Top 10 Facts about Wikipedia

Wikipedia is started in January 2001. Jimmy Donal is the co- founder and promoter of Wikipedia.

1. Articles: There are a massive 17 million articles on Wikipedia, with the number increasing everyday.

2. Languages: There are 262 different language versions of the website, although the English, German and French versions have the most articles.

3. English: Of the 17 million articles, 3.5 million of them are written in the English language.

4. Record breaker: On 9 September 2007, the English version of Wikipedia surpassed two million articles. It made it the largest encyclopaedia ever put together and took the record from the Yongle encyclopaedia, which had held it for 600 years.

5. Readership: Wikipedia claims to have roughly 325 million readers, meaning there are 21 users to every article on the website.

6. Edits: There have to date been over one billion edits on Wikipedia, again with the number growing all the time – and being positively encouraged by founder Jimmy Wales.

7. Wiki: The word “wiki” is the Hawain word for “quick” but now has its own definition as “a web application that allows anyone visiting a website to edit content on it.”

8. Person becomes people: In 2006 the users of Wikipedia who edited the site were named as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

9. Hosted state: The servers for Wikipedia are hosted in Florida, therefore content on the site is subject to the US state’s laws.

10. Google gives it a hit: Many of us may go straight to Wikiepdia.org, however 50 per cent of the website’s traffic actually comes from Google.