Wikipedia

A free, online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested the idea that a wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001. There was resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a Web site in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, 2001. The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new parent organization, prompting the use of a ".org" domain to denote its non-commercial nature. In March 2007, the word wiki became a newly recognized English word.

Historical perspective: As of 2010, critics of the collaboratively written online encyclopedia question its accuracy and editing process, resulting in these alternatives to Wikipedia: Citizendium.com, Scholarpedia.com, Conservapedia.com.