Wikipedia projects (and abstract discussions of policy and direction), and there are many different places for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

For a full list of contact options, see: Wikipedia:Contact us.

Opinions and objections

A lot of people love to explore or contribute to Wikipedia. There are articles on the strengths of Wikipedia and some replies to common objections available.

Versions in other languages

This Wikipedia is written in English. Many other Wikipedias are available; some of the largest are listed below.

Sister projects

Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:

See also Wikipedia:Paper edition

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