Happy birthday Wikipedia! It’s hard to believe it has been 15 years since the website first launched on January 15, 2001.
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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.
