Wikimedia and Free Multilingual Content

Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia that can be read and edited by anyone. Wikipedia was founded on the belief that virtually everybody has some knowledge that they can share with others. Nobody knows everything but everybody knows something.

Wikipedia began as an English-language project on January 15, 2001. On Wikipedia, anyone can create or modify an article instantly, so that no article has a single author. Instead, tens and even hundreds of people work together, sharing what they know to edit and improve the content. The result is a never-ending work in progress, always getting more thorough and always getting better.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. Wikimedia relies on public donations to meet its goal of providing free knowledge to every person in the world.

The wiki language, known as wikitext, is much simpler than HTML. It is practically intuitive, so that anyone can learn it in just a few minutes. You can start editing the cotent by just clicking on the edit link in a page!

Wiki Projects

The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent organization of some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, some of them are listed below.

While browsing through these sites, use the Search Box to find what you want.

1. Wikipedia is a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Wikipedia is one of the 50 most visited websites in the world.
2. Wikinews is a project which aims to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view.
3. Wiktionary a collaborative project to produce a free multilingual dictionary in every language, with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, quotations and synonyms.
4. Wikimedia Commons is a project that provides a central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts.
5. Wikibooksis a collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit.
6. Wikiquote is a free online compendium of quotations in every language, including sources (where known)and translations of non-English quotes.
7. Wikisource is the Free Library, an online collection of free content source texts built by its contributors.
8. Wikispecies is a free directory of life – an open, free directory of species.