Happy Birthday Wikipedia -- 20 today

The world's biggest free encyclopedia turns 20 years old today. It has more than 55 million articles that can be accessed in over 300 languages, for free, all created by volunteers.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia's volunteer communities are involved in developing tools and programs to expand the quantity and diversity of Wikipedia content as well as modernizing its technology to meet the needs of the future and enhancing volunteers' ability to combat disinformation with better resources and insights.

"In a world where information is increasingly commoditized, Wikipedia's model has always been based on the belief that knowledge belongs to all humans," says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "Wikipedia forces us to step outside of our echo chambers and contend with what a shared understanding of the world could really look like. After all, a Wikipedia article is the same no matter who or where you are in the world, and if something isn't right in the article, you can change it."

Of course being crowd sourced means Wikipedia can sometimes be contentious. Rouge Media has analyzed the pages which have received the most edits over the site's history. The WWE Wrestlers page has seen most edits, and two former US presidents -- no prizes for guessing who one of them is -- have had more edits than Jesus and the Catholic church.

To mark the anniversary the Wikimedia Foundation has created a page highlighting the site’s milestones over that last two decades at 20.wikipedia.org there are also a series of virtual celebration events taking place around the world.