Wikipedia

Topics come under categories such as entertainment, arts, history, prominent personnel, countries, societies, locations, events, science, technology, associations, political science, and more. Wikipedia comes in 247 different versions and is hosted and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which also operates Wikipedia-related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The operation of the platform depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database system. With a reputation for being a reference website, Wikipedia was reported to have had 18 billion page views and over 500 million unique visitors each month. Wikipedia was launched by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.