User:Dontrustme

What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a multi-lingual, Web-based free content encyclopedia project. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the Web site. Wikipedia's main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and now is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multi-lingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".

Currently Wikipedia has more than five million articles in many languages, including more than 1.4 million in the English-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 17 of them have more than 50,000 articles each. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity, and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top fifteen most visited sites, and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking proper sources that, in the eyes of most Wikipedians, is necessary for an article to be considered "high quality". However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their articles on the natural sciences. This study was challenged by Encyclopædia Britannica, who described it as "fatally flawed".

Who is Larry Sanger?
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger (born July 16, 1968) has been an organizer of various online encyclopedia projects, most notably, organizing Wikipedia as a free, open, and collaborative online encyclopedia and developing many Wikipedia policies. He was an important and early strategist for the expert-authored and edited Encyclopedia of Earth. On September 15, 2006 he proposed a new fork of Wikipedia called Citizendium. At the Wizards of OS conference in September 2006, Sanger announced a fork of Wikipedia, named Citizendium. The objectives of the fork are to address various perceived flaws in the Wikipedia system.

Who is Jimmy Wales?
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is the founder, board member and Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates the Wikipedia project, and several other wiki projects, including Wiktionary and Wikinews. He is also the co-founder, along with Angela Beesley, of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

What is an encyclopedia?
An encyclopedia, encyclopaedia or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.

Quotes

 * Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. - André Gide (1869 - 1951)
 * All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. - Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
 * The truth is more important than the facts. - Frank Lloyd Wright (1869 - 1959)
 * A lie told often enough becomes the truth. - Lenin (1870 - 1924)