by Neville Hobson, ABC

Whenever you look up something online, the chances are good that the results of your search will include information about your topic on Wikipedia.

“The free encyclopedia anyone can edit” was founded in 2001. Today, it’s the sixth most visited website in the world, according to Alexa, and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet with an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.

While the English-language Wikipedia may be the biggest work, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. Collectively, Wikipedia contains 22 million articles (more than 4 million of them in English), created and edited by more than 100,000 active contributors worldwide.

Such superlatives add to one’s sense of the scope and scale of Wikipedia, which is far deeper and greater than most people realize. And while Wikipedia is described as something anyone can edit, the reality of doing that is a challenge for many communicators.

Read more>>>