'Wikipedia ( pronunciation (info   help)) is an Internet encyclopedia project in many languages. It is free of charge: users do not pay. Also, it is "open content". This means anyone can copy it, and make changes to it if they follow the rules for copying or editing.
'Wikipedia is owned by an American organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which is in San Francisco, California.
'Its name is a combination of the two words wiki, a Hawaiian word for quick, and encyclopedia.[3] Because the word was made by combining parts of those words, it is a portmanteau.
'It was started on January 10, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of an earlier Internet encyclopedia named Nupedia. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia became a separate website of its own. It is a wiki that runs using the software MediaWiki (like all other Wikimedia projects).
'Anyone who wishes to, can change the pages in Wikipedia, or even make new ones. Wikipedia has a standard page layout for all pages in the encyclopedia.
'As of December 2007, Wikipedia had about 9.25 million pages in 253 languages, and more than 1.74 billion words across all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia is the biggest.
'[CC BY-SA 3.0 Simple English Wikipedia]