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See talk page and Wikimedia press release strategy.
{hier Datum einfügen} 2003 (The Internet): Die Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a volunteer created multilingual encyclopedia, announced today that the project has reached a milestone of 300,000 articles under development spread across 40 different languages and that, for the first time, there are more articles in other languages than there are in English.
In addition, on June 20, 2003 the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WikimediaFoundation.org) was created to manage and fund the operations of Wikipedia, its sister project Wiktionary (a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus at wiktionary.org) and its new siblings Wikiquote (an encyclopedia of famous quotations at wikiquote.org) and Wikibooks (a collection of e-book resources aimed toward the needs of students at wikibooks.org). The Wikimedia Foundation is also starting a two-week long fundraising drive today. Please visit WikimediaFoundation.org/fundraising to learn how to make donations.
Wikipedia and its sister projects are public WikiWikiWebs, websites where anyone can edit nearly any page at any time (Wiki means quick in Hawaiian). Users build upon each other's edits, and incorrectly edited pages are quickly repaired. Even this press release was created using a WikiWikiWeb. In January of this year, Wikipedia announced that its English version had reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development and that the other language versions as a whole were working on 37,000 articles. A large army of volunteer editors from around the world have since added an additional 55,000 articles in development to the English version and, more remarkably, the other language editions now have more than 145,000 articles under development - an increase of nearly 400% in 8 months' time.
There are now seven Wikipedia versions that have over 10,000 articles in development: English, German, French, Polish, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch. This surge in growth has made Wikipedia the world's largest and fastest growing open content encyclopedia project and has, according to Alexa.com, resulted in Wikipedia.org passing Britannica.com in terms of Internet traffic.
Wikipedia has been the subject of articles in The New York Times and its respective magazine, and MIT's highly-respected Technology Review, as well as high-profile technology news websites such as Slashdot, Wired and Kuro5hin. More recently, Wikipedia has been featured on radio news programs, such as National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and CNN's television program TechWatch. It is also increasingly being used as a reference source for students and journalists, or anyone who needs a starting point for doing Internet research.
The Wikipedia project was founded by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger in January of 2001. Bomis.com, an Internet web portal owned by Wales, has supplied the financial backing and other support for Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects. Sanger led the Wikipedia project during its first year as a full-time paid editor. Since then it has operated on consensus using policies refined over time by contributors.
Wales attributes Wikipedia's success to the presence of a strong core group of well-educated and articulate contributors from around the world who together maintain "community standards" of civility, quality and neutrality. "Participants all keep a watchful eye over the 'Recent Changes' page," Wales said. "They edit each others' work constantly. It seems surprising that it works very well, but it does." Even controversial topics seem to neutralize quite naturally via this process. At any given time, less than one hundred articles in the English Wikipedia currently have their neutrality disputed.
All Wikimedia content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, which ensures that anyone may reuse Wikimedia content in any way they wish, including commercially, as long as they too preserve that right in their own versions and credit the editors of the relevant Wikimedia project as the source.
With edits being made every minute of every day, it is impossible to predict where Wikipedia and its sister projects will be one year from now. Thanks to the GNU General Public license, one thing is certain: The content will remain free.
Additional information
For questions and interviews, please contact:
Jimmy Wales
Phone: (+1)-727-527-9776
Email: jwales@bomis.com
For further background information, please see:
- http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Wikipedia's article about Wikipedia - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia
Wikipedia's article about Wikimedia - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AReplies_to_common_objections
Some responses to common criticisms of the WikiWiki concept - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ABrilliant_prose
Selected Articles that are considered to be well written and researched - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3APress_coverage
Past press coverage of the project