Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free web-based and collaborative multilingual encyclopedia, born in the project supported by the non-profit wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia has around 13 million articles, in this 2.9 million articles are in English. All the articles are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of the articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and larry Sanger, now it is the worlds largest and most popular general reference work on the internet.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by the experts and reviewed under a formal process. This Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger,
editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was believed to be the ultimate encyclopedia by the people and for the people. But eight years on, the site is plagued by many problems. Some of them are
# The number of articles added per month flattened at 60,000 in 2006.
# The number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively.
# The foundation's finances is the major problem to Wikipedia.

One thing that every one of us must note is that, if the quality of Wikipedia could be degrade as there would be fewer editors checking for errors and the correcting the vandalism that accompanies user-gen websites.