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Sanger coined its name as a blend of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by Similarweb and formerly Alexa as of 2023, Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world according to Semrush. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. Most text is also dual-licensed under GFDL media licensing varies
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