Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, it is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and has consistently been one of the 10 most popular websites. Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, collectively known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki.
Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies