Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but even before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company.
Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Other collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before Wikipedia, but none were as successful. Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
On January 15, 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia Sanger coined its name as a portmanteau of "wiki" and "encyclopedia." Wales was influenced by the " spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics, after being exposed to these ideas by Austrian economist and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations. It is consistently one of the 15 most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of 2022, Wikipedia was ranked the 10th most popular site. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia ( / ˌ w ɪ k ɪ ˈ p iː d i ə/ ( listen) wik-ih- PEE-dee-ə or / ˌ w ɪ k i-/ ( listen) wik-ee-) is a multilingual open online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system.
Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies