10 cool facts about Wikipedia you didn’t know

According to a joke, “a student thanked Wikipedia for his continuous success in his university life on a graduation ceremony while receiving his Degree.” Although, it was a joke, but it may be true in many students’ cases as Wikipedia is one of the most trust-able websites to gain knowledge and to verify authenticity of almost all facts of the world.

Wikipedia, the sixth most visited website on internet, is a free encyclopedia that is being updated continuously by thousands of volunteer contributors. The website was launched on 15th January 2001 and it now has about 35 million registered users in all editions around the world.

Wikipedia.com is owned by a non-profit charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, which is also running many other projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikinews etc.

This post is dedicated to Wikipedia and its contribution in making the world’s knowledge available at finger tips and we’ll write 10 impressive facts about Wikipedia.

10 cool facts about Wikipedia

•  Wikipedia has about 4 millions articles published in its all editions in 285 languages and almost all of these articles can be edited by anyone even if he/she is not registered with Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia ask its visitors to not to rely on its content while researching on any topic, but still their content is trustworthy.

• Anyone can write articles for Wikipedia and edit the articles. No registration is required to write articles and make edits.

• On 16th January 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation decided to black out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours to record its protest against SOPA(Stop Online Piracy Act), so English Wikipedia website was down for 24 hours. Many well-known websites too supported Wikipedia in this act.

• In all editions of Wikipedia, English Wikipedia has the most number of articles i.e., 4,177,451. German Wikipedia is second with 1,557,829 articles and French Wikipedia is third in the list with 1,359,330 articles.

• If you can read 600 words per minute and start reading26 hours daily, you’ll need seven years to read the whole content on Wikipedia but you are not completed yet, by then most of the content will be updated/changed and you’ll need to read it from the scratch.

• About 1.8 billion edits have been performed on Wikipedia till now. 1st edit was made on 16th January 2001 while 1 billionth edit was made on 16th April 2010.

• 
  Every minute, about 600 edits made on Wikipedia that means 36,000 edits per hour and 864,000 edits per day. The article with the highest number of edits is about George W Bush i.e. 44,435 while the user who has made the highest number of edits is Justin Anthony Knapp of Indiana, United States. Justin Knapp has made more than 1 million edits in different articles on Wikipedia and is still active.

• One of the most impressive fact about Wikipedia is that there is not a single advertisement on the website. It is a non-profit organization and running its projects on donations that can be made online.

• Wikipedia has total 29,621,520 pages. It is ranked 6 on Alexa while PR9 on Google. According to an estimate, all the text on Wikipedia will take 10 gigabytes of space on disc.

• There are about 2500 hits received by Wikipedia every second that is a large amount of requests but Wikipedia has over 350 different servers to entertain these requests.