Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. Wikipedia's combined editions comprise more than 61 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 15 million edits per month (about 5.7 edits per second on average) as of January 2023. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and has consistently been one of the 10 most popular websites. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki.
Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies
