Wirtualna Polska
Encyclopedia
Wirtualna Polska is the sixth-largest Polish
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 web portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

. It was founded in 1995. It has often been the leader in offering new services on the Polish market. Their services are: email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

, web hosting, search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

, online chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

s and a large collection of free and legal Polish mp3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

s, of the 1995-1998 years is wp.cnt.pl, of 1998 to 2010 is wp.pl

According to Alexa
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...

 rankings, as of December 2007, it is the 182nd most popular website worldwide and the 6th most popular site in Poland.

History

Wirtualna Polska was created by Leszek Bogdanowicz, Damian Woźniak, Marek Borzetowski and Jacek Kawalec at Politechnika Gdańska in Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...

, who met each other via the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

. The early forum of ideas turned in March 1995 into a service using the name Wirtualna Polska. Initially, it was available on www.wp.cnt.pl (CNT = Centrum Nowych Technologii, Centre of New Techonology). In 1998, it was moved to www.wp.pl, which is its current address.
In the beginning, Wirtualna Polska functioned as a catalogue of web sites and then was modified into a web portal offering a number of complex services.
Many of the activities of the portal at the Internet market were precursory. Wirtualna Polska used XHTML
XHTML
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

 and it was the first portal to create a catalogue of web sites with a possibility of positioning them. It also initiated personalization and online chats.
Apart from a number of informative services (news, sport), WP provided access to such services as free email accounts, the possibility of web hosting, a web engine, instant messaging Spik
Špik
Špik is a mountain in Slovenian Julian Alps. Its summit is at 2,472 m above sea level. The mountain's name is a cognate of the English "spike," derived from its pointed shape....

.
One of its most popular services is mp3 service, offering on one hand legal Polish songs in mp3 format but on the other promoting independent artists.

WP and Wikipedia

In April 2009 France Telecom
France Télécom
France Telecom S.A. is the main telecommunications company in France, the third-largest in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It currently employs about 180,000 people and has 192.7 million customers worldwide . In 2010 the group had revenue of €45.5 billion...

 and Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...

signed an agreement, which enabled Wirtualna Polska using the logo and name "Wikipedia" and downloading the up-to-date articles directly from Wikimedia Foundation.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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