Wikipedia (Listeni/?w?k?'pi?di?/ or Listeni/?w?ki'pi?di?/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-?

) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia that is support ed by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Volunteers worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including over 4.4 milli on in the English Wikipedia. Anyone who can access the site can edit almost any of its articles, which on the Internet comprise[4] the largest and most popular general reference work.[5][6][7][8][9] On February 9, 2014, The New York Times r eported that Wikipedia is ranked fifth globally among all websites stating, "Wit h 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, accordin g to the ratings firm comScore, Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors."[10] Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, the latter[ 11] creating its name,[12] a portmanteau of wiki (the name of a type of collabor ative website, from the Hawaiian word for "quick")[13] and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia-building and the presence of much unacademic content have received extensive attention in pri nt media. In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia's participation in the rap id growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around t he world, in addition to YouTube, reddit, MySpace, and Facebook.[14] Wikipedia h as also become known as a news source because of the rapid update of articles re lated to breaking news.[15][16][17] While Wikipedia has had its fair share of good press,[18] it has also gotten its fair share of bad as well. The open nature of Wikipedia has caused concerns abo ut its writing,[19][20] the amount of vandalism,[21][22] and the accuracy of inf ormation. Some articles contain unverified or inconsistent information,[23] thou gh a 2005 investigation in Nature showed that the 42 science articles they compa red came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopdia Britannica.[24]