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Wkipedia at 15, Interesting facts you need to know
On Friday 15th, 2016, Wikipedia marked its 15th anniversary since it was started in 2001, former President of the United…
On Friday 15th, 2016, Wikipedia marked its 15th anniversary since it was started in 2001, former President of the United States of America George W. Bush’s page becoming the most edited page.
Marking its 15th anniversary Wikipedia released a ranking of its pages based on how many edits have been made by volunteers stating that edits can mount at Wikipedia pages when people or subjects incite passion or rival perspectives.
Top on the list was George W. Bush with 45,862 edits to his Wikipedia page, coming in about 3,000 edits ahead of the World Wrestling Entertainment roster page.
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The list of the top-10 most edited pages went on to include, in order, the United States, Wikipedia itself, Michael Jackson, Jesus and the Catholic Church.
Rounding out the list were programs broadcast by Philippines television network ABS-CBN, US President Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler.
Wikipedia, is known as the world’s free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia, marked the birth of an idea: that anyone can contribute to the world’s knowledge.
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It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger began to try and realize the incredibly ambitious goal of putting the sum of all human knowledge into a single place, and to make the whole thing available to anyone, free.
According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world’s seventh-most-popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic. Wikipedia’s total worldwide monthly readership is approximately 495 million. Worldwide in August 2015, WMF Labs tallied 18 billion page views for the month. According to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 117 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.
On Friday readers and editors came together to celebrate, with nearly 150 events globally.
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To mark its 15th anniversary, Wikipedia also launched #1Lib1Ref (“One Librarian, One Reference”) is a Wikipedia publicity drive, which asks each librarian on Earth to mark the 15th anniversary of the foundation of Wikipedia, on 15 January 2016, by adding a citation to the online encyclopedia.
The organisers estimated that if each librarian on the planet spent 15 minutes adding a citation, then the English Wikipedia’s backlog of 350,000 citation needed templates would be cleared.
The week long event, running from 15-23 January, uses the hashtag “#1lib1ref”.
Here are some interesting facts you need to know about Wkipedia:
Wikipedia started in January 2001 in English, but soon expanded to other languages—within the first year, it grew to 18 languages. Today, it is available in nearly 300.
In 2003 The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established, and Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo.
Volunteers constantly edit and improve Wikipedia. Every hour, roughly 15,000 edits are made to Wikipedia. Every day, around 7,000 new articles are created.
Wikipedia became one of the top 10 websites in the world in 2007, and the only non-profit website anywhere near the top.
It’s not just Wikipedia. There are 11 other Wikimedia free knowledge projects, including Wikimedia Commons, with more than 30 million freely licensed images, as well as Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, and more.
In 2010, On 24 March, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. Failover to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.
On 13 May, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On 12 December, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia’s millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1-billionth Wikimedia project edit was performed on 16 April
The Wikimedia community supports global projects that spread the joy of knowledge. Wiki Loves Monuments, a global photo competition, launched in 2010 to document images of cultural heritage. In 2011, the contest was named the largest photo competition in the world. Companion projects like Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Africa, and even Wiki Loves Cheese document more knowledge from around the globe.
Volunteers around the world have built hundreds of partnerships with galleries, libraries, museums to make institutional collections more broadly available. These partnerships have contributed to more than 1.5 million images of cultural works on the Wikimedia projects.