These 13 Wikipedia Facts Will Leave You in Surprise

Can you trust Wikipedia? We all know Wikipedia is one of the most trusted online communities that is maintained by a set of volunteer editors. The Economist newspaper declared it as the “13th-most-visited place on the web”. In this article, we will discuss 13 things you don’t know about Wikipedia. These Wikipedia facts will help you learn more about the functionality of Wikipedia. 

1) Wikipedia is a non-commercial website that is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a non-profit and charitable organization that is based in San Francisco, California. It was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2003. It is mainly supported by donations and grants. Mission of Wikipedia is to bring free knowledge to every individual and to fund its sibling projects. The foundation has over 300 employees with an annual revenue of US $109.9 million, as of 2020.

2) Though Jimmy Wales founded the Wikimedia foundation, currently, he is working only as one of the eleven trustees of the Wikipedia Board. Several times, his lack of power has led to ignorance of his wishes and ignorance of how Wikipedia should work.

3) After taking a cue from the free software community that includes projects such as CNU, Linux, or Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia has adopted something called “free content license”(CC-BY-SA and GFDL). A Creative Commons(CC) is a public copyright license that is used when an author allows other people to share, use, and build his/her work. The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license that allows their readers to copy, redistribute, and modify a work. But all the copies and derivatives must be available under the same license. Wikipedia only insists us to credit the contributors. Most of the images or other media available on the site are free licensed or in the public domain. You can find its licensing terms in the file’s description page.

4) Wikipedia has more than 50 million media files including images, sound files, videos, and other media. 

5) The Wikimedia Foundation operates ten sister projects to encyclopedia including Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, Wikidata, and Wikivoyage. All these are freely licensed and open to contributions just like Wikipedia. 

6) Pomnik Wikipedii or Wikimedia Monument is a statue designed by Armenian sculptor Mihran Hakobyan in order to pay honor to Wikipedia contributors. It is located in Slubice, Poland and was unveiled in Frankfurt Square in October 2014.

7) One of the early Wikipedia articles ever written was for the standard poodle. It was simply mentioned, “A dog by which all others are measured.” The page now has more than 6,000 words that represents poodles crossed with other dog breeds such as Cockapoo, Spoodle, Maltipoo, and Cavapoo.

8) If you are taking five minutes to complete reading a Wikipedia article, around 570 edits were made as it develops at a rate of over 1.9 edits per second. 

9) Wikipedia currently has around 32.5 million registered usernames who have the rights to edit Wikipedia pages. They are widely known as Wikipedians. 

10) January 15 is celebrated as “Wikipedia Day”( Its birthday). On this day in 2001, it went public. When it turned 10 in 2011, a page was created listing the celebration spots where people could meet and commemorate the special day. 

11) Despite the fact that the website is available in 262 different languages, English, German, and French versions contain the most articles. 

12) ‘Hotel California’, a version of the Eagles’ 1976 hit has been declared as the official theme song for Wikipedia. 

13) This is one of the Interesting facts about Wikipedia. Wikipedia might block certain edits coming from .gov IP addresses because of politicians who try to whitewash their own records. Edits done via IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology are also blocked as they attempt to rewrite their own history. 

These are the top 13 wiki facts that everyone who uses Wikipedia must know!