Wikipedia
Free knowledge for the world
Wikipedia turns 20 on January 15th.
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It is the most popular online encyclopedia and most frequented website in the world, on January 15th Wikipedia celebrates its 20th anniversary.
It was exactly 20 years ago that the non-profit project Wikipedia was started on January 15, 2001. The online encyclopedia has since become a global symbol of freely accessible knowledge. The entrepreneur Jimmy Wales (54), co-founder of the platform, stated in 2006: "The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed and high-quality encyclopedia." Wikipedia could never reach an end point: "Nothing is ever over." Human knowledge grows incessantly.
Numbers around Wikipedia
In 2021, the platform will probably be used more frequently than ever. According to the online service Alexa, which collects data on all aspects of page views, "Wikipedia.org" is currently the 13th most popular website in the world. A mixture of the number of visitors and views is used for the evaluation. In Germany, Wikipedia even reached seventh place – and only had to beat "google.com", "youtube.com", "google.de", "amazon.de", "ebay.de" and "aparat.com" give.
By the end of 2020, more than 55.6 million articles in almost 300 languages had been written on Wikipedia, according to information on its own website. There are more than 2.5 million articles in German alone. This makes it the fourth largest version behind its English-speaking, Cebuano-speaking, and Swedish siblings. The first article in the German Wikipedia edition deals with the Greek port city of Pylos, the millionth with the US botanist Ernie Wasson (71).
Author among most influential people on the internet
The American Wikipedia author Steven Pruitt (36) was one of the most influential people on the Internet in 2017. The "Time" magazine selected him at the time in a corresponding list of 25 personalities or groups, on which numerous celebrities landed, including singer Katy Perry (36), reality TV star Kim Kardashian (40), "Harry Potter" – Author JK Rowling (55) and still-US President Donald Trump (74). Between the summer of 2004 and the beginning of 2019, Pruitt made more than three million changes on Wikipedia alone.
Even if new knowledge is added every day, Wikipedia is unlikely to change fundamentally in the future. "I think it will be very similar to today. We will probably not suddenly start showing a lot of funny cat videos, but will still be an encyclopedia", Wales recently explained in an interview with the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" when asked, where he see Wikipedia in 20 years. "Many changes will probably be invisible to many people because a large part will revolve around growth in the languages of developing countries." However, this is "an important development for our global influence."