Happy birthday Wikipedia! It’s hard to believe it has been 15 years since the website first launched on January 15, 2001.
See below for 15 interesting “Did you knows?” about Wikipedia:
- “Wiki” comes from the Hawaiian word meaning “quick”
- Over 5 million articles have been published in English so far
- Some languages supported by Wikipedia are: Esperanto, Latin, Swahili, Vietnamese, and Simple English
- The symbols on the Wikipedia logo are glyphs from a number of different writing systems in the world.
- Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia by creating an account
- The articles which feature a bronze star are considered to be some of the best articles in Wikipedia
- You can race your friends to see how many clicks does it take for you to get from Moby Dick to Kim Kardashian
- You can view a list of the recent changes to an article with the time and name of the editor
- Wikimedia is a non-profit organization with a number of projects including: Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews
- Being a Wikipedian in residence is a thing!
- Wikipedia relies solely on donations and volunteer contributors
- The majority of text and pictures on Wikipedia is covered by a Creative Commons license.
- You can put together a list of articles from Wikipedia to create your own book
- If you click on the “talk” tab of any article you can read a discussion on how best to improve the page
- Apparently it would take 16 years to read all of English Wikipedia
Follow the hastag #1lib1ref on Twitter to see what the librarians at QUT (and around the world) have been doing to celebrate this momentous occasion.
