Wikipedia reached the magical figure of 10 million articles on Wednesday, when an article about a 16th century goldsmith named Nicholas Hilliard was created on the Hungarian version of the site.
Wikipedia was launched in Jan. 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has since reached a landmark: It now boasts 10 million articles across the site that runs in 250 languages. It is the largest and fastest-growing reference site on the Internet.
You can tell WIkipedia's clout as soon as you try and do a Google search on almost anything; Google places high importance on Wikipedia results so whenever you search Wikipedia will almost always be in the top 10 search results.
Wikipedia through their Wikimedia Foundation made this announcement about reaching 10 million articles. They said the 10 millionth article was created at 5:07 p.m. PDT on March 26. The article is a short biography of 16th century English goldsmith and painter Nicholas Hilliard. It was created in Hungarian by a user named Pataki Marta.
Compared to Wikipedia, a regular encyclopedia (such as a 26 Volume Britannica Encyclopedia) has 29,800 articles and sells for $749. The biggest part ow Wikipedia is its English version which boasts more than 2.3 million articles. It's also free to use.
Wikipedia also recently secured $3 million in funding from Alfred P. Sloan foundation and $500,000 from Vinod Khosla and his wife Neeru.