Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, first launched on January 15, 2001. Today, the website is thus 10 years old. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia is hosting some 400 conferences and parties across the globe. In traditional Wikipedia style, the events are being organized by its community of users.
After a decade of growth, Wikipedia is an important source of information for millions of topics and remains among the Internet's top 10 most visited sites. It has over 400 million readers each month and has a very small budget for a website its size: just $20 million. Almost all its revenue comes from donations. In its last fundraising push, the organization saw 500,000 users donate $16 million.
At this point, Wikipedia has some 17 million articles. The top 10 languages on Wikipedia, by number of articles, are as follows:
- English: 3,526,000 articles
- German: 1,174,000 articles
- French: 1,054,000 articles
- Polish: 765,000 articles
- Italian: 762,000 articles
- Japanese: 727,000 articles
- Spanish: 699,000 articles
- Russian: 648,000 articles
- Portuguese: 666,000 articles
- Dutch: 664,000 articles
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is aiming to have 1 billion visitors each month by the year 2015. To achieve this, Wales will need to acquire more regular contributors, which has always been a problem for the company. Wikipedia is currently working on simplifying its tools to make it easier for more people to contribute, including a WYSIWYG editor that can be easily picked up by those who aren't necessarily tech savvy.