Wikipedia:About

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is being written collaboratively on this web site. The site is a WikiWiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit any article right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears in every article in Wikipedia.

The project was started on January 15, 2001 and we are already working on 6,910,884 articles in English, with many more articles being written in other languages, too. As more and more people edit the articles, they improve in quality all the time.

All of our articles are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, to ensure that they can remain freely available forever. We hope you will enjoy using and contributing to this valuable free resource.

More about Wikipedia

Wikipedia - an article about the project and its history.
Frequently asked questions.
Announcements.
Press coverage.

Exploring Wikipedia

Recent changes. See the articles that Wikipedia contributors are working on.
Random article.
New articles.
Help desk. Request an article or information. See also Requested articles.
Brilliant prose - the best of Wikipedia.

Contributing to Wikipedia

Welcome, newcomers!. New contributors start here!
Policies and guidelines for contributors
Help page. Help on editing articles and more.

Getting in touch

Village pump. Got a question? Ask it here!
Wikipedia mailing lists.
Chat with other users on IRC.
Bug reports and feature requests.
Wikipedians - a list of Wikipedia contributors.
Meta Wikipedia, a site that works alongside the main Wikipedia project. Here you can post essays and discussions about topics related to Wikipedia.

Other language versions

Wikipedia in other languages - Coordination between languages - Afrikaans - Arabic (Araby) - Basque (Euskara) - Catalan (Català) - Chinese (Hanyu) - Czech (Cesky) - Danish (Dansk) - Dutch (Nederlands) - Esperanto - Estonian (Eesti) - French (Français) - Frisian (Frysk) - German (Deutsch) - Italian (Italiano) - Japanese (Nihongo) - Latin (Latina) - Norwegian (Norsk) - Polish (Polska) - Portuguese (Português) - Russian (Russkiy) - Serbocroatian (Srpskohrvatska) - Slovene (Slovensko) - Spanish (Español) - Swedish (Svensk) - Create a new language in Wikipedia

Sister Projects

Wiktionary. A multilingual Wiki dictionary and thesaurus. (See Wiktionary for background)
Project Sourceburg. A collection of public domain source texts used in Wikipedia. (See Project Sourceberg for background)
Nupedia. A more academic free encyclopedia project with a peer-review system for accepting articles (See Nupedia for background)
Enciclopedia Libre. An independant Spanish language encyclopedia project. (See Enciclopedia Libre for background)