Wikipedia:About

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is being written collaboratively by the readers. The site is a WikiWiki, meaning that anyone, you included, can edit any article right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears in every Wikipedia article that is not designated as a protected page. The project was started on January 15, 2001 and there are 176851 articles in English that are being worked on with many more articles being written in other languages. Every day hundreds of contributors from around the world make thousands of edits and create lots of new articles.

All of the site's content is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible. See copyrights for more information.

Note: Wikipedia contains content that may be considered offensive, vulgar or profane by some users. See the content disclaimer for more information.

More about Wikipedia

• Wikipedia, an article about the project and its history.
• Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit parent organization of Wikipedia and similar projects.
• Frequently asked questions
• Announcements
• Press coverage

Exploring the Wikipedia

• Recent changes, see articles that are being worked on right now.
• Random article
• New articles
• Reference desk, request an article or information. See also Requested articles
• Brilliant prose, see the best of Wikipedia.

Contributing to Wikipedia

• Welcome, newcomers!, a starting point for new contributors.
• Policies and guidelines for contributors
• Help pages, help on editing articles and more.

Getting in touch

• Village pump, a forum to ask questions not answered in the FAQs or help pages.
• Wikipedia mailing lists
• Chat with other users on IRC
• Instant messaging Wikipedians
• Bug reports and feature requests
• Wikipedians, lists of Wikipedia contributors.
• Meta Wikipedia, a site that works alongside the main Wikipedia project. Here you can post essays and discussions about topics related to Wikipedia.

Versions in other languages

Coordination between languages - Create a new language in Wikipedia

Afrikaans - Arabic (Araby) - Basque (Euskara) - Catalan (Català) - Chinese (Hanyu) - Czech (Cesky) - Danish (Dansk) - Dutch (Nederlands) - Esperanto - Estonian (Eesti) - Finnish (Suomeksi) - French (Français) - Frisian (Frysk) - German (Deutsch) - Hungary (Magyar) - Interlingua - Indonesia - Italian (Italiano) - Japanese (Nihongo) - Latin (Latina) - Lithuanian - Norwegian (Norsk) - Polish (Polska) - Portuguese (Português) - Russian (Russkiy) - Serbocroatian (Srpskohrvatska) - Slovene (Slovensko) - Spanish (Español) - Swedish (Svenska) - Welsh (Cymraeg)

Similar projects

• Wiktionary, a multilingual Wiki dictionary and thesaurus. (See Wiktionary for background)
• Wikibooks, a Wikipedia-like project to create open content textbooks.
• Project Sourceburg, a collection of public domain source texts used in Wikipedia. (See Project Sourceberg for background)
• Nupedia, a more academic free encyclopedia project with a peer-review system for accepting articles (See Nupedia for background)
• Enciclopedia Libre, an independent Spanish language encyclopedia project. (See Enciclopedia Libre for background)
• September 11 Memorial Wiki

Opinions and objections

• Why Wikipedia is so great
• Why Wikipedia is not so great
• Replies to common objections, a collection of counter arguments for common objections to the Wikipedia and wiki concept.
• The power structure of Wikipedia

Other links

• Friends of Wikipedia