It has been censored by world governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Its coverage of controversial topics such as American politics and major events such as the COVID-19 pandemic has received substantial media attention. Its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, but has improved over time and has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced amount of commercial bias, but criticism for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and alleged ideological bias. In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the 'biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world'. Its combined editions comprise more than 58 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month, and more than 17 million edits per month (1.9 edits per second).

Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Wales was influenced by the 'spontaneous order' ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and Austrian School of economics, after being exposed to these ideas by Austrian economist and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger Sanger coined its name as a blending of 'wiki' and 'encyclopedia'. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through small donations. It is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and consistently one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of 2021, Wikipedia was ranked the 13th most popular site. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. 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 free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies

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