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Wikipedia , free Internet-based encyclopaedia , started in 2001, that operates under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. Although some highly publicized problems have called attention to Wikipedia ’s editorial process, they have done little to dampen public use of the resource, which is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet .

In 1996 Jimmy Wales , a successful bond trader, moved to San Diego , California , to establish Bomis, Inc., a Web portal company. In March 2000 Wales founded Nupedia , a free online encyclopaedia, with Larry Sanger as editor in chief. Nupedia was organized like existing encyclopaedias, with an advisory board of experts and a lengthy review process. By January 2001 fewer than two dozen articles were finished, and Sanger advocated supplementing Nupedia with an open-source encyclopaedia based on wiki software . On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia.com, but, following objections from the advisory board, it was relaunched as an independent Web site a few days later. In its first year Wikipedia expanded to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, including French, German, Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Chinese, and Esperanto. In 2003 Nupedia was terminated and its articles moved into Wikipedia .

By 2006 the English-language version of Wikipedia had more than one million articles, and by the time of its 10th anniversary in 2011 it had surpassed 3.5 million. However, while the encyclopaedia continued to expand at a rate of millions of words per month, the number of new articles created each year gradually decreased, from a peak of 665,000 in 2007 to 374,000 in 2010. In response to this slowdown, the Wikimedia Foundation began to focus its expansion efforts on the non-English versions of Wikipedia , which by 2011 numbered more than 250. With some versions having already amassed hundreds of thousands of articles—the French and German versions both boasted more than one million—particular attention was paid to languages of the developing world, such as Swahili and Tamil, in an attempt to reach populations otherwise underserved by the Internet. One impediment to Wikipedia ’s ability to reach a truly global audience, however, was the Chinese government’s periodic restrictions of access to some or all of the site’s content within China .

In some respects Wikipedia ’s open-source production model is the epitome of the so-called Web 2.0 , an egalitarian environment where the web of social software enmeshes users in both their real and virtual-reality workplaces. The Wikipedia community is based on a limited number of standard principles. One important principle is neutrality. Another is the faith that contributors are participating in a sincere and deliberate fashion. Readers can correct what they perceive to be errors, and disputes over facts and over possible bias are conducted through contributor discussions. Three other guiding principles are to keep within the defined parameters of an encyclopaedia, to respect copyright laws, and to consider any other rules to be flexible. The last principle reinforces the project’s belief that the open-source process will make Wikipedia into the best product available, given its community of users. At the very least, one by-product of the process is that the encyclopaedia contains a number of publicly accessible pages that are not necessarily classifiable as articles. These include stubs (very short articles intended to be expanded) and talk pages (which contain discussions between contributors).

The central policy of inviting readers to serve as authors or editors creates the potential for problems as well as their at least partial solution. Not all users are scrupulous about providing accurate information, and Wikipedia must also deal with individuals who deliberately deface particular articles, post misleading or false statements, or add obscene material. Wikipedia ’s method is to rely on its users to monitor and clean up its articles. Trusted contributors can also receive administrator privileges that provide access to an array of software tools to speedily fix Web graffiti and other serious problems.

Reliance on community self-policing has generated some problems. In 2005 the American journalist John L. Seigenthaler, Jr., discovered that his Wikipedia biography falsely identified him as a potential conspirator in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and that these malicious claims had survived Wikipedia ’s community policing for 132 days. The author of this information could not be easily identified, since all that is known about unregistered contributors is their computers ’ IP, or Internet protocol , addresses (many of which are dynamically generated each time a user goes online). (The contributor later confessed and apologized, saying that he wrote the false information as a joke.) The Seigenthaler case prompted Wikipedia to prohibit unregistered users from editing certain articles. Similar instances of vandalism later led site administrators to formulate a procedure, despite protests from some contributors, by which some edits would be reviewed by experienced editors before the changes could appear online.

Although Wikipedia has occasionally come under fire for including information not intended to be widely disseminated—such as images of the 10 inkblots used by psychologists in the Rorschach Test —it has also adapted its philosophy of openness in certain cases. For instance, after New York Times reporter David S. Rohde was kidnapped by Taliban militants in Afghanistan in 2008, his employer arranged with Wikipedia for news of the incident to be kept off the Web site on the grounds that it could endanger Rohde’s life. The site’s administrators complied, in the face of repeated attempts by users to add the information, until after Rohde’s eventual escape. Additionally, in 2010 it was revealed that there was a cache of pornographic images, including illegal depictions of sexual acts involving children, on Wikimedia Commons, a site maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation that served as a repository of media files for use in all Wikimedia products. Although there were no such illegal images on Wikipedia itself, the ensuing scandal prompted Jimmy Wales, who personally deleted many of the Commons files, to encourage administrators to remove any prurient content from Wikimedia sites.

Wikipedia administrators also have the power to block particular IP addresses—a power they used in 2006 after it was found that staff members of some U.S. congressional representatives had altered articles to eliminate unfavourable details. News of such self-interested editing inspired Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology , to create Wikipedia Scanner, or WikiScanner, in 2007. By correlating the IP addresses attached to every Wikipedia edit with their owners, Griffith constructed a database that he made available on the Web for anyone to search through. He and other researchers quickly discovered that editing Wikipedia content from computers located within corporations and in government offices was widespread. Although most of the edits were innocuous—typically, individuals working on subjects unrelated to their positions—a pattern did seem to emerge of many articles being edited to reflect more favourably on the editors’ hosts.

Debates about the utility of Wikipedia proliferated especially among scholars and educators, for whom the reliability of reference materials was of particular concern. While many classrooms, at nearly all grade levels, discouraged or prohibited students from using Wikipedia as a research tool, in 2010 the Wikimedia Foundation recruited several public policy professors in the United States to develop course work wherein students contributed content to the Wikipedia site. As Wikipedia became a seemingly inescapable part of the Internet landscape, its claims to legitimacy were further bolstered by an increasing number of citations of the encyclopaedia in U.S. judicial opinions, as well as by a program administered by the German government to work with the German-language site to improve its coverage of renewable resources.

The number of active editors (i.e., those who edit more than 100 articles a month) peaked in 2007 and as of 2017 had declined by about a third. Various factors were blamed for this decline. Wikipedia ’s bureaucratic culture with its complex norms and its reliance on automated procedures that tended to reject new edits were seen as discouraging to new editors. Editing the articles requires knowledge of a specialized markup language that is difficult to edit on smartphones and tablets. Surveys of Wikipedia editors have revealed a persistent gender gap; only about 10–20 percent of the editors are women. In response to concerns about this gender gap and how it is reflected in the encyclopaedia, Wikipedia began about 2012 to encourage “edit-a-thons,” in which editors come together at events devoted to increasing the site’s coverage of such subjects as feminism and women’s history. Whether or not Wikipedia can solve these demographic problems, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do.

Internet applications

TechTarget Contributor

Wikipedia is a free, open content online encyclopedia created through the collaborative effort of a community of users known as Wikipedians . Anyone registered on the site can create an article for publication; registration is not required to edit articles. The site's name comes from wiki , a server program that enables anyone to edit Web site content through their Web browser.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia as an offshoot of an earlier encyclopedia project, Nupedia, in January 2001. Originally, Wikipedia was created to provide content for Nupedia. However, as the wiki site became established it soon grew beyond the scope of the earlier project. As of January 2015, the website provided well over five million articles in English and more than that number in all other languages combined. At that same time, Alexa ranked Wikipedia as the seventh-most popular site on the Internet. Wikipedia was the only non-commercial site of the top ten.

Criticisms of Wikipedia include assertions that its openness makes it unreliable and unauthorative. Because articles don't include bylines, authors aren't publicly accountable for what they write. Similarly, because anyone can edit any article, the site's entries are vulnerable to unscrupulous edits. In August 2007, Virgil Griffiths created a site, WikiScanner, where users could track the sources of edits to Wikipedia entries. Griffiths reported that self-serving edits typically involved whitewashing or removal of criticism of a person or organization or, conversely, insertion of negative comments into the entry about a competitor. Wikipedia depends upon the vigilance of editors to find and reverse such changes to content.

In addition to the encyclopedia, the non-profit Wikipedia foundation oversees several other open-content projects, including:

Wikipedia was one of the first social media websites.

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What Are Wikis, and Why Should You Use Them?

'Wiki' is one of the most prevalent buzzwords on the Internet, right up there with 'cloud computing' and 'responsive design'.

Learn how to use wikis for better online collaboration. Image source: Envato Elements

When you hear the word 'wiki', you most likely think immediately of Wikipedia , the famous online encyclopedia. Then there's WikiLeaks , the source of leaked government secrets. With both sites bearing the same weird root word, you would be forgiven for thinking they're related. They're not. At least not in the way you might think.

What is a 'wiki' defined as today? This term "wiki" actually means quick in Hawaiian. The journey from that definition to today's definition of "a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users" is quite the interesting story , best told by Ward Cunningham, the father of the modern wiki.

The important part of wikis—what makes them different from any other type of website—is collaborative editing by the users . Think about that for a moment: the ability for the users of a wiki to collaboratively edit it. If you can read it, you can edit it. It seems simple at first, yet profoundly powerful in practice—and it's what both Wikipedia and WikiLeaks have in common.

That's what we're going to explore: the benefits a wiki can provide to a business, the sort of problems it can solve, why you might use a wiki, and what sort of options you have for setting up a wiki for yourself. It's a lot to cover, so let's keep things moving.

What Wikis Do

To really appreciate what wikis in and of themselves do for your business, we need to first travel back in time, back to the original days of the web. By looking at what the first wiki was intended to do, the current state of wiki software will make a lot more sense.

I mentioned Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki, earlier. On the front page of his own wiki , he gives some insight into the origins of wikis and what they're designed to do.

The idea of a "Wiki" may seem odd at first, but dive in, explore its links and it will soon seem familiar. "Wiki" is a composition system; it's a discussion medium; it's a repository; it's a mail system; it's a tool for collaboration. We don't know quite what it is, but we do know it's a fun way to communicate asynchronously across the network.

I love that summary. In the beginning, Ward and his colleagues didn't even know what wikis were supposed to do exactly. But they knew it was fun.

From that short summary we can pull out some of the main themes of wikis: composing, discussing, hyperlinking, collaborating, communicating.

Notice something about those words? They're all verbs . They're what wikis do .

1. Quick Composing With Wikis

How do wikis work? At their core, wikis are composition systems. They're trying to make it as easy as possible to write on a webpage. This is so important because it's something that separates wikis from your average website.

Most people only visit a site like Wikipedia to read something, just like they do most websites, so this aspect of wikis is often lost on the casual observer. But back in the late 1990s, when Ward Cunningham built his wiki, it was the easy authoring of web content that he had in mind.

At that time, web pages were almost always written by hand in HTML. HTML is fine as a markup language, and it still powers the web today. But it can be a cumbersome language to type by hand, and frequently gets in the way of just writing . This is especially true when you try to do more than type simple paragraphs. If you want to add any sort of structure or formatting to a document, the HTML markup quickly swallows up the content.

Ward wanted a tool that let people write web pages quickly (see how the name wiki comes back into play here?) and HTML wasn't quick enough. So within his wiki system was a basic text formatting system. It was simpler and easier to type than HTML tags, and was less obtrusive when writing and editing wiki pages. Plus, it enabled anyone to edit a wiki, without having to know how to edit HTML code.

And so in turn, quick and easy composition has become a cornerstone of wiki design. It should be faster and easier to write and edit text in a wiki than hand-writing HTML code. The wiki syntax—which is somewhat similar to the now-popular Markdown syntax—is designed to help decrease friction when writing and editing wiki pages, which in turn helps users to write and edit more frequently.

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2. Wikis Are Great For Collaborating

The Internet has simplified communications to such a degree that today, talking to someone on the other side of the world isn't even that exciting. In the early days of the Web that power was all the more tantalizing. Today's Internet-powered communication apps didn't yet exist, so the web itself was the primary way to communicate. That's part of what made the wiki such a fascinating product, it's great for discussing, collaborating, and communicating.

Flexible Access for Editing Wiki Pages

We already looked at how the wiki made things quicker to edit than your average web page. But the wiki allowed for something else unique: anyone who could read a wiki page had the ability to edit that wiki page. In its most open sense, a wiki is editable by any visitor.

It was this feature that Ward was referring to when he called the wiki "a discussion medium; a mail system; a tool for collaboration." These days, wiki software allows for more control over who can edit the wiki, but the power of the feature remains the same. You can make a wiki into all of those things Ward mentioned and more.

Editing doesn't just have to mean working together to make a site—it can also mean just updating a wiki page about a project to let others know how it's progressing, for instance. When you start thinking about it in the context of business, the potential gets pretty exciting, doesn't it?

3. Hyperlinking Powers All Wikis

Hyperlinking is certainly nothing new—it's been around since the dawn of the Web. It's the first word in the acronym "HTML". But how the first wiki handled hyperlinks was what made it so special, and that's why linking has become a cornerstone of wiki design to this day.

Adding Links to Wiki Pages is Quick

Just like everything else we've looked at so far, adding and creating links within the wiki is designed to be fast and easy. Notice I said within the wiki —it's internal links that are designed to be so easy to make.

The specific syntax for creating an internal link differs between different wiki systems, but what they all have in common is efficiency. That, among other reasons, is why it's so easy to get lost in Wikipedia, since there's always more info to explore among the dozens of links on any page.

The Power of Linking to Future Wiki Pages

Beyond just being quick to add, something else that's special about links in wikis is that you can link to something that doesn't exist. What do I mean by that? Well, let me illustrate: what if you're writing a wiki page, and you want to go more in-depth on a particular subject? You can create a link to a page about that subject, even though the other page doesn't yet exist.

Take a moment to think about that. It's simple, yet profound.

And it fits in so neatly with the vision Ward Cunningham had for his wiki in the first place. He wanted it to be a fertile place for communication, discourse, and the sharing of knowledge.

Here we have a simple and straight-forward means for one user to request further thought and discussion on a particular topic. Or, used a different way, the means for a user to map out subjects he wants to elaborate on in the future. A natural to-do list, if you will, one that automatically makes the original project better when the tasks are completed.

These two aspects of linking within wikis come together into something more special than your average hyperlink. They help facilitate growth within the wiki. It's by means of this sort of linking that wikis start becoming magical.

Are Wikis Right for My Business?

So, in a nutshell, wikis:

But that's still a bit abstract. It might help you see how Wikipedia because such a success, but it's a bit harder to see how it can benefit your business. For that, here's some specific examples of what a wiki can do for you. I think you'll be convinced they're the perfect solution for your business.

1. Wikis Are the Documentation Dream

Every business wants detailed, well-maintained documentation. And yet, it so often feels like a pipe dream. Back in the day, maybe your business documentation was a detailed employee handbook, meticulously researched, maybe spiral-bound, and made in-house. But it's the 21st century; nobody wants to use something like that anymore.

You could try modernizing things, going digital with your documentation. Perhaps you could have some Word documents in shared folders for your entire company. That would certainly give you some nice features. It's digital, syncs to your different employees computers, and it's easy to write and edit... well, as long as everyone has Microsoft Word.

But, what if you want to reference a document while you're in a meeting, and you don't have your computer right in front of you? How about trying to search for a particular procedure, or an important technique in those Word docs? After all, it'd take a lot of Word docs to document everything. Then, it'd be way too easy for someone to accidentally delete a document, or edit out something important, and the only way to fix the mistake would be to restore from a backup.

And we haven't even talked about trying to associate different documents with each other. How do you connect documents together when you're talking about Word files in a shared folder? Let's look at a simple scenario:

The Problem With Organizing Business Documents

Let's say you have a few different departments all writing their own documentation. How do you organize all of those documents? Just throwing them all inside one shared folder will get messy quickly. So you start putting some of those documents inside folders.

Let's say you organize those folders by department.

See how things can get out of hand quickly? I don't mean to bash on Word documents in shared folders. If a system like that genuinely works for you, I'm happy for you. But if you've encountered any of the issues I just described, then you owe it to yourself to examine a wiki as a solution for your business.

2. Making That Dream a Reality

How can a wiki help to make your documentation dreams a reality?

Think about office memos, the ones you feel like you're always resending. With a wiki, they turn into a single page with a link you can display somewhere everyone will see it. When it comes time to edit that memo, it's simple and easy. And the best part is, the link will always be accurate, even after you've edited the memo. Cool, right?

Create a Searchable, Online Product Catalog

Do you have a large and complex catalog of products? Imagine it neatly organized in one place. A place that's searchable, easily editable, and links related products together. That's a wiki, my friend. Neat, huh?

Make a Knowledge Base for Your Team

What if you have a sales-based business? With a wiki you can help your salesmen keep track of their sales numbers, client information, or sales tips and tricks, all in one convenient place. And you can set up your wiki so that it's accessible to them when they're out in the field, from any type of mobile device. Now that feels like the 21st century, doesn't it?

Build a Wiki Intranet for Business Training

Now, think about how a wiki can revolutionize employee training. The wiki becomes a consistent place to put business policies, best practices, standards, and guidelines. All the things that you've learned over time, a new employee can benefit from right away just by reading the wiki. You can stop worrying about teaching the same thing over and over again. Write it once now, and it will teach everyone in the future—and will be easy to edit when things change.

A wiki can be home to all of this and more. Remember what makes a wiki unique: they're easy to edit, accessible from anything with a web browser, with simple and intuitive linking between pages. These features help facilitate the sort of environment where quality documentation like you've always wanted can grow and thrive.

Make Your Own Wiki (Take the Next Step)

I hope by now you appreciate what a wiki does, and how it can benefit a small business, school, your personal life, and anything else. Now, all you'll need to do is to make your own wiki, and put it to use in your work.

You can set up a wiki with MediaWiki on your own server, or in one click with most web hosting services. Alternatively, you could use a hosted wiki service like PBworks or Wikia . The basics are the same, no matter which you choose.

You can also use WordPress to setup your wiki with. We offer popular ga-analytics#sendMarketClickEvent">WordPress wiki themes on our ThemeForest marketplace. They're great for making corporate intranets, collaborate knowledge based sites, helpdesk setups, and other types of business wikis.

But it can still be a bit complicated getting your wiki started, and learning how to actually use it to create, edit, and link content. That's where our next tutorial comes in. Here's everything you need to get your wiki up and running .

To learn even more about Wikis, review this tutorial:

Editorial Note: This post was originally published in 2014. It has been comprehensively revised to make current, accurate, and up to date by our staff—with special assistance from Laura Spencer .

Ranking the Top 100 Websites in the World

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The Richest People in Human History - Part 1

As a greater portion of the world begins to live more of their life online, the world’s top 100 websites continue to see explosive growth in their traffic numbers.

To claim even the 100th spot in this ranking, your website would need around 350 million visits in a single month. Using data from SimilarWeb , we’ve visually mapped out the top 100 biggest websites on the internet. Examining the ranking reveals a lot about how people around the world search for information, which services they use, and how they spend time online.

Note: This is a ranking of biggest websites, specifically. Brands that extend across platforms or serve the majority of their users through an app will not necessarily rank well on this list. As a result, you’ll notice the absence of companies like WeChat and Snapchat.

The Top 100 Websites

The 100 biggest websites generated a staggering 206 billion visits in June 2019. Google, YouTube, and Facebook took the top spots, followed by Baidu and Wikipedia. Below is the full ranking:

Search Reigns Supreme

Search engines provide the connective tissue that binds the internet together, and they accounted for the majority of website traffic in the top 100 ranking.

Google is the undisputed top website in nearly every country in the world. In fact, Alphabet’s 11 domains in the top 100 ranking – including YouTube and a number of international versions of Google – racked up an impressive 90 billion visits in a single month.

Exceptions to Google’s dominance can be found in China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex), where homegrown search engines have managed to capture the domestic market.

One scrappy competitor, DuckDuckGo , is slowly gaining prominence as an alternative to Google. The search engine’s focus on user privacy appears to be resonating with internet users as the site’s traffic has surpassed 500 million visits per month.

Full Stream Ahead

Video streaming and sharing is another major driver of global internet traffic.

Thanks to high-powered phones and bigger data plans, video is now a prominent portion of internet content consumption. This can take a few forms, from binge watching TV shows on Netflix to short-form video uploads on platforms like Douyin and Instagram.

Live streaming is increasingly a bigger part of the mix. Twitch, which is focused on gaming, is now ranked 30th in the world in web traffic. The Amazon-owned platform is now so popular that on any given night, its viewership surpasses many of the major U.S. cable networks.

Of course, this category also includes adult content, which is well represented in this ranking. XNXX, XVideos, and PornHub all made the top 20, and the three websites combined for over nine billion visits in the most recent month of data available.

Old Dogs, New Tricks

Classic web portals such as MSN and Yahoo are still putting up impressive traffic numbers, but major players are increasingly staying relevant by acquiring rising internet stars.

In the case of Microsoft, acquiring Github and Linkedin helped the company target new markets and grow their overall presence online. Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch proved to be a good bet, and Instagram continues to breathe new life into Facebook, which has seen a backlash focused on its original namesake social network.

Google isn’t sitting still either. The company recently championed the open-source AMP Project to help improve the performance of mobile pages, which are increasingly bogged down by adware, unoptimized images, and JavaScript. In a short amount of time, the AMP Project has taken off to become one of the biggest websites in the world.

The project is not without controversy though.

Critics point out that cached AMP pages – which are hosted by Google – essentially cut out content creators, and that non-compliant pages may lose their ranking on mobile search results. As the project moves towards becoming a foundation, it remains to be seen how AMP will evolve and how much involvement Google will have in the future.

The Geography of the Top 100 Websites

The internet may be a global network, but many of the gatekeepers are still located in the United States. If international domain suffixes of companies like Amazon and Google are counted, 60 of the 100 websites in the ranking are American.

Below is a breakdown of the Top 100 by country.

China is a strong runner-up, with 15 websites in the Top 100. While most of these Chinese companies are focused on the sizable domestic market, some are also making global inroads through investment. Tencent has partially backed the fast-growing chat platform, Discord, and it also has double-digit stakes in Snapchat and Spotify.

With the exception of Baidu, all of the biggest websites in the world have swelled in size by serving a global audience. As the tech market continues to mature in China, it remains to be seen whether Chinese companies can successfully move beyond the firewall to become the next Facebook or Google.

Correction: Bilibili, a website run by a Chinese company, was incorrectly identified as a Japanese company.

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Ranked: crypto popularity across european union nations.

This chart shows crypto popularity amongst European Union investors relative to traditional assets like stocks, bonds, and funds.

Depending on where you live, investors can have wildly different preferences when it comes to choosing asset classes.

For a modern example, we can see how different countries (and regions) act when it comes to cryptocurrency. Within the European Union —one of the regions dealing with faster crypto adoption—attitudes towards investing can vary considerably.

This graphic from Gilbert Fontana looks at crypto popularity amongst investors in the EU using data from the European Commission’s Eurobarometer . It compares exposure to cryptocurrencies relative to stocks, funds, and bonds.

Crypto Popularity in Europe in 2022

Given that crypto has experienced bubble-like asset rallies, including a dramatic rise to over a trillion dollars in value before crashing, it’s fair to say it’s well known by now.

But even with a vast rise in awareness, there are still discrepancies between the level of investment crypto receives amongst European Union nations. Let’s see which countries have the highest proportion of citizens invested in crypto:

Topping the list is Slovenia , considered by some the most crypto-friendly nation in the world. According to the survey, 18% of the country’s population has some sort of investment in it. Cyprus also ranks high in its crypto-friendly rank and hits an investment figure of 13% .

Also notable is the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , which despite having a small population of 640,000 also has a strong reputation as a global financial hub. When it comes to crypto, 14% of the population owns or has owned the asset, relative to 36% for stocks, bonds, or funds.

Crypto Unpopularity?

In regards to the countries with lower levels of crypto investment, one observation is that they tend to be wealthier and more developed EU nations. Here’s how the nations at or below the 10% crypto-investment threshold rank:

At the “bottom” of crypto interest are France , Germany and Italy , also the EU’s largest economies. At a glance, this might suggest that citizens of stronger economies invest less in crypto.

However, it’s important to note that the countries with higher levels of crypto investment tend to have lower levels of wealth on average. Though less of their investors seem to engage in crypto trading, countries like France and Germany might have more comparable levels of crypto investment on a pure dollar-basis.

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What does Wikipedia mean?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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The full form of Wikipedia is Wiki + Encyclopedia

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Wiki + Encyclopedia

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Translation, similar terms.

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How to Cite a Website | MLA, APA & Chicago Examples

Published on March 5, 2021 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 23, 2022.

To cite a page from a website, you need a short in-text citation and a corresponding reference stating the author’s name, the date of publication, the title of the page, the website name, and the URL.

This information is presented differently in different citation styles. APA , MLA , and Chicago are the most commonly used styles.

Use the interactive example generator below to explore APA and MLA website citations.

Note that the format is slightly different for citing YouTube and other online video platforms, or for citing an image .

Citing a website in mla style, citing a website in apa style, citing a website in chicago style, frequently asked questions about citations.

An MLA Works Cited entry for a webpage lists the author’s name , the title of the page (in quotation marks), the name of the site (in italics), the date of publication, and the URL.

The in-text citation usually just lists the author’s name. For a long page, you may specify a (shortened) section heading to locate the specific passage. Don’t use paragraph numbers unless they’re specifically numbered on the page.

The same format is used for blog posts and online articles from newspapers and magazines.

You can also use our free MLA Citation Generator to generate your website citations.

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The Scribbr Citation Generator will automatically create a flawless MLA citation

Citing a whole website

When you cite an entire website rather than a specific page, include the author if one can be identified for the whole site (e.g. for a single-authored blog). Otherwise, just start with the site name.

List the copyright date displayed on the site; if there isn’t one, provide an access date after the URL.

Webpages with no author or date

When no author is listed, cite the organization as author only if it differs from the website name.

If the organization name is also the website name, start the Works Cited entry with the title instead, and use a shortened version of the title in the in-text citation.

When no publication date is listed, leave it out and include an access date at the end instead.

An APA reference for a webpage lists the author’s last name and initials, the full date of publication, the title of the page (in italics), the website name (in plain text), and the URL.

The in-text citation lists the author’s last name and the year. If it’s a long page, you may include a locator to identify the quote or paraphrase (e.g. a paragraph number and/or section title).

Note that a general reference to an entire website doesn’t require a citation in APA Style; just include the URL in parentheses after you mention the site.

You can also use our free APA Citation Generator to create your webpage citations. Search for a URL to retrieve the details.

Generate accurate APA citations with Scribbr

The Scribbr Citation Generator will automatically create a flawless APA citation

Blog posts and online articles

Blog posts follow a slightly different format: the title of the post is not italicized, and the name of the blog is.

The same format is used for online newspaper and magazine articles—but not for articles from news sites like Reuters and BBC News (see the previous example).

When a page has no author specified, list the name of the organization that created it instead (and omit it later if it’s the same as the website name).

When it doesn’t list a date of publication, use “n.d.” in place of the date. You can also include an access date if the page seems likely to change over time.

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The AI-powered Citation Checker helps you avoid common mistakes such as:

In Chicago notes and bibliography style, footnotes are used to cite sources. They refer to a bibliography at the end that lists all your sources in full.

A Chicago bibliography entry for a website lists the author’s name, the page title (in quotation marks), the website name, the publication date, and the URL.

Chicago also has an alternative author-date citation style . Examples of website citations in this style can be found here .

For blog posts and online articles from newspapers, the name of the publication is italicized. For a blog post, you should also add the word “blog” in parentheses, unless it’s already part of the blog’s name.

When a web source doesn’t list an author , you can usually begin your bibliography entry and short note with the name of the organization responsible. Don’t repeat it later if it’s also the name of the website. A full note should begin with the title instead.

When no publication or revision date is shown, include an access date instead in your bibliography entry.

The main elements included in website citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the author, the date of publication, the page title, the website name, and the URL. The information is presented differently in each style.

In APA , MLA , and Chicago style citations for sources that don’t list a specific author (e.g. many websites ), you can usually list the organization responsible for the source as the author.

If the organization is the same as the website or publisher, you shouldn’t repeat it twice in your reference:

If there’s no appropriate organization to list as author, you will usually have to begin the citation and reference entry with the title of the source instead.

When you want to cite a specific passage in a source without page numbers (e.g. an e-book or website ), all the main citation styles recommend using an alternate locator in your in-text citation . You might use a heading or chapter number, e.g. (Smith, 2016, ch. 1)

In APA Style , you can count the paragraph numbers in a text to identify a location by paragraph number. MLA and Chicago recommend that you only use paragraph numbers if they’re explicitly marked in the text.

For audiovisual sources (e.g. videos ), all styles recommend using a timestamp to show a specific point in the video when relevant.

Check if your university or course guidelines specify which citation style to use. If the choice is left up to you, consider which style is most commonly used in your field.

Other more specialized styles exist for certain fields, such as Bluebook and OSCOLA for law.

The most important thing is to choose one style and use it consistently throughout your text.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2022, August 23). How to Cite a Website | MLA, APA & Chicago Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/cite-a-website/

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