Internet resources: Online encyclopedia Wikipedia celebrates its tenth birthday

On January 15 2011 a free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is marking its tenth birthday with celebrations launched worldwide.

Wikipedia project was founded by Jimmy Wales and mounted in 2001. For the last decade Wikipedia has turned into one of the major web-based resources. Encyclopedia’s database features almost 18 million articles in more than 260 languages. Within past months $16 million were donated to the Wikimedia Foundation by Web users.

At first not many believed in success of the project: every now and then critics pinpointed mistakes in articles and false information. From time to time Wikipedia Foundation faced financial problems.

At the moment English language segment with more than 3,5 million articles is the largest in Wikipedia. The second place is shared by the German and French Wikipedias. Russian language segment closes Top 10 of largest segments: it provides access to almost 650 000 articles.