The online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia celebrated its 10th birthday through commemorative events on all the worlds continents: from Houston to Sao Paulo, from Poznan to Kyoto, from Teheran to Berlin. The site opened officially on 15 January 2001 with a revolutionary proposal: everyone was welcome to write entries for the online encyclopedia and edit already-existing ones.
As a way of celebrating one of the Internets greatest success stories, the wikipedian community invited its users to celebrate the web sites birthday by sending in stories concerning this decade-long, worldwide collaborative effort. The name wikipedia, which blends the Hawaiian word wiki (fast) with the Greek word pedia (culture), has by now been expanded to indicate any collaborative type of soft-ware.
In the past few years, the Wikipedia site has exploded: today it can be consulted in 270 languages and is one of the worlds 10 most visited web sites. Research engines almost al-ways list it among their first entries and the word has become synonymous with freely-shared knowledge.