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Wikipedia:Free encyclopedia; About Wikipedia; What Wikipedia is not; Copyrights in Wikipedia; Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License – the legal license as it applies to Wikipedia; GNU Free Documentation License, an encyclopedic article about the history of the license and the related movements of Free software and Free content
Screenshot of Wikipedia's article on Earth, 18 January 2023. Opening English Wikipedia's main page with Mozilla Firefox 99 on Ubuntu 20.04. Editors of the English Wikipedia have pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages.
Encyclopedia. Entry for the French word "Amour" (Love) in a paper encyclopedia ( Larousse Universel) and in an online encyclopedia (Wikimini.org). An encyclopedia ( American English) or encyclopaedia ( British English) [1] is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, to a particular field or ...
That's what we're doing." — Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and millions already have . Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by presenting information on all branches of knowledge.
A hundred years from now, the idea of a proprietary textbook or encyclopedia will sound as quaint and remote as we now think of the use of leeches in medical science. Through this work, every single person on the planet will have easy low cost access to free knowledge to empower them to do whatever it is that they want to do.
Nupedia and Wikipedia both existed until Nupedia's servers were stopped in 2003. After this, its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia reached 2 million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever.
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis.
