10 Interesting Facts about wikipedia

Fact #1
The name Wikipedia comes from a combination of the words “wiki”, meaning shared website, and “pedia”, which is a shortened form of encyclopedia.

Fact #2
As of January 7, 2009, Wikipedia currently has more than 2.68 million English articles in its database.

Fact #3
Wikipedia currently supports content in 260 different languages.

Fact #4
There are over 75,000 “hot authors” on Wikipedia, responsible for constantly maintaining and adding to the site’s database.

Fact #5
Due to the fact that Wikipedia is solely maintained by volunteers, anyone can sign up and start adding or editing pages right off the bat. There’s no ranking system which lets certain authors edit some pages and not others.

Fact #6
When Wikipedia first started up in 2001, the original URL was to be Wikipedia.com, however, it was changed to Wikipedia.org when the site’s parent company Wikimedia transformed into a not-for-profit organization. In general, domains ending with “org” are non-commercial websites.

Fact #7
The pages of Wikipedia are under constant supervision by over 1,500 administrators. The problem with this is that when a person edits a page’s content with new information that has yet to be released to the public, said information is removed. For example, when searching for an “Episode Guide” for your favorite television show, you’ll often find 10 to 20 future episodes and their descr i ptions; however, the administrators will remove all of the future episodes except for the one that airs the following week.

Fact #8
Wikipedia obtains approximately 684 million viewers every year.

Fact #9
Some members of the community classify January 15 as “Wikipedia Day” due to the fact that the first Wikipedia domain was launched on that day.

Fact #10
Most of the articles on Wikipedia can be edited by users that haven’t even registered an account on the site.