Wikipedia ( (listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or (listen) wik-ee-) is a free, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa; as of 2021, it was ranked as the 13th most popular site. The project carries no advertisements and is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through user donations.Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; Sanger coined its name as a blending of "wiki" and "encyclopedia". Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. The English Wikipedia, with 6.3 million articles as of June 2021, is the largest of the 321 language editions. Combined, Wikipedia's editions comprise more than 56 million articles, and attract more than 17 million edits and more than 1.7 billion unique devices per month.Wikipedia has received praise for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced amount of commercial bias, but has also been criticized for its perceived unreliability and for exhibiting systemic bias, namely geographical bias, racial bias, gender bias against women, and alleged ideological bias. Its coverage of American politics and of the COVID-19 pandemic have received substantial media attention. At various points, Wikipedia has been censored by world governments, ranging from the blocking of specific pages to bans on the entire site. Wikipedia has become an element of popular culture, with references in books, films and academic studies. In 2006, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world", and is "a testament to the vision of one man, Jimmy Wales". In 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking links to related Wikipedia articles.