As Wikipedia Turns 20 it Aims to Reach More Readers

As Wikipedia Turns 20 it Aims to Reach More Readers
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As Wikipedia Turns 20 it Aims to Reach More Readers

As Wikipedia Turns 20 it Aims to Reach More Readers

Wikipedia celebrates its 20th anniversary on Friday and the collaborative, volunteer-produced internet encyclopedia aims to spend the next 20 years further expanding free access to information.

Founded on January 15, 2001 by the American-British entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is now the seventh-most popular website in the world, with its more than 55 million articles being consulted 15 billion times every month.

The website started in English but within two months had already launched in German and Swedish. It is now available in 309 languages.

But Wales doesn't intend to stop there, with the languages of the developing world in the website's sights.

"That's really important that the next billion people, two billion people who come online are going to want to participate in Wikipedia, to grow their own storehouse of knowledge, and they're going to rely on us to support that work, and that's a big part of how I think about the future," Wales told AFP in an interview.

In 2006, Wales set the goal of having 100,000 entries in Wikipedia for every language with more than one million speakers, but he recognized that Wikipedia is still at least 20 years from achieving that.

Wikipedia's non-profit status nature make it an outlier among today's internet dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook, and hark back to the web's early idealistic days when the open-source movement harnessed the talents of volunteers to offer free access to tools and knowledge.

Wales said he was inspired by such collaborative efforts.

"I'd seen the growth of open-source software, free software, and to me it seemed obvious that you could use the same kind of techniques to build a free encyclopedia, so I was in a real kind of panic because I thought this is such an obvious idea that other people will do it," he said.

"But we actually were probably two years into the project before anybody noticed or cared, so maybe it didn't have to be so urgent."

Wikipedia continues to be a volunteer-driven effort, with each language site built up independently from original contributions rather than translated articles.

Unlike traditional encyclopedias, contributions by non-experts are welcome, which has driven innumerable debates about content and have led to restrictions on updating certain entries.

The website has also come in for criticism due to the fact that its volunteers are overwhelmingly white males from Western countries, with critics saying it lacks information about women and developing nations.



Nvidia Set to Become the World's Most Valuable Company in History

A view of a Nvidia logo at their headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan May 31, 2023. (Reuters)
A view of a Nvidia logo at their headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan May 31, 2023. (Reuters)
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Nvidia Set to Become the World's Most Valuable Company in History

A view of a Nvidia logo at their headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan May 31, 2023. (Reuters)
A view of a Nvidia logo at their headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan May 31, 2023. (Reuters)

Nvidia was on track to become the most valuable company in history on Thursday, with the chipmaker's market capitalization reaching $3.92 trillion as Wall Street doubled down on optimism about AI.

Shares of the leading designer of high-end AI chips were up 2.2% at $160.6 in morning trading, giving the company a higher market capitalization than Apple's record closing value of $3.915 trillion on December 26, 2024.

Nvidia's newest chips have made gains in training the largest artificial-intelligence models, fueling demand for products by the Santa Clara, California, tech company, Reuters reported.

Microsoft is currently the second-most valuable company on Wall Street, with a market capitalization of $3.7 trillion as its shares rose 1.4% on $498.

Apple rose 0.5%, giving it a stock market value of $3.19 trillion, in third place.

A race among Microsoft, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms , Alphabet and Tesla to build AI data centers and dominate the emerging technology has fueled insatiable demand for Nvidia's high-end processors.

The stock market value of Nvidia, whose core technology was developed to power video games, has nearly octupled over the past four years from $500 billion in 2021.

Nvidia is now worth more than the combined value of the Canadian and Mexican stock markets, according to LSEG data. The tech company also exceeds the total value of all publicly listed companies in the United Kingdom.

Nvidia recently traded at about 32 times analysts' expected earnings for the next 12 months, below its average of about 41 over the past five years, according to LSEG data. That relatively modest price-to-earnings valuation reflects steadily increasing earnings estimates that have outpaced Nvidia's sizable stock gains.

The company's stock has now rebounded more than 68% from its recent closing low on April 4, when Wall Street was reeling from President Donald Trump's global tariff announcements. US stocks, including Nvidia, have recovered on expectations that the White House will cement trade deals to soften Trump's tariffs.