Wikipedia Day Date in the current year: January 15, 2024

Wikipedia's name was coined by Larry Sanger. He combined words wiki (from the Hawaiian “quick”) and pedia (from encyclopedia). The project initially was to be only English, but it became multilingual very quickly through the launch of different versions. All versions of Wikipedia are similar, though important differences exist, which concern editing practices and content. However English Wikipedia remains as the largest one.

Today Wikipedia is one the biggest non-profit projects in the Internet. It is the sixth most popular website. It had got about 500 million unique visitors each month and boasted 18 billion pages as of February 2014.

For several years Wikipedia Day was celebrated both online and offline. 2011 was the year of a big worldwide celebration. This tradition continued and Wikipedia Day is observed with diverse local meetings and wiki-events.

Did you know, that January 15 is the date when WikiHow was founded? This day was chosen to honor Wikipedia Day.