Press kit/October 2005

The Wikipedia Press Kit is a short guide to Wikipedia for journalists, with information about Wikipedia.

Origins

• The English Wikipedia was founded in January 2001, as a companion site to the peer-reviewed Nupedia project.
  • Other language editions were set up starting in March 2001; early languages included German, French, and Japanese.
• Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Larry Sanger left the project in 2003.

Details

• Please refer to Wikipedia as "Wikipedia.org" - not "Wikipedia.com" .
• The non-profit foundation that coordinates the Wikipedia project and its sister projects is the Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003.

Statistics (October 2005)

Content

• Wikipedia has 2.6 million articles in over 200 languages, which have on average been edited more than 10 times apiece.
• The English Wikipedia, with 787,000 articles, is by some measures the world's largest encyclopedia.
• Wikipedia has over 275,000 freely reusable images.

Languages

• Wikipedia is available in 50 major languages and over 200 languages in all.
  • These are not machine translations, but all collections of native content, managed by volunteer editors (researchers, writers, and translators).

Users

• There are over 11,000 active Wikipedia editors as of July 2005, and over 53,000 editors all told.
  • There are 1,500 administrators on the various Wikipedia projects.

Historical Stats

• See our statistics page.
  • See our historical Alexa stats for estimates of daily traffic and reach as a percentage of total internet use.

Quotes

Public quotes from founder Jimmy Wales

Old quotes

• Jimmy Wales to Ward Cunningham (the father of the wiki) : Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia?

Ward: Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- from a discussion before Wikipedia was created

• The big secret of course is that Wikipedia is not really about an encyclopedia, it's just a big game of w:nomic.
• "There's no cost to switching from an outdated old encyclopedia to Wikipedia -- just click and learn, and there you go. You can switch before your friends switch, but the knowledge you learn will be perfectly compatible," he said.

Slashdot interview, July 28 2004

Images

Images and photographs available for use in articles