Founded 15 years ago, Wikipedia has become the Internet’s largest and most popular search engine. Students and teachers, journalists and experts, professionals or the simply curious are all unable to resist the shortcuts to information offered by this general reference work. As stated on its home page, Wikipedia is “a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia.”
Available in more than 280 languages, it offers information typical of traditional encyclopedias, plus data found in almanacs, atlases and specialized publications. The managers of the website say that most of the articles in the encyclopedia can be freely edited; anyone can contribute information to already-existing articles or else can create new ones.
To celebrate its 15th birthday, the Wikipedia Foundation has launched two initiatives: the first is a question posted on its home page, asking users: What does Wikipedia mean to you? And the second is a press release with a list of the 15 pages that have been changed the most in its history. The only two religious voices on the list are: Catholic Church, with 26,000 changes, and Jesus Christ, with 25,000 changes.