Wikipedia, example of collaboration; Princess of Asturias prize – El Mañana of Nuevo Laredo

MEXICO CITY .- The digital encyclopedia Wikipedia free Internet access, with more than 37 million articles in 288 languages, including indigenous languages, won yesterday the Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in recognition his “open and inclusive”.

The jury spirit important example of international cooperation, democratic, open and participatory, with the collaboration selflessly thousands of people of all nationalities, “said the foundation.

Wikipedia “has he managed to make available to everyone the universal knowledge in a similar line to the one that won the encyclopedic spirit of the eighteenth century,” said

Established in 2001. by the American Jimmy Wales with the help of the philosopher Larry Sanger, “Wikipedia, which is among the ten most visited sites on the Internet,” has had a growth “continued with more than 37 million articles in 288 languages, including indigenous languages,” he said in announcing the award in a brief televised ceremony from Oviedo, in northern Spain.

Here you can also find articles on invented like Esperanto, or dead like Latin languages.

This encyclopedia online, written by volunteers around the world, whose articles can be modified by registered users, “uses technology ‘wiki’, which facilitates content editing and storing the history of changes to the page,” said the Princess Foundation Asturias, which awards the prize.

Born to supplement written by experts called Nupedia encyclopedia, to “make a similar quality goods professional encyclopedias thanks to the participation of scholars, mostly doctorates and academics, to which he intended to work so unpaid “he said.

To speed up the project a portal that allows writing articles in parallel for review by experts was created.

Farewell to Nupedia

Both projects coexisted until the success of Wikipedia ended eclipsing Nupedia, which ceased operations in 2003, “he said.

That same year the Wikimedia Foundation was created, based in the US city of San Francisco, which manages the encyclopedia and other projects such as Wikibooks, putting pedagogical texts available to the users, or Wikiquote a compendium of quotations in countless languages.

With more than 4.8 million

items, the English version is the largest of this digital encyclopedia.