Lesser known Facts About Wikipedia You Should Know

Interesting Facts About Wikipedia, a free multilingual online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is a large-scale, community-driven online wiki system maintained and written by volunteers around the world.

Interesting Facts About Wikipedia

1. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
2. The term Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger. It is a portmanteau of two words: “wiki” and “encyclopedia”.
3. Wikipedia is one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa; as of 2021.
4. As per Alexa‘s ranking as of 2021, Wikipedia is ranked as the 13th most popular site.
5. Wikipedia is maintained, developed, and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
6. Wikipedia Foundation is a non-profit and charitable organization from America.
7. Wikipedia doesn’t show advertisements. It is funded by individual donations to Wikimedia Foundation.
8. Initially, Wikipedia running on UseModWiki. It was developed using Perl by Clifford Adams.
9. In January 2002, Wikipedia started running on a PHP wiki engine. It was a custom-made software for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske.
10. In July 2002, Wikipedia started running on MediaWiki. And, rest is the history.
11. MediaWiki is a custom-made, free, open-source software. It has been developed using PHP. It uses MySQL to handle its database backend.
12. MediaWiki is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) license. Apart from Wikipedia, there are a lot of Wikimedia Foundation and other projects running on MediaWiki.
13. Wikipedia search is powered by the CirrusSearch Mediawiki extension.
14. As of May 2021, Wikipedia has a total of 6,307,508 (6.3 million) articles in English.
15. As of 2021, Combined articles from all languages Wikipedia hosts about 56 million articles read by more than 1.7 billion unique viewers per month.
16. Wikipedia is available in 321 languages.
17. Wikipedia has >334,019 active users and >96,217,008 registered users. Active users are those who made at least one edit or other action in a given month.
18. Wikipedia content is available under the CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0 license.
19. In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the “biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world”.
20. Nupedia was a collaborative online encyclopedia project attempted before Wikipedia. But, it failed to succeed.
21. Wikipedia predecessor Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company co-founded by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis in 1996.
22. Nupedia servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its content was got merged into Wikipedia.
23. The domain wikipedia.com was registered on January 12, 2001. It redirects to wikipedia.org which was registered on January 13, 2001. And, then official Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001.
24. In February 2002 users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre. They were worried about the commercial advertising and lack of control in the Wikipedia project.
25. At the end of 2004 Wikipedia was available in a total of 161 languages.
26. On September 9, 2007, within 7 years of its inception, Wikipedia had more than two million articles.
27. As per Comscore Networks, in January 2007, Wikipedia grabbed a position in the first top ten websites in the US.
28. There is an asteriod named after Wikipedia. “274301 Wikipedia” was named after Wikipedia in January 2013.
29. In October 2014, Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument, located in Słubice, Poland. It is a statue designed by Armenian sculptor Mihran Hakobyan honoring Wikipedia contributors.
30. In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash.
31. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia have been encoded into synthetic DNA. Synthetic genomics is a nascent field of synthetic biology that uses aspects of genetic modification on pre-existing life forms, or artificial gene synthesis to create new DNA or entire lifeforms.
32. The Marathi Wikipedia (Marathi Edition of Wikipedia) was launched on 1 May 2003. It picked up growth from 2006 onwards. On 13 January 2006 it had 1500 articles.
33. As of May 2021, the Marathi Wikipedia 74,617 articles.
34. As of May 2021, Marathi Wikipedia has total registered users 133,223, 10 admins. Out of which 220 are active users.
35. Among the most visited Marathi-language websites, the Marathi Wikipedia is ranked tenth by Alexa.
36. The Hindi Wikipedia (Hindi Edition of Wikipedia) was launched in July 2003. As of May 2021, it has 147,824 articles. In June 2020, there were 38 million page views.
37. Hindi Wikipedia is the second most popular Wikipedia in India after the English version.
38. Hindi Wikipedia has more than 1,400 active users.
39. The French Wikipedia edition was started on 23 March 2001.
40. As of May, 2021, The French Wikipedia has 2,332,098 articles.
41. The French Wikipedia is the fifth-largest Wikipedia overall after the English, Cebuano, Swedish and German.
42. As of May 2021, the French Wikipedia has 4,104,000 users and 156 admins.
43. The Cebuano-language Wikipedia was launched in June 2005.
44. The Cebuano Wikipedia is the Cebuano-language edition of the Wikipedia. There are only 167 active users. Cebuano is the second most spoken language in the Philippines with about 20 million speakers.
45. The Cebuano Wikipedia currently has 5,739,404 articles, most of which were created by the automated program Lsjbot.
46. Lsjbot is an automated Wikipedia article-creating program, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Wikipedia. It is also known as Wikipedia bot.
47. The Wikipedia bot (Lsjbot) primarily focuses on articles about living organisms and geographical entities.
48. About 30% of Cebuano Wikipedia views come from China, 22% from the United States, and only 11% from the Philippines.
49. The Russian Wikipedia was launched on 11 May 2001.
50. As of May 2021, The Russian Wikipedia has 1,727,695 articles.
51. The Russian Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia written in any Slavic language. The Slavic languages, a.k.a. the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken by the Slavic peoples or their descendants.
52. The Swedish Wikipedia was formed on 23 May 2001.
53. As of May 2021, The Swedish Wikipedia is the third largest Wikipedia by article-count.
54. As of May 2021, The Swedish Wikipedia contains total 3,166,138 articles. Our of which a majority are generated by a bot, Lsjbot (Wikipedia Bot).
55. Wikimedia Foundation also maintains some sister projects, like, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, WikiBooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, and Wikiversity.
56. Wikitionary was launched on December 12, 2002. It is a project to create a free content dictionary of terms.
57. Wikiquote a project intended to create a collection of famous quotes collected from works published by prominent people was launched on 10 July 2003.
58. Wikibooks was launched on July 10, 2003. It is a project hosted by Wikimedia Foundation for creating free digital textbooks. The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003.
59. There is a Wikibooks sub-project called Wikijunior aiming to produce age-appropriate non-fiction books for children ranging from birth to age 12. Available here.

Resources to learn more about Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher | The Economist
• Wikipedia.org Traffic, Demographics and Competitors | Alexa Internet
• Wikimedia’s approach to coronavirus: Staffers can work 20 hours a week, get paid for full time | The Washington Post
• Wikipediots: Who Are These Devoted, Even Obsessive Contributors to Wikipedia? | Salt Lake City Weekly
• Wikistats – Statistics For Wikimedia Projects
• Jimmy Wales – The 2006 Time 100 | Time
• CC Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0
• The contribution conundrum: Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed? | Nieman Lab
• Wikipedia and e-Collaboration Research: Opportunities and Challenges
• Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You
• The Free Encyclopedia Project
• The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
• Startup packs all 16GB of Wikipedia onto DNA strands to demonstrate new storage tech – Biological molecules will last a lot longer than the latest computer storage technology, Catalog believes | CNET
• Hindi Wikipedia
• Alexa – Top Sites by Category: World/Marathi
• Wikiquote
• Wiktionary