Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of encyclopedias in every major language. The project was started by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001 as an accidental spin-off of Nupedia (Wales no longer considers Sanger a co-founder of Wikipedia).

Wikipedia grew exponentially over the next 4 to 5 years, although the growth curve began to flatten after the one millionth article. The English Wikipedia is the world's largest wiki.

The project wrote its own wiki software called MediaWiki and very graciously released this software under the GPL, so anyone may copy it and modify it freely.

Most Wikipedia articles deal with trivial matters of geography (like a gazetteer) or sports. Popular culture fills out the bulk of the remaining articles, e.g., an in-depth study on some of Spiderman's enemies. Less than 3,000 articles are considered of any import or sufficient quality to be called "featured articles".