Press releases/Wikipedia Celebrates its Seventh Birthday

= Wikipedia Celebrates its Seventh Birthday =

San Francisco, January 15 &mdash; Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit, celebrates its seventh birthday today. Founded on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has become one of the world's ten most visited websites, and the fastest growing, most current, and largest encyclopedia ever created. Currently, the website has nine million articles in over two hundred and fifty languages. It is collaboratively written by volunteers from around the world.

"In a relatively short time, Wikipedia has become one of the world's most successful collaboratively written websites. We have struck a chord with tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide, all of whom share our dream of empowering citizens worldwide to share in the sum of all human knowledge. Now with a strong international volunteer base, we would like to focus more energy on improving the quality of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The next five years are going to bring many never-seen-before web based initiatives geared towards this goal," stated Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

The Wikipedia experiment has repeatedly been acclaimed as a resounding success. Most recently a 2007 study from the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory found that Wikipedia's best quality articles are those that have been edited often and by many different people. The report also validated Wikipedia as a "successful collaborative effort".

Wikipedia and its sister projects have become a virtual library that spans all languages and continents, attracts millions of visitors, and collects information from all corners of the world. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit foundation behind the project, has begun developing programs and tools that will extend learning and knowledge gathering in the developing world and disadvantaged communities. In Fall 2007 the Foundation held several Wikipedia Academies in South Africa, with the goal of increasing the number of Wikipedias in African languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation has chapters throughout the world, responsible for promoting the projects locally. Currently, chapters are present in Argentina, France, Israel, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

The content on Wikipedia and its sister projects are under a free license. Content can be modified rapidly and repeatedly, and individuals can build on the material submitted by other editors. As a result, this ensures that the content will never be lost to humankind, and that information remains free and accessible to all.