Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation based in St. Petersburg, Florida. It has editions in about 200 languages (about 100 of which are active). Ten editions have more than 50,000 articles each: English, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish. According to Hitwise, an online measurement company, Wikipedia is currently the most popular reference site on the Internet.

History

Wikipedia began as a complementary project of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts through a formal process. Nupedia was founded on 9 March 2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company. Its principal figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was described by Sanger as differing from existing encyclopedias in being open content; not having size limitations, as it was on the Internet; and being free of bias, due to its public nature and potentially broad base of contributors.{{ref|SangerNupediaPurpose}} Nupedia had a seven-step review process by appointed subject-area experts, but was later widely viewed as too slow for producing a limited number of articles. Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by the use of advertisements.{{ref|NupediaAds}} It was licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License initially, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License prior to Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.

Related Topics:
Nupedia - 9 March - 2000 - Bomis, Inc - Jimmy Wales - CEO - Larry Sanger - Editor-in-chief - Open content - Internet - Richard Stallman

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Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001, as a single English-language edition at wikipedia.com. It had been, from 10 January, a feature of Nupedia.com in which the public could write articles that could be incorporated into Nupedia after review. It was relaunched off-site after Nupedia's Advisory Board of subject experts disapproved of its production model.{{ref|SangerAB}} Wikipedia thereafter operated as a standalone project without control from Nupedia. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its initial months, though it is similar to Nupedia's earlier "nonbias" policy. There were otherwise few rules initially. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles among 18 language editions by the end of its first year. It had 26 language editions by the end of 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the end of 2004.{{ref|HistLangCount}} Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers went down, permanently, in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.

Related Topics:
15 January - 2001 - 10 January - Slashdot - Search engine - 2003

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Wales and Sanger attribute the concept of using a wiki to Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository. Wales mentioned that he heard the concept first from Jeremy Rosenfeld, an employee of Bomis who showed him the same wiki, in December 2000,{{ref|WalesRosenfeld}} but it was after Sanger heard of its existence from Ben Kovitz, a regular at this wiki, in January 2001,{{ref|SangerKovitz}} and proposed a creation of a wiki for Nupedia to Wales that Wikipedia's history started. Under a similar concept of free content, though not wiki production, the GNUPedia project existed alongside Nupedia early in its history. It subsequently became inactive and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, lent his support to Wikipedia.{{ref|Stallman}}

Related Topics:
Ward Cunningham - Portland Pattern Repository - December 2000 - January 2001 - GNUPedia - Free-software - Richard Stallman

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Citing fear of commercial advertising and lack of control in a perceived English-centric Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Later that year, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and moved its website to wikipedia.org. Projects have since forked from Wikipedia's content for editorial reasons, such as Wikinfo, which abandoned "neutral point-of-view" in favor of multiple complementary articles written from a "sympathetic point-of-view."

Related Topics:
Spanish Wikipedia - Enciclopedia Libre - February 2002 - Advertisements - Wikinfo

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From Wikipedia and Nupedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was created on June 20, 2003.{{ref|Wikimedia}} Wikipedia and its sister projects thereafter operated under this non-profit organization. Wikipedia's first sister project, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki" had been created in October 2002 to detail the September 11, 2001 attacks; Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquotes, a collection of quotes, a week after Wikimedia launched; and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively-written free books, the next month. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects, detailed below.

Related Topics:
June 20 - 2003 - Non-profit organization - October 2002 - September 11, 2001 attacks - Wiktionary - December 2002 - Wikiquotes - Wikibooks

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Wikipedia has traditionally measured its status by article count. In its first two years, it grew at a few hundred or less new articles per day. The English Wikipedia reached a 100,000 article milestone on January 22, 2003. In 2004, its article growth rate was approximately 1,000 to 3,000 per day. In all editions, it reached 500,000 articles on February 25, 2004.{{ref|HalfMillion}} Wikipedia reached its one millionth article among 105 language editions on September 20, 2004.{{ref|WikimediaMillion}}

Related Topics:
January 22 - 2003 - February 25 - 2004 - September 20

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Software and hardware

Wikipedia is run by MediaWiki free software on a cluster of dedicated servers located in Florida. MediaWiki is Phase III of the program's software. Originally, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki by Clifford Adams (Phase I). At first it required CamelCase for links; later it was also possible to use double brackets. Wikipedia began running on a PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database in January 2002. This software, Phase II, was written specifically for the Wikipedia project by Magnus Manske. Several rounds of modifications were made to improve performance in response to increased demand. Ultimately, the software was rewritten again, this time by Lee Daniel Crocker. Instituted in July 2002, this Phase III software was called MediaWiki. It was licensed under the GNU General Public License and used by all Wikimedia projects.

Related Topics:
MediaWiki - Free software - Florida - UseModWiki - Clifford Adams - CamelCase - PHP - Wiki engine - MySQL - Database - January 2002 - July 2002 - GNU General Public License

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Wikipedia was served from a single server until 2003, when the server setup was expanded into an n-tier distributed architecture. In January 2005, the project ran on 39 dedicated servers located in Florida. This configuration included a single master database server running MySQL, multiple slave database servers, 21 web servers running the Apache software, and seven Squid cache servers. By September 2005, its server cluster had grown to more than 100 servers in four locations around the world.

Related Topics:
2003 - N-tier - January 2005 - Florida - MySQL - Apache - Squid cache - September 2005

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Page requests are processed by first passing to a front-end layer of Squid caching servers. Requests that cannot be served from the Squid cache are sent to two load-balancing servers running the Perlbal software, which then pass the request to one of the Apache web servers for page-rendering from the database. The web servers serve pages as requested, performing page rendering for all the Wikipedias. To increase speed further, rendered pages for anonymous users are cached in a filesystem until invalidated, allowing page rendering to be skipped entirely for most common page accesses. Wikimedia has begun building a global network of caching servers with the addition of three such servers in France. A new Dutch cluster is also online now. In spite of all this, Wikipedia page load times remain quite variable. The OpenFacts wiki has been set up to largely to keep track of Wikipedia read and write speeds, which at various times are Fast; Reasonable; Slow; Very Slow; Really Slow; Appallingly Slow; Unbearingly Slow; or Not Responding.

Related Topics:
Squid caching - Perlbal - France

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The ongoing status of Wikipedia's website is posted by users at a status page on OpenFacts.

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