Hi Susan

Wiki info posted below. It is an initiative of individuals from the IT industry.

It is written by public contribution in an IT format that was intended to allow a people collaboration approach to knowledge. That is people's contributions are open to editing by others.

This was meant to be so that people could share information, not be afraid to get all details, other people could pitch in and help with their resources.

Unfortunately, just like the dot.com mess when greedy twenty somethings wanted to make big fat profits out of what was then an information sharing medium, the world wide web, Wiki is open to abuse.

Nya

Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It has editions in about 200 different languages (about 100 of which are active) and contains entries both on traditional encyclopedic topics and on almanac, gazetteer, and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free international encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. Wikipedia is one of the most popular reference sites on the web,^[1] receiving around 60 million hits per day.

Wikipedia contains approximately 1.6 million articles. More than 600,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French. It began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on January 15, 2001. Having steadily risen in popularity,^[2] it has spawned several sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. It is edited by volunteers in wiki fashion, meaning articles are subject to change by nearly anyone. Wikipedia's volunteers enforce a policy of "neutral point of view" whereby views presented by notable persons or literature are summarized without an attempt to determine an objective truth. Because of its open nature, vandalism and inaccuracy are problems in Wikipedia.

The status of Wikipedia as a reference work has been controversial, and it is both praised for its free distribution, free editing and wide range of topics and criticized for alleged systemic biases, preference of consensus to credentials, deficiencies in some topics, and lack of accountability and authority when compared with traditional encyclopedias. Its articles have been cited by the mass media and academia and are available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Its German language edition has been distributed on compact discs, and many of its other editions are mirrored or have been forked by websites.