Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a vast publicly-generated encyclopedia of knowledge. It started in 2001 and is still going strong.

Every page has been generated by a member of the public at some point, rather than an employee of Wikipedia.

The basic concept is that anyone can create a page of content and as-important - anyone can edit that page to make it more accurate or more comprehensive (or both).

There are of course some issues with this ideal - such as a biased group (or person) wanting to change the text - not based on facts but opinion.

This is especially true for political or famous-people entries and also for especially sensitive subjects.

Therefore as a safeguard, these sensitive pages are carefully monitored by volunteers to correct any inaccuracies as soon as possible. Wikipedia is multi-lingual, with a total page count of about 61 million pages. At the moment the English version has over 6.7 million pages.

2023-10