Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, celebrates its seventh birthday today.
Wikipedia has become one of the world's ten-most-visited Websites, and the fastest-growing and largest
encyclopedia ever created. Currently, the Web site has 9 million articles in more than 250 languages. It is collaboratively written by volunteers from around the world.
A 2007 study from the
Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory found that Wikipedia's best-quality articles are those that have been edited often and by many different people. The report also validated Wikipedia as
a "successful collaborative effort".
--Tanya Irwin