15 Facts About Wikipedia

Here are 15 interesting did you know facts about possibly the most ambitious internet venue ever. An internet encyclopedia constantly updated by an anonymous crowd of users; over the years it’s gone from internet inside joke to invaluable resource for trusted information. Most of the time, anyway. Here are 15 did you know facts about Wikipedia:

1.) Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger in 2001.

2.) The name is the combination of the words “wiki,” which means ‘shared website’ and “pedia,” a shorten form of the word ‘encyclopedia.’

3.) Wikipedia currently supports over 260 different languages.

4.) Sex is one of the most popular wikipedia articles in every language except French and Spanish.

5.) Wikipedia generates approximately 684 million page views each year.

6.) Bad Weather leads to more wikipedia updates, that’s why the Dutch wikipedia has more pages than Spain’s wikipedia.

7.) The English wikipedia has more than 3 million articles. The German has around 1.10 million, French has around 1 million, Italian has around 700,00 and the Spanish wikipedia has around 610,000.

8.) Wikipedia is ad-free.

9.) Members of the wikipedia community is referred to as the ‘Wikipedians‘.

10.) Anybody can edit wikipedia’s articles.

11.) There is no censorship in wikipedia but articles must follow some guidelines.

12.) Wikipedia’s mission is to make all of the information in the world available in every language.

13.) A study in 2008, compared the accuracy of Wikipedia’s articles to similar encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica, The Dictionary of American History, etc. The results were as follows:

• Wikipedia – 80% Accurate
• Others – 95 – 96 % accurate.

14.) Just 31% of wikipedia’s are women.

15.) A sampling of wikipedia’s articles in August 2002 showed that only 0.2% were victims of vandalization. By May, 2009, those number had increased to about 7.7%.