While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias. Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial 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 60 million articles, attracting around 2 billion unique device visits per month and more than 15 million edits per month (about 5.7 edits per second on average) as of January 2023. 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 the Austrian School of economics after being exposed to these ideas by the libertarian economist Mark Thornton. Sanger coined its name as a blend of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. 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 Similarweb and formerly Alexa as of 2023, Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world according to Semrush. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies

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