Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. Language editions were created beginning in March 2003, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Bomis originally intended it as a business for profit. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. The domains (later redirecting to ) and were registered on January 12, 2001, and January 13, 2001, respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.
Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
16.5.2 Articles re Wikipedia usage patterns.11.1 Trusted source to combat fake news.
Sanger coined its name as a blend of " wiki" and " encyclopedia." Wales was influenced by the " spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics, after being exposed to these ideas by Austrian economist and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton. On January 15, 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by the Similarweb and former Alexa as of 2022, Wikipedia was ranked the 7th most popular site. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia ( / ˌ w ɪ k ɪ ˈ p iː d i ə/ ( listen) wik-ih- PEE-dee-ə or / ˌ w ɪ k i-/ ( listen) wik-ee-) is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies