Wikipedia:Press releases/January 2003

Draft

Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ), an open content community-built encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development. In addition, the project itself has recently celebrated its two-year anniversary (15 January) and the fact that there are more than 37,000 articles being worked-on in languages other than English. On 12 December of last year Wikipedia also launched a sister project called Wiktionary ( http://www.wiktionary.org/ ), a free multilingual dictionary and thesaurus.

Wikipedia is a public WikiWikiWeb, meaning that anyone can edit any article at any time. In its second year, thousands of volunteer editors from around the world have added 80,000 entries to the English version and 33,000 more to the other language editions of Wikipedia. This surge in growth has made Wikipedia the world's largest and fastest growing open content encyclopedia and the largest WikiWikiWeb. With edits being made 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is impossible to predict where the project will be one year from now.

Wikipedia was founded by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger. Wales' Bomis.com search engine has supplied the financial backing and other support for the project, and Sanger led the project during its first year as a full-time paid editor of Wikipedia. They both attribute Wikipedia's success to the presence of a strong core group of well-educated, and articulate contributors from around the world who together maintain community standards of quality and neutrality. "Participants all keep a watchful eye over the 'Recent Changes' page," Wales said. "They edit each others' work constantly. It seems surprising that it works very well, but it does."

Critics often ask: How can so many people with so many different backgrounds collaborate with no oversight? From the beginning, Wales and Sanger believed that it was absolutely necessary that all participants be committed to what they call "neutral point of view": rather than taking stands on issues of controversy, participants work together to prepare descriptions of the controversy that are fair to all points of view. Sanger explains: "If we were to permit Wikipedia to take controversial stands, it would be virtually impossible for people of many different viewpoints to collaborate. Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working together on the same articles. It's quite remarkable."

Wikipedia is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, which ensures that anyone may reuse the entries on the site in any way they wish, including commercially, as long as they too preserve that right in their own versions and they also credit Wikipedia as the source.