Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree 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 59 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 17 million edits per month (1.9 edits per second) as of November 2020. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed.

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 formerly 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

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