On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a 'feeder' project for Nupedia. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia founders Jimmy Wales (left) and Larry Sanger (right) Articles on breaking news are often accessed as a source of frequently updated information about those events.

It has been censored by world governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s, having become an important fact-checking site. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. Wikipedia's combined editions comprise more than 61 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 15 million edits per month (about 5.7 edits per second on average) as of January 2023.

Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and has consistently been one of the 10 most popular websites. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies

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