
Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Wales was influenced by the " spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics after being exposed to these ideas by the libertarian economist Mark Thornton. Sanger coined its name as a blend of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by Similarweb and formerly Alexa as of 2023, Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world according to Semrush.


Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. If you want to decipher the data format consult the APPNOTE.TXT.Į.g., if I simply make a zip file of a blank file named aaa.zip and encrypt with password abcd and print the file in ISO-8859-1 encoding, I get: $ cat new.zip At the very least you need a hex editor to view the information there.

First, there's no standard encoding for non-ASCII letters and several characters are not printable.
