Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.4 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.

The term Internet meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/) is used to describe a concept that spreads swiftly via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although this concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.