Wikipedia turns 8 today.

The free, multilingual encyclopaedia, launched in January 15, 2001, is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

The articles, said to be about 12 million in count has 2.6 million in English.
The volunteers around the world have written collaboratively on these articles, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. They remain anonymous too. “Consequently, Wikipedia “makes no guarantee of validity” of its content.”

Wikipedia.org was opened on donated bandwidth and server and its first article appeared on January 16.

UuU, said to be the oldest article, contains the earliest surviving edit on the Wikipedia.

When Time recognized “You” as its “Person of the Year for 2006”, the magazine listed websites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Wikipedia as media that allowed users to interact with the web by uploading and publishing their own comments, videos, pictures and links.

According to studies Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide. A good portion of the searches made on Internet is related to academic research and about 50 percent of search engine traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google.

No wonder, Wikipedia’s audience have shot up to 9.5 million from 6.3 million.