15th January is celebrated all around the world as Wikipedia Day. On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was established, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. They both co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of an earlier encyclopedia project, Nupedia.
Coincidentally, also on January 15, 2001, Creative Commons registered their website. Creative Commons developed the free and open copyright system which Wikipedia uses, and Wikipedia is the most enthusiastic community of the free media which Creative Commons promotes.
Every year around January 15 Wikipedia fans organize their own parties in their own communities to discuss Wikipedia and share cake. Typical activities at these events include Wikipedia editors sharing what they did in Wikipedia last year, anyone proposing to share information in Wikipedia in the coming year, Wikipedia training for newcomers, and socializing.
We all have sometimes used Wikipedia for our work, home, or schools to gain inspiration or simply to cheat from this wonderful website. That’s why most people around the world are indebted to this online encyclopedia.
In addition to the encyclopedia, the non-profit Wikipedia foundation oversees several other open-content projects, including:
- Wiktionary, a dictionary, and thesaurus
- Wikibooks, a collection of free texts and other books
- Wikiquote, a collection of quotations
- Wikisource, a collection of free source documents
- Wikiversity, a collection of free learning materials
- Wikispecies, a directory of species
- Meta-Wiki, which coordinates all the other projects.
