Type of business Private company Owner Wirtualna Polska SA Registration optional | Type of site Web portal | |
Wirtualna Polska ([virtuˈwalna ˈpɔlska]; English: Virtual Poland; abbreviation: WP [vuˈpɛ]) is the sixth-largest Polish web portal. It was founded in 1995, and is known as the first existing internet portal in Poland. It has often been the leader in offering new services on the Polish market. Their services are: email, web hosting, search engine, online chats and a large collection of free and legal Polish mp3s.
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According to Alexa rankings, as of December 2007, it was the 262nd most popular website worldwide and the 7th 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, who met each other via the Internet. 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 Technologies). 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 cutting edge. Wirtualna Polska used XHTML 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, and instant messaging service Spik (now discontinued).
WP and Wikipedia
In April 2009 France Telecom and Wikimedia Foundation signed an agreement, which enabled Wirtualna Polska to use the logo and name "Wikipedia" and downloading the up-to-date articles directly from Wikimedia Foundation.