What is the meaning of the word "Wikipedia"? Many people are interested in this issue. An electronic dictionary that can answer most user questions also has its own history and meaning. This article is dedicated to the all-knowing Wikipedia.
The meaning of the word "Wikipedia" is an electronic type encyclopedia. We will deal with the history of the creation of this resource. Jimmy Wells and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of the earlier Nupedia encyclopedia project in January 2001. Wikipedia was originally created to provide content for Nupedia. However, when the site became established, it soon went beyond the scope of an earlier project.
Wise resource
As of January 2015, the website has submitted over five million articles in English and many in all other languages. Wikipedia is becoming the seventh most popular website on the Internet. She was the only non-profit site in the top ten. The meaning of the word "Wikipedia" is becoming increasingly widespread.
The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 5,682,533 articles, which is equivalent to more than 2,500 printing houses of the British Encyclopedia. Including all language versions, Wikipedia has over 45 million articles, equivalent to more than 19 thousand print volumes. You can only imagine how much knowledge fits in this resource. Having dealt with the meaning of the word "Wikipedia", we proceed to the study of its history.
History reference
The main page of Wikipedia appeared on December 20, 2001. The launch of the first page started on January 15, two days after the registration of the domain by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. His technological and conceptual foundations preceded this. The most famous proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of a free online encyclopedia (unlike a simple open source) was successfully proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.
What was planned first
The dictionary of the modern Russian language interprets the word "Wikipedia" as an encyclopedia, an electronic type resource. A key feature of Stallman's concept was that no central organization should control editing.
This feature contrasted sharply with modern digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and even Nupedia Bomis, which was the direct predecessor of Wikipedia.
In 2001, the Nupedia license was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited exclusively by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. In practice, Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in several languages and inspiring a wide range of other online projects.
Leading Resource Positions
Wikipedia is the fifth most popular site in the world in terms of total traffic for visitors. The annual readership of Wikipedia is about 495 million people. Worldwide, in August 2015, WMF Labs counted 18 billion page views per month. Wikipedia receives more than 117 million monthly visitors from the United States alone.
The roots of encyclopedic collections
The concept of gathering world knowledge in one place goes back to the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, but the concept of a widespread printed encyclopedia came from Denis Didro and 18th-century French encyclopedists.
Advances in information technology at the end of the 20th century led to changes in the form of encyclopedias. Although previous encyclopedias, notably Encyclopædia Britannica, were book-based, Microsoft Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and a hyperlink.
The development of the World Wide Web has led to numerous attempts to develop online encyclopedia projects. An early offer for the web encyclopedia was Rick Gates Interpedia, a project that died before the creation of encyclopedic content.
Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of the “free universal encyclopedia and learning resource” in 1999. His published document aims to determine what a free encyclopedia should do, what freedoms it should provide to the public, and how to begin to develop it.
On Wednesday, January 17, 2001, two days after the founding of Wikipedia, the GNUPedia Free Software Foundation (FSF) went online to compete with Nupedia. But today, the FSF encourages people to visit and contribute to Wikipedia.
To summarize
The meaning of the word "Wikipedia" is interpreted as an electronic type encyclopedia. This resource is known all over the world for both adults and children, translated into many languages. Wikipedia helps to understand the meaning of the word. It is allowed to edit articles by users themselves. The meaning of the word “Wikipedia” in the dictionary was considered above, since many users are interested in the interpretation of the concept. This resource has become a great helper for adults and children all over the world.