Short answers, pulled from the story.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and launched on the 15th of January 2001 as a single English-language site at www.wikipedia.com. It began as a side project intended to feed articles into Nupedia, a separate expert-written encyclopedia owned by the web portal company Bomis.
Wikipedia attracts more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month across all language editions. The English Wikipedia alone has passed several million articles, and as of January 2023, its articles had been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals.
A 2005 peer review in the science journal Nature found that the average Wikipedia science entry contained around four inaccuracies while Encyclopaedia Britannica averaged about three. Wikipedia makes no guarantee of validity, though multiple studies have found its articles to be generally as reliable as traditional reference works.
A Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 found that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. A 2016 study found that women reported less confidence in their expertise, greater discomfort with editing, and more negative responses to critical feedback compared to male contributors.
Wikipedia uses a combination of human review, automated bots, page protection, and a formal Arbitration Committee to manage vandalism and disputes. The median time to detect and fix obvious vandalism is a few minutes, though some cases, like a false edit in John Seigenthaler's biography in May 2005, went uncorrected for four months.
Wikipedia has been hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit, since 2003. The Foundation relies on public donations and grants; its 2020 IRS Form 990 showed revenue of $124.6 million and expenses of almost $112.2 million.