Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web Based, free content encyclopaedia. It is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and is based on a model of openly editable content. The word “Wikipedia” is comprises of two word wiki and encyclopaedia. Wiki is a technology for creating collaborative websites. It is derived from a Hawaiian word wiki which means “quick”. Wikipedia’s articles contain links that guides the user to of related pages having additional information.
There are large numbers of anonymous volunteers who write collaboratively without pay. A person having Internet access can write and edit Wikipedia articles. In some special cases editing is restricted in order to prevent disruption or vandalism. There are policies and guidelines developed by the Wikipedia community to improve the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia was created in 2001 and since then it has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites. It attracts around 374 million unique visitors monthly as per reports of September 2015. There are over 70,000 active contributors who are working on more than 38,000,000 articles in 290 languages. Till date Wikipedia has 102,886 articles in English and daily thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and write thousands of new articles.
Wikipedia in coordination with researchers from Sweden is now developing a crowd sourced speech engine. This new project will be making the online encyclopaedia handier to users, particularly the visually impaired. Wikipedia is working in partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology University in Stockholm, Sweden, in order to make the ‘speech synthesis platform’. This platform will allow the online encyclopaedia to read content to its users. By September 2017, Wikipedia will be developing the engine for English, Swedish, and Arabic and then it will move on to the other 280 languages that the site supports. The speech engine will be an open source and can be used for free on sites running the MediaWiki software.