Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia that is available through the Internet. It is a free and open access publication, with more than 15 million articles written by volunteers in more than 200 languages.
The encyclopedia, managed by a non-profit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation, was created by Americans Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. Its name is a contraction of wiki wiki ("fast" in Hawaiian language) and encyclopedia ("encyclopedia" in English).
These characteristics are what have made Wikipedia today an information tool for everyone. Thus, both students, to obtain data about a topic that they address in class, as well as anyone who wants to know what the word in front of them means, make use of that Internet encyclopedia.
It is so important in our day-to-day life that at the moment it is in the "top ten" of the most visited places on the Internet. And it is really useful because it is made up of more than 37 million articles that can be found in a total of 284 different languages.
Culture, art, history, geography, health, mathematics, technology or philosophy are some of the areas that are addressed in this encyclopedia through thousands and thousands of interesting articles that are very useful for everyone and that are usually accompanied in addition to the corresponding Graphic material.
The main novelty provided by Wikipedia is the possibility that any user can contribute and edit content. This democratizes the generation and dissemination of information, although there is also the risk of spreading false or biased data.
Wikipedia must deal with vandalism on a daily basis. There are activists who edit content for ideological reasons and who try to discredit those who think differently. On the other hand, some people purposely edit articles with false information to demonstrate the unreliability of the encyclopedia.
However, Wikipedia has several tools to reverse the attacks, from employees who review and block certain sensitive articles to avoid conflicts, to technological systems that are in a position to automatically detect vandalism.
Specifically, among the most important professionals that form an essential part of this encyclopedia, we would have to refer to librarians, who are in charge of preventing certain users from editing the information, or to the so-called edit suppressors. As its name suggests, these are the ones in charge of verifying the identities of users.
There are other projects managed by the Wikimedia Foundation that complement the Wikipedia proposal, such as Wiktionary (a free dictionary), Wikibooks (a compilation of textbooks and tutorials with free access), Wikiquote (a compendium of famous phrases in various languages) and Wikinews (free content news).
However, we cannot forget about wikiviajes, which is a totally free guide with open access that allows obtaining tourist information from many corners of the world, or from wikiversity, a very useful tool for teachers.