Wikipedia

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales, Bomis CEO, and Larry Sanger, edotro-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia.

Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia. While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, Sanger is usually credited with the strangely of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10,2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15,2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot posting, and web search engine indexing. It grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the ent of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004. Nupedai and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. Enlish Wikipedia passed the two million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Youngle Encyclopedia (1407), which had held the record for exactly 600 years.

On 2002, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and its website was moved to Wikipedia.org. Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattered off around early 2007. In July 2007, about 2,200 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; as of August 2009 [update], that average is 1,300.

Wikipedia has also spawned several sister projects, which are also run by the wikipedia Foundation.The first, "In Memoriam: September 11 Wiki", created in October 2002, detailed the September 11 attacks; this project was closed in October 2006. Wiktionary, a dictionary project, was launched in December 2002; Wikiquote, a collection of quotations, a week after Wikimedia launched, and Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated  texts. Wikimedia has since started a number of other projects for the creation of free learning materials and the provision of online learning activities. None of these sister projects, however, has come to meet the success of Wikipedia.

The online wiki-based encyclopedia Citizendium was started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in an attempt to create an "expert-friendly" Wikipedia.

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one i ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it. concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, the insertion of false information, damage, and similar problems.

Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; additionally, critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.

Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.

Recent Modern History of Nepal

Nepal had been a kingdom for at least 1,500 years. During most of that period, the Kathmandu valley has been Nepal's political, economical, and cultural center. The valley's fertile soil supported thriving village farming communities, and its location along trans-Himalayan trade routes allowed merchants and rulers alike to profit. Since the fourth century, the people of the Kathmandu valley have developed a unique variant of South Asian civilization based on Buddhism and Hinduism but influenced as well by the cultures of local Newar citizens and neighboing Tibetans. One of the major themes in the history of Nepal has been the transmission of influences from both the north and the south into a original culture. During its entire history, Nepal has been able to continue this process while remaining independent.


The long-term trend in Nepal has been the gradual development of multiple centers of power and civilization and their progressive incorporation in to a varied but eventually united nation. The Licchavi (fourth to eigth centuries kings may have claimed that they were overloads of the area that is present-day Nepal, but rarely did their effective influence extend far beyond the Kathmandu valley. By the 16th century, there were dozens of kingdoms in the smaller valleys and hills throughout the Himalayan region.

It was the destiny of Gorkha, one of these small kingdoms, to conquer its neighbors and finally unite the entire nation in the late 18^th century. The energy generated from this union drove the armies of Nepal to conquer territories far to the west and to the east, as well as to challenge the Chinese in Tibet and the British in India. Wars with these huge empires checked Nepalese ambitions, however, and fixed the boundaries of the mountain kingdom. Nepal in the late 20^th century was still surrounded by giants and still in the process of integrating its many localized economies and cultures into a nation state based on the ancient center of the Kathmandu valley.

Nepal took a fateful turn in the mid-19th century when its prime ministers, theoretically administrators in service  to the king, usurped complete control of the government and reduced the kings to puppets. By the 1850s, a dynasty of prime ministers called Ranas had imposed upon the country a dictatorship that would last about 100 years. The Ranas distrusted both their own people and foreigners- in short, anyone who could challeange their own power and change their position. As the rest of the world underwent modernization, Nepal remained a medieval nation, based on the exploitation of peasants and some trade revenues and some trade revenues and dominated by a tradition-bound aristocracy that had little interest in modern science or technology.

After the revolt against the Ranas in 1950, Nepal struggled to overcome its long legacy of underdevelopment and to incorporate its varied population into a single nation. One of the early casualties of this process was party-based democracy. Although political parties were crucial in the revolution that overthrew Rana rule, their constant wrangling conflicted with the monarchy's views of its own dignity and with the interest of the army. Instead of condoning or encouraging a multiparty democracy, King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev launched a coup in late 1960 against Bisheshwar Prasad (B.P.) Koirala's popularly elected government and set up a system of indirect elections that created a consultative democracy. The system served as a sounding board for public opinion and as a tool for economic development without exercising effective political power. Nepal remained until 1990 one of the few nations in the world where the king, wielding absolute authority and embodying sacred tradition, attempted to lead his country towards the 21st century.