15th January: Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on this date in 2001. Some things you might not know about Wikipedia.

1. The name "Wikipedia" is a "portmanteau word", a combination of "wiki", from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and encyclopedia. So it means "quick encyclopaedia".
2. The symbols on the jigsaw pieces on the globe in the logo represent the letter "w" or the sound "wi" in different writing systems.
3. Wikipedia is the seventh-most popular website (behind Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Baidu and Amazon) with 500 million people visiting it each month (as of February 2014).
4. A 2011 survey found that the average age of these visitors was 36, and a roughly equal proportion of men and women. The picture for those who contribute to it is rather different - only 13% of editors are women and the average age is mid-20s.
5. In September 2007 the English version hit two million articles. This made it the largest encyclopaedia ever, a record that had been previously held by the Yongle Encyclopaedia for 600 years. (The Yongle Encyclopaedia was commissioned by the Chinese Ming dynasty emperor Yongle in 1403 and was referred to as the "Great Canon of Yongle".) Now, Wikipedia has over 4.6 million articles.
6. There are over 200 versions of Wikipedia in different Languages, although at the very start it was only available in English.
7. In the early days, anyone could edit an article and their changes would be immediately published; but this left the site open to vandalism - people could introduce irrelevant, inaccurate or blatantly false information very easily - leading to criticisms that Wikipedia was notoriously unreliable. Now, only registered editors can contribute, and some sensitive pages are further restricted so that only certain editors or administrators can make changes.
8. Despite these criticisms, a study by the journal Nature in 2005, which compared a sample of Wikipedia articles with their counterparts in Encyclopaedia Britannica, found that, for science articles at least, there was not a lot of difference in accuracy.
9. Every article has a "Talk Page" which is where unregistered people can make suggestions for changes to the page.
10. There is an award for particularly hard working or diligent contributors, called a Barnstar. Another user can place a star image on a contributor's talk page, explaining the reasons for the award. Barnstars, according to Wikipedia, are a kind of "warm fuzzy" and their purpose is to "promote civility and WikiLove."