It was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15.1. 2001. The name means a combination of the words wiki (fast) and encyclopedia. At first it was only the English version, but soon other language mutations emerged.

Currently, the most extensive languages ​​are English (11.2% of all Wikipedia articles), Cebuano (9.8%) and Swedish (6.2%). The Czech Wikipedia was launched on May 3, 2002 and in January 2021 had over 470,000 articles. In January 2019, Wikipedia had a total of 49.3 million articles.

This encyclopedia is maintained and created as an open collaboration project with free content involving volunteer contributors from around the world. It is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that manages wiki projects such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiversity and more. That's why there are no ads anywhere. Wikipedia works on the principle of a wiki, which means that anyone who has access to the web (registration is not required) can freely edit articles, whether it's a typo or adding an entire article. Each article has a history in which it is written who edited what in the article, each article also has its own discussion. Wikipedia also has its rules, and these are: the requirement for data verifiability, an unbiased point of view (articles must present all the essential views on a given topic without pretending to be the only objective truth) and others.