The Wikipedia logo of the free online encyclopedia consists of a graphic mark and a wordmark. The mark is a gray 3D globe made of puzzle pieces: individual tiles contain characters from different writing systems, and the top area shows visible “gaps” where pieces are missing. Below the globe is the word “WikipediA” in a serif typeface, with the final “A” set as a capital, and the initial “W” standing out because it looks like two overlaid “V” letters intersecting at the center. In 2010, the “puzzle globe” was updated and redrawn, including corrections to a number of characters on the tiles.
Wikipedia is a multilingual free encyclopedia where articles are created and updated by volunteers using a wiki model, and the text is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (unless stated otherwise). The project launched on January 15, 2001 and is associated with Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; the infrastructure and trademarks are supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has become one of the world’s most widely used reference sources: people use it as a quick entry point into a topic, to check facts, terms, and historical context, and to navigate to primary sources through the references and further-reading sections. With hundreds of language editions and open editing, the encyclopedia covers a broad range of subjects and is continuously expanded, remaining a publicly accessible resource worldwide; the project does not rely on advertising as its main funding source and is supported largely by reader donations.
