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Case Study on famous Open Source Projects

In this article, we will be talking about the most famous Open Source Projects which made their mark in the Free and Open Source Industry.
Submitted by Monika Sharma, on February 17, 2020

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is no less than an encyclopedia available free of cost to the public nowadays. If you want to write a passage, know about some famous person or thing you are just one click away from your desired article.

Wikipedia got registered with domain Wikipedia.com on January 12, 2001, and with the domain Wikipedia.org on January 13, 2001, before it launched on January 15, 2001. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were the founders of Wikipedia. Wikimedia is the founding organization of Wikipedia.

The name Wikipedia holds great meaning in itself, In Hawaiian language wiki means quick and pedia means learning. The world-famous Alexa from amazon has ranked Wikipedia on the 5th position in the most visited website category. Before Wikipedia, many such concepts were introduced but none of them worked for Nupedia, the first one to come up with the concept of an online encyclopedia. They developed a free encyclopedia online which was English-language based whose articles were jotting down by industry experts and went under review before publication on the internet.

Wikipedia being an Open Source took up the lead as it allowed everyone using it to contribute for the same. Wikipedia touched the milestone of more than 42Million distinct visitors on its site in the year of 2007 and featured for the very first time in the top10 most visited websites and has been there since then. Wikipedia showed constant growth and was appreciated by each individual who used it. In the years 2004 and 2005, Wikipedia won numerous awards and got a lot of acknowledgment. In 2005, it turned into a top100 site as per Alexa.com. Wikipedia's one-millionth article was released in March of 2006 and only three years that number would develop to an aggregate of thirteen million articles accessible in multiple languages.

Talking about the stats, Wikipedia has kept its number game quite strong as it is now available in 303 Languages and contains more than 5900K articles on various topics over the internet, you’ll hardly find something that’s not there, if you do find something, you are welcome to contribute to it. This unique feature of Wikipedia has made it the world’s largest encyclopedia in the world. There are more than 284K active users on Wikipedia and more than 83,489K users have registered themselves on Wikipedia to date. The admin of Wikipedia comprises of 1,145 members.

Wikimedia made Wikipedia a not for profit non-commercial organization just to provide people a platform where they can search for anything. Wikipedia founder pledged never to have promotions or any kind of advertisements on its site, which is a pledge they have kept. Wikipedia highlights a simple search engine and a reliable format.

Wikipedia utilizes MediaWiki software to run its site. Its primary U.S. server farm, comprising of around 300 servers, is situated in Tampa, Florida. Wikipedia additionally has a European server farm in Amsterdam, EvoSwitch, where they have around 50 servers. There are additionally provisional designs to verify another server farm in Virginia. Wikipedia as of now utilizes Ubuntu Linux 2.6 as its OS with a standard LAMP bundle.

With great success comes great responsibility and also great competitors. Wikiwand being one of them is the biggest in the market, the only plus point of Wikiwand is the pleasing layout that it provides to the users. Wikipedia has faced certain criticisms over the period for providing bias and fake news to which Facebook came in rescue and announced that by 2017 it would start providing wiki links to all the fake news spread across over the internet. YouTube also announced similar plans and was about to launch it in 2018.