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Wikipedia and wikipedians - The world’s largest free encyclopaedia

Wikipedia is a multi-lingual, web-based, free encyclopaedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non profit organisation. It is currently published in 250 languages and it contains topics that vary from traditional ones such as those you can find in an encyclopaedia to those related to almanacs, atlases and topics regarding the latest trends.

It’s purpose is to create and distribute a free encyclopaedia in as many languages as possible. Wikipedia is one of the ten most popular websites and receives 60 million visits every day. The important feature of Wikipedia is that anyone and everyone can contribute.

It’s editing is carried out by volunteers which apply a wiki development model, which means that pages can by modified by anyone. One of the main basic principles of Wikipedia is the fact that the opinions are presented by relevant people from a neutral point of view and literature is summarised without trying to establish an objective truth. Due to it’s "open" nature vandalism and inaccuracies are problems you may encounter in Wikipedia.

The aim of Wikipedia is to create a free and universal encyclopaedia, in terms of both the size and depth of the topics it deals with.

Wikipedia has been described by its founder Jimmy Wales as "an effort to create and distrubute a multilingual free encyclopaedia of the highest quality to every single person on the planet and in their own language".

The word Wikipedia comes from the Hawaiin word "wiki" which means fast and is also a collaborative software, and "pedia",(suffix of encyclopaedia) which means teaching, in Greek. Wales states that Wikipedia should achieve the same quality, or even better, than the Encyclopaedia Britanicca and be issued in paper versions as well.

By searching for information on the Net through a search engine, you will often find results taken from Wikipedia: the free and for free encyclopaedia offers millions of commented entries. Check it out to see if you can find something interesting too.

If you want to know more about Napoleon.

The first step is to type the wikipedia web address and choose your language. (1)

Then you need to type the search term in the search field.

In your case type Napoleon. (2)

(3) and lastly, after having clicked on the search button, the page with the contents -displayed as hypertext and connected to all terms in Wikipedia- appears on the screen