Wikipedia wins Princess of Asturias Award for Int’l Cooperation

Wikipedia portal was awarded on Wednesday the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in its 35th edition.

Created in 2001 by U.S. entrepreneur Jimmy Wales with the help of the philosopher Larry Sanger, Wikipedia has been managed since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, reaches 500 million unique visitors every month and is among the 10 most visited websites in the world.

Wikipedia contains more than 37 million articles written in 288 languages by volunteers from all around the world.

The online encyclopedia opened for business on Jan. 15, 2001, in addition to a written and peerreviewed encyclopedia called Nupedia, which it eventually eclipsed.

Wikipedia, with more than 25 million registered users, 73,000 of which are active editors, uses wiki technology that facilitates content editing and storing the history of changes to the page, the Princess of Asturias Foundation lauded in a statement.

It includes editions in 12 languages with over one million itemsEnglish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, Cebuano and WarayWaray (the latter two are spoken in the Philippines)and three others have more than 700,000 entriesChinese, Japanese and Portuguese.

The English language Wikipedia is the largest, with more than 4.8 million articles.

Twentyfour candidates from 10 different countries were up for the award, such as the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, the Spanish armed forces, the European Space Agency, and the former prime minister of Portugal and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres.

Last year the award was awarded to the Fulbright Foundation, sponsor of an international scholarship program to facilitate the exchange between U.S. college graduates and the rest of the world.