Facts About Wikipedia
A couple of days back, I was thinking about some cool and amazing facts about Wikipedia. So, I thought to write a post on it here for you guys.
In this post, I’m going to list 30 interesting (maybe funny and unknown) facts about Wikipedia for you!
Fact#1: Name
Wikipedia includes the words “Wiki” which means “a shared website” and “pedia” which refers to a short form of the word “encyclopedia.”
Fact#2: Founders
Wikipedia was founded on 15th January 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.
Fact#3: Languages
Currently, there are 285 languages from all over the world that are registered on Wikipedia. The top 5 languages include English, German, French, Dutch and Italian.
Fact#4: Free, open source website
Wikipedia is a completely free, open source website. This means that anyone can jump in and edit articles as they find suitable. There is no such thing as a ranking system for the kind of articles to be edited or anything else like that.
Fact#3: Theme song
Little did you know that Wikipedia also has an official theme song named “Hotel Wikipedia” which is the parody of the song “Hotel California” by The Eagles band.
Fact#4: Birthday committee
Wikipedia also has a birthday committee that is established to wish happy birthday to Wikipedia users who register their birthday on their talk page or on the “Wikimedians by birthday” list. The intro page of the birthday committee provides numerous banners that you can use to wish a Wikipedian a happy birthday. The birthday committee has some set rules like “More than one person from the committee may send messages to the same person.”
Fact#5: List of deleted articles with weird titles
If you’re looking for some fun, then you should surely see Wikipedia’s list of “deleted articles with freaky titles.” As the name tells it all, this list is actually a list of articles that people have written but were deleted afterwards because of their weird titles and names. Some examples of these weird titled articles are “Diarrhea of a genius” and “Guide to: Blowing Your Nose & Getting Dressed.”
Fact#6: Policy of “No Angry Mastodons”
Wikipedia has long been in this tradition of offering annoying policies under somewhat stupid names like Jimbo’s prayer, No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spiderman, and No curses. These all insane policies request users not to target the Wikipedia community with any malicious charm or curse. One of users’ favorites is the “No Angry Mastodons” policy, which involves posting articles when furious, and provides suggestions on how to deal with people who are stampeding.
Fact#7: Edits
Wikipedia has had above 1 billion edits from 17.6 million articles submitted by around 27 million users from around the world. The number of edits is increasing from time to time.
Fact#8: Most edited page
The top most edited page in Wikipedia belongs to former American president George W. Bush.
Fact#9: Competition
Also, there’s a competition for guessing about the last article in Wikipedia. If you’re feeling psychic, you can try to get your hands on to the contest for what the last article written in Wikipedia will be about. Up to now, suggestions include “Last digit of pi” and “How to divide by zero.”
Fact#10: Readership
The world famous website claims to have around 325 million readers which means 21 users to each article posted on the site.
Fact#11: Meaning of the word “Wiki”
The word “wiki” is derived from a Hawain word which means “quick.” But now, this word has its own definition of a “web application that allows anyone visiting a website to edit content on it.”
Fact#12: Hosted servers
The website’s servers are hosted in Florida, so all the content on the site is subject to the laws of United States of America.
Fact#13: World record
The English version of Wikipedia exceeded 2 million articles in September 2007, which made it the world’s largest encyclopedia ever compiled. This record was broken from the Yongle encyclopedia that held it for over 600 years.
Fact#14: Wikipedia is a hit website on Google
You might have not known the fact that almost half of the website’s traffic comes from Google, but a lot of people go directly to the website to search their query.
Fact#15: Person of the Year award
The users of Wikipedia who edited the website were given the name of “Person of the Year” by Time Magazine in the year 2006.
Author Bio
Anna Marsh is a blogging enthusiast. She uses Essay Help UK platform to educate the readers about different subjects. Some of her favorite topics include online marketing, blogging, social media marketing and education. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
