Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone who can access the site can edit almost any of its articles. Wikipedia is the seventh-most popular website and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name,[11] a portmanteauof wiki (from the Hawaiian word for "quick")  and encyclopedia. Although Wikipedia's content was initially only in English, it quickly became multilingual, through the launch of versions in different languages. All versions of Wikipedia are similar, but important differences exist in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of more than 200 Wikipedias, but remains the largest one, with over 4.6 million articles. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.  Wikipedia has more than 22 million accounts, out of which there were over 73,000 active editors globally as of May 2014. 

Wikipedia's accuracy is similar to Encyclopedia Britannica, with Wikipedia being much larger. However, critics argueWikipedia exhibits systemic bias,[citation needed] and its group dynamics hinder its goals.[clarification needed] Manyacademics, historians, teachers and journalists reject Wikipedia as a reliable source of information for being a mixture of truths, half truths, and some falsehoods, and that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is notoriously subject to manipulation and spin. Wikipedia's Consensus and Undue Weight policies have been repeatedly criticised by prominent scholarly sources for undermining freedom of thought and leading to false beliefs based on incomplete information.