Introduction
Wikipedia is one of the very first and oldest forms of online encyclopedias and it was launched in the year 2001 and has come a long way since then. After Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, it is found that it comprises more than one hundred and sixty editions of various languages and has over thirteen million articles and also is presently ranked as the number 8th position on alexa.com along with 10% of the internet users across the world visiting the site.
History
Wikipedia was launched as an offset of Nupedia, it was started by the online or virtual media company called Bomis which would produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had a detailed system of review of the peer and needed top qualified contributors but the content writing became slow in this case. During the year 2000 the founder of Nupedia and also the co-founder of Bomis Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who was hired by Wales to work for the encyclopedia project talk over different ways of complementing the Nupedia project with more options. Various sources recommended that Wiki should allow random public members to contribute resource material and therefore Nupedia’s very first wiki went virtual on 10th January 2001.
There was substantial resistance on the section of Nupedia reviewers and editors to the thought of associating Nupedia with a wiki format website. Therefore, on 15th January, Sanger came up with the idea of the new project named Wikipedia and it was established in its domain as Wikipedia.com. The server and bandwidth were provided by Wales.
In May 2001, a huge number of various languages of Wikipedia were introduced such as Swedish, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Hebrew, German, French, Esperanto, Dutch, Chinese, and Catalan. These were soon joined by Hungarian and Arabic. Polis was added in September and all the further promise to the provision of multilingual Wikipedia was done. By the end of the year, Serbo Croatian, Norwegian, Afrikaans versions of Wikipedia were also announced. In 2003 when the Wikipedia Foundation has introduced the domain was changed to the current Wikipedia.org. Currently, Wikipedia is available in more than three hundred languages.
In the years 2004 and 2005 Wikipedia received a decent amount of recognition and also won numerous awards. Wikipedia became one of the top 100 websites as per alexa.com in the year 2005. In march 2006 Wikipedia published more than one million content or articles and within three years the number has successfully grown over thirteen million contents or articles which were available in various ranges of languages.
Overview
Wikipedia is a project which offers online or virtual free encyclopedia content that helps to create a platform in which everyone is allowed to freely share the estimate of all information. It is supported by a model of freely editable content and based on the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia contents also offer designated links to guide the user to their desired pages with additional knowledge of information. All the information in Wikipedia is written by collaborating with enormous anonymous volunteers. People who have got access to an internet connection are able to write and also can make changes to the articles of Wikipedia except for those of the limited cases in which editing is strictly restricted to prevent it from vandalism and disruption. Wikipedia was created on 15th January 2001 and has successfully grown as the world’s one of the top reference websites, it has crossed more than 1.8 billion monthly visitors in the current year 2021. Currently, it has over fifty-seven million contents in more than three hundred languages.
Specifications of the System
Wikipedia has over thirteen million contents or articles not only in English but also in various ranges of languages.
- Scalability: Wikipedia provides a continuous flow of traffic and has become a service where people can depend on. It has also developed a very efficient and scalable solution for the server to meet the demands of the website.
- RAM: The individual articles of encyclopedia pages do not need a huge amount of RAM to get displayed.
- Disk: To store the millions of contents and articles which are available in Wikipedia to the public in various languages required to have a huge amount of space on the disk.
- CPU: The encyclopedia articles pages of Wikipedia don’t need too many resources and are very simple to power. The processing powers which are used are mostly as search databases, links, and indexing.
- Bandwidth: Wikipedia functions are extremely basic and simple. While getting a huge amount of continuous traffic, Wikipedia requires sending only the occasional image and a fixed page of text.
Features
Wikipedia is one of the topmost trafficked websites on the web and also it is completely free or a non-profit online or virtual encyclopedia that has crossed more than three million articles or contents only in the English language. The contents of the articles which are available on Wikipedia are written and also edited by numerous volunteer contributors as it solely donated. Wikipedia’s founder pledged never to show advertisements on the site and they are still diligently maintaining the promise they made. Wikipedia promotes consistent format and a basic and simple search engine.
Conclusion
Wikipedia an online and non-profit virtual encyclopedia has successfully grown from just thousands of contents of the articles at the beginning of its project in the year 2001 to more than thirteen million contents of the articles available in various ranges of different languages now. Wikipedia has one international center in Amsterdam and also has one US data center in Florida and works with an operating system of Ubuntu Linux 2.6. Wikipedia was mainly formed as an additional feature for Nupedia, later on, it came up with a range of projects like Wiktionary under the roof of the Wikimedia which is the head organization. Presently, Wikipedia has over fifty-seven million contents in more than three hundred languages.
