WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia is a multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia comes in 285 different versions and is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The operation of the platform depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database system. Wikipedia comprises more than 55 million articles, attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors per month. Wikipedia was launched by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.