Good thing they make those belated birthday cards for people like us who on occasion, forget to celebrate a birthday on the actual date! Yesterday was a big day for Wikipedia, it was the day that they turned 7 years old. If you do a quick search on Wikipedia for Wikipedia (of course they have a page!), you’ll find that they were formally launched on January 15, 2001 as a single English-language edition encyclopedia project. At the end of 2001, they had managed to gather up an index of 20,000 articles in 18 different language editions. As of December 2007, they had 9 and 1/4 million articles in 253 different languages!What a great seven years it’s been for Wikipedia!
In honor of their birthday, we thought we’d take a look at some interesting Wikipedia facts:
- The top five languages include English, German, French, Polish, and Japanese
- Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are the founders of Wikipedia
- The English Wikipedia has over 2 million articles which makes it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled
- Wikipedia’s headquarters are currently in St. Petersburg Florida, but they’ll be moving to San Francisco in February of this year
- They rely on MediaWiki to keep Wikipedia going – it is a free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database
- Servers are located in Tampa, Florida, Amsterdam, and Seoul, South Korea
- Depending on the time of day, Wikipedia receives between 10,000 and 35,000 page requests per second
- According to Alexa, it is the 8th most visited site worldwide.
- If it ran ads, its market value would be around $580 million
- As of February 2007, 50% of search engine traffic to Wikipedia came from Google – I guess you could say they rely quite heavily on them!
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY! You been so helpful wikipedia.
Agreed! I end up on their site at least once everyday.
David,
Hope you have had a wonderful birthday yestarday.
And sorry for late wishes. Hope to be earlier noext time.
your Dad