George Bush tops Wikipedia’s most edited list
Online encyclopaedia which turns 15, has been edited 808,187,367 times since its launch. Getty Images

Former US president George Bush's page tops the list of most edited pages of Wikipedia which turned 15 on 15 January. Bush's page has had 45,862 edits since it first went online.

Adolf Hitler, Britney Spears and a series of televised programmes aired by the Asian TV channel ABS-CBN, also make it to the top 15 of the online encyclopaedia's list. According to a BBC report, the entire site has been edited a total of 808,187,367 times ever since the website was formed.

Speaking about the early stages of the page, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said: "It was very top-down, very structured. I beat my head against the wall for two years, I knew the system was too complicated, but I didn't want to fail." The page was to be called Nupedia at the time of its conception, but was later changed.

To mark its 15<sup>th year, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for running the page, has announced the launch of a new endowment fund. It hopes to raise over $100m (£70m, €91m) over the next decade and become a permanent and consistent source of funding for the page. The foundation said it has over 36 million articles and around 80,000 volunteers who make roughly 15,000 edits every day, while creating 7,000 new articles on an hourly basis.

"Wikipedia seemed like an impossible idea at the time – an online encyclopaedia that everyone can edit. However, it has surpassed everyone's expectations over the past 15 years," Wales is quoted as saying by the Guardian. With the coming of age, the website is facing concerns regarding generating traffic and maintaining quality and accuracy of content.

Wales said with the rise of the internet in the developing world, the foundation would focus on creating a niche for itself in the mobile world. This could prove challenging, given that its mobile platform is quite limited.

The foundation's chief advancement officer Lisa Gruwell summed up the organisation's current state of affairs: "We have a great fundraising model right now, but things on the internet change so it's not something we can count on forever."

More about Technology