www.wikipedia.org

The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit umbrella organization, supports Wikipedia, which was established on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. A prior encyclopedia project called Nupedia, which has been inactive since September 26, 2003, inspired the creation of Wikipedia as a supplementary undertaking.

It developed as a result of the demanding review process used by Nupedia experts, which turned off contributors and stunted the site's growth. Wales wanted to establish a new wiki that would encourage open collaboration without putting contributors in danger of being humiliated with content that they could later properly review and move to the Nupedia site. Wikipedia had 13,000 articles as of September 25, 2001, compared to Nupedia's meager 21 approved articles in its first year, but the idea quickly outgrew Nupedia and outnumbered its number of articles. After Nupedia was shut down in 2003, all of its articles were incorporated into Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a multilingual, collaborative, and totally free online encyclopedia. Every user has free access to Wikipedia, which allows them to share any kind of data and even gives them the option to edit it.