Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 21, 2025, 5:08 PM

The Rhodesian government actively recruited white personnel from other countries from the mid-1970s until 1980 to address manpower shortages in the Rhodesian Security Forces during the Rhodesian Bush War. Between 800 and 2,000 foreign volunteers enlisted. This was controversial as international sanctions banned military assistance for Rhodesia due to its illegal declaration of independence and the white minority's dominance. The volunteers were often labelled as mercenaries by opponents of the Rhodesian regime, though the government did not regard or pay them as such. They were motivated by opposition to governments led by black people, anti-communism, a desire for adventure, racism, and economic hardship. The Rhodesian government considered the volunteers to be unreliable and they were often treated poorly by their comrades; this contributed to many deserting.

Some modern far-right and white supremacist groups celebrate the volunteers. (Full article...) December 21: December solstice (15:03 UTC, 2025); Dongzhi Festival in China (2025) Battleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent epic film produced by Mosfilm. Directed and co-written by Sergei Eisenstein, it presents a dramatization of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers. The film, released on 21 December 1925, is a prime example of the Soviet montage theory of editing, such as in the "Odessa Steps" scene, which became widely influential and often recreated.

Battleship Potemkin is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects: This Wikipedia is written in English. Many other Wikipedias are available; some of the largest are listed below. An important update for readers in the United States. Please don't skip this 1-minute read.

This fundraiser will soon be over, but we haven't yet hit our goal. If you're like us, you've used Wikipedia countless times. To settle an argument with a friend. To satisfy a curiosity. Whether it's 3 in the morning or afternoon, Wikipedia is useful in your life. Please give $2.75.

After nearly 25 years, Wikipedia is still the internet we were promised—created by people, not by machines. It's not perfect, but it's not here to push a point of view. It's owned by a nonprofit, not a giant technology company or a billionaire. Just 2% of our readers donate, so if you have given in the past and Wikipedia still provides you with $2.75 worth of knowledge, donate today. If you are undecided, remember any contribution helps. Today, we ask you to join the 2% of readers who give.

If everyone reading this right now gave just $2.75, we'd hit our goal quickly. $2.75 is all we ask. Wikipedia[c] is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.[1] Wikipedia is the largest and... Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 66 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million...

Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.[5][6] Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics, but the encyclopedia has also been... Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success.[13] Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by... Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.[15][16] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia... Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day)[18] as a single English language edition with the domain name www.wikipedia.com,[W 4] and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[17]... Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Pagetype/setindex' not found.

Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia website in 344 languages of the world in which 342 languages are currently active and 14 are closed. It is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians. Users can freely use it, share it, and change it, without having to pay. It is also one of the biggest wiki organizations. People can choose to give money to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects. It is an open content website.

This means anyone can copy or edit it and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing. Wikipedia is owned by an United States organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco. Wikipedia's name is a combination of two words, wiki and encyclopedia.[3] Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Wikipedia, free Internet-based encyclopedia, started in 2001, that operates under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia uses collaborative software known as a wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. Although some highly publicized problems have called attention to Wikipedia’s editorial process, they have done little to dampen public use of the resource, which is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. In 1996 Jimmy Wales, a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego, to establish Bomis, Inc., a web portal company. In March 2000 Wales founded Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in chief. Nupedia was organized like existing encyclopedias, with an advisory board of experts and a lengthy review process. By January 2001 fewer than two dozen articles were finished, and Sanger advocated supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopedia based on wiki software.

On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia.com, but, following objections from the advisory board, it was relaunched as an independent website a few days later. In its first year Wikipedia expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into Wikipedia. By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than 1,000,000 articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had surpassed 3,500,000. However, while the encyclopedia continued to expand at a rate of millions of words per month, the number of new articles created each year gradually decreased, from a peak of 665,000 in 2007 to... In response to this slowdown, the Wikimedia Foundation began to focus its expansion efforts on non-English versions of Wikipedia, which by 2011 numbered more than 250.

Some versions had already amassed hundreds of thousands of articles; indeed, the French and German versions both boasted more than a million. Consequently, the foundation paid particular attention to languages of the developing world, such as Swahili and Tamil, in an attempt to reach populations otherwise underserved by the Internet. One impediment to Wikipedia’s ability to reach a truly global audience, however, was the Chinese government’s periodic restrictions of access to some or all of the site’s content within China. In some respects, Wikipedia’s open source production model is the epitome of the so-called Web 2.0, an egalitarian environment where the web of social software enmeshes users in both their real and virtual-reality workplaces. The Wikipedia community is based on a limited number of standard principles. One important principle is neutrality.

Another is the faith that contributors are participating in a sincere and deliberate fashion. Readers can correct what they perceive to be errors, and disputes over facts and over possible bias are conducted through contributor discussions. Three other guiding principles are to keep within the defined parameters of an encyclopedia, to respect copyright laws, and to consider any other rules to be flexible. The last principle reinforces the project’s belief that the open-source process will make Wikipedia the best product available, given its community of users. At the very least, one by-product of the process is that the encyclopedia contains a number of publicly accessible pages that are not necessarily classifiable as articles. These include stubs (very short articles intended to be expanded) and talk pages (which contain discussions between contributors).

Wikipedia started with an impossible idea: to build a free encyclopedia for and by the world. Almost two decades later, we’ve made some serious progress. Nearly 300 languages, more than 45 million articles, hundreds of millions of monthly readers, and millions of contributors over the years. Edit by edit, Wikipedia continuously grows and evolves over time. Volunteers collaborate openly to check each other’s work and ensure accuracy. For content to remain on Wikipedia, it must be written from a neutral point of view and attributed to a reliable source, so readers can verify the facts.

Bots and monitoring tools help ensure articles meet these standards. Most editors act in good faith, but if anyone makes intentionally disruptive or malicious changes, the community will find these and fix them as quickly as possible. If you notice an inaccuracy, you can request a correction on that article’s talk page. See an example of this on the ProPublica Talk page. We don’t edit or create content. That is all up to the volunteer community.

Most of our projects discourage creating or editing articles about yourself and organizations in which you have a vested interest. This includes campaigns, products, and services you may be involved in. Owners, employees, and contractors of a business are considered paid editors and are required by the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use and by the Wikipedia paid editing disclosure policy to disclose their paid status,... Here’s more information about Wikipedia’s conflict of interest guidelines. The English Wikipedia is the primary[a] English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Its content, written independently of other editions by volunteer editors known as Wikipedians,[1] is in various varieties of English while aiming to stay consistent within articles. Its internal newspaper is The Signpost. English Wikipedia is the most read version of Wikipedia,[2][3] accounting for 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining percentage split among the other languages.[4] The English Wikipedia has the most articles of any... English Wikipedia, often as a stand-in for Wikipedia overall, has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and ideological bias.[6][7] While its reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise in...

Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

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