16 Weird Facts About Wikipedia

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The Knowledgebase for the World
Whenever people seek information, be it science, sports, celebrities, authors and even weather, there is one place they usually look for. It’s Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is said to be the most popular online information sources, and it is the most visited Web site in the United States close on the heels of the sites such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace and eBay. The topics of content in this database vary from specific academic to casual or entertaining. The site has become a major research tool for college students, faculty, researchers, writers and other professionals

Wikipedia is unique as it hands over the control to the users, and they decide the topics to cover and the depth of their content. Articles are updated here quite on time with new information.

Wikipedia often blocks attempts to edit articles from .gov IP addresses. These attempts are usually made by the parties with political interests related to their own entries. On many occasions, politicians were caught for altering their political and personal records on Wikipedia. In addition, the website has also blocked the edit attempts from the IP addresses own by bodies such as the Church of Scientology.

Facts About Wikipedia:

  1. In 2001, James Wales and Larry Sanger established Wikipedia. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco.
  2. The name Wikipedia originated by combining “wiki”, which means shared website and “pedia” from Encyclopedia.
  3. Wikipedia is a Non-Profit Organization, which means it does not earn any profit by distributing knowledge. Due to this reason, the company does not spend money on advertisement.
  4. Wikipedia generates around 684 million pages views every year.
  5. When looking for some information, many people go straight to Wikipedia; however about 50 percent of this site’s visitors comes through from Google.
  6. Currently, Wikipedia supports 260 languages.
  7. It is an open source website, which means readers edit the articles or add information as they feel important. Wikipedia members are called “Wikipedians”. Though not just members, anyone can edit the content.
  8. Richard Farmbrough is said to be one of the most active editors of Wikipedia. He has so far edited more than 985,000 articles!
  9. It is likely to take 16 years and 9 months to finish reading the entire English Wikipedia!
  10. In 2009, a study revealed that more than 80 percent Wikipedia users are male and less than 20 percent are female.
  11. There is also a Wikipedia for children and people who have learning disabilities. The website is named “simple.wikipedia.org”.
  12. “Hotel Wikipedia” is said to be the official theme song of Wikipedia. It was inspired by the famous 1976 song “Hotel California” by “Eagles”.
  13. On January 15, Wikipedia celebrates “Wikipedia Day” for commemorating the site’s launch in 2001 on the same date.
  14. On 9 September 2007, the English version of Wikipedia accumulated a collection of two million articles. Thus the site became the largest Encyclopedia ever consolidated, and broke the record of “Yongle Encyclopedia”, which did hold it for 600 years!
  15. Wikipedia follows a policy called “No Angry Mastodons”. It has been a long a long tradition within Wikipedia to formulate strange policies under strange names.
  16. The “Wikimedia” foundation runs “Wikiversity”. It is one of the latest projects taken up by Wikipedia among a wide range of projects. Wikiversity has been formed for collaborative learning, where educationists can create and revise content for helping students and others to get accurate information. Though Wikiverisity does offer any degree, anyone can study or teach a course.
  17. There is an alternate language Wikipedia called “Cheyenne”. It is perhaps the least popular yet active site. The site has just around 60 articles and only 10 active users.

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