[Overview]
Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry
resigned later on), Wikipedia has quickly grown into the largest
reference website on the internet. Its multilingual content is free and
written collaboratively by people worldwide. Its website is a wiki,
which means that anyone can edit, correct and improve information
throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their
authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free
Documentation License). Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia
Foundation, which runs a number of other projects, for example
Wiktionary - launched in December 2002 - followed by Wikibooks,
Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikiquote. In December 2004, Wikipedia had
1.3 million articles from 13,000 contributors in 100 languages. Two
years later, in December 2006, it had 6 million articles in 250
languages.