Wikipedia:About

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by people from all around the world. The site is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit articles, simply by clicking on the edit this page link. It runs on MediaWiki software.

Press Enquiries: Please use this number for press enquiries only. Please be sure to leave a message and Terry Foote will pass it on to Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation president. Messages on anything other than press enquiries will not be returned. The number to reach Terry Foote is +1 (310) 474-3223. Other inquiries should be made by email to jwales@wikia.com (mailto:jwales@wikia.com).

Wikipedia began on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and a few enthusiastic English-language collaborators. Four years later, as of December 2004, there were 13,000 active contributors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm) working on over 1,300,000 articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm) in more than 100 languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm). As of today, there are 514019 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands (http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsageVisits.htm) of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles.

All text in Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information)

Contents

1 Project history and overviews 2 Exploring Wikipedia 3 Contributing to Wikipedia 4 How to contact project members 5 Opinions and objections 6 Other links 7 Versions in other languages 8 Sister projects

Project history and overviews

• The Wikipedia project and history and FAQ
• The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit parent organization of Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia announcements, press coverage, and a weekly review.

Exploring Wikipedia

• Recent changes — articles being worked on in the last few minutes.
• Featured articles, new articles, requested articles, or a random article.
• The local reference desk, for requesting help or research information.

Contributing to Wikipedia

Reference pages: policies and guidelines for contributors, our welcome page, an introduction for newcomers, and general help with editing and navigating the site.

How to contact project members

Standard places to ask policy and project-related questions are the village pump, online, and the Wikipedia mailing lists, over email. You can also reach other Wikipedians via IRC and instant messenger.

There is also a meta-Wikipedia, a site for coordinating the various Wikipedia projects (and abstract discussions of policy and direction), and there are a few different places for submitting bug reports and feature requests.

See also: Wikipedia:Contact us.

Opinions and objections

• The strengths of Wikipedia and some replies to common objections.

Other links

• Wikipedia statistics, friends, and power structure
• Other projects similar to Wikipedia

Versions in other languages

Sister projects

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates several other multilingual and free-content projects:

	Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus		Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals		Wikiquote Collection of quotations		Wikisource Free source documents
	Wikispecies Directory of species		Wikinews Free content news source		Commons Shared media repository		Meta-Wiki Wikimedia project coordination

See also Wikipedia:Paper edition