Wikipedia Version 0.5
The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of an open source web-based online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000. Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was created to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of additional reference projects.
As of May 2013, Wikipedia includes over 26 million freely usable articles in 285 languages, written by over 39 million registered users and numerous anonymous contributors worldwide. According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website, visited monthly by around 12% of all internet users. According to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 80 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.
Famous quotes containing the word version:
“I should think that an ordinary copy of the King James version would have been good enough for those Congressmen.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)