History of Wikipedia
Encyclopedia
The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates
in 1993, but the concept of an open source
web-based online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman
around 1999. Wikipedia
was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales
and Larry Sanger
, using the concept and technology of a wiki
pioneered by Ward Cunningham
. Initially, Wikipedia was created to complement Nupedia
, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of additional reference projects. , Wikipedia includes over 20 million freely usable
articles in 282 languages, written by over 31 million registered users and countless anonymous contributors worldwide.
and Pergamon
, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia
dates from shortly before Denis Diderot
and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press
to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet
's book Traité de documentation (1934; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum
institution, 1910), H. G. Wells
' book of essays World Brain
(1938) and Vannevar Bush
's future vision of the microfilm based Memex
in As We May Think
(1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson
's hypertext
design Project Xanadu
, begun in 1960.
While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopedia Britannica were book-based, Microsoft's Encarta
published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM, and hyperlink
ed.
With the development of the web
, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia project
s. An early proposal was Interpedia
in 1993 by Rick Gates
; but this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software
exponent Richard Stallman
described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. His published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On 17 January 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation
's GNUPedia
project went online, competing with Nupedia
, but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".
, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis
, a web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales
, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate multi-step peer review
process. Despite its mailing-list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger
, a graduate philosophy
student hired by Wales, the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a wiki
-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz. Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham
's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb
". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on 2 January 2001. Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software", though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis
employee, introduced him to the concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list
that a wiki based upon UseModWiki
(then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:
Wales set one up and put it online on 10 January 2001.
The bandwidth
and server
(located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by Bomis. Many current and past Bomis
employees have contributed some content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and current CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.
In December 2008, Wales
stated that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!". The oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.
The project received many new participants after being mentioned on the Slashdot
website in July 2001, with two minor mentions in March 2001. It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin
on 25 July. Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google
, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media
coverage was in the New York Times on 20 September 2001.
The project passed 1,000 articles around 12 February 2001, and 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created—a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000.
Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki
software deleted old data after about a month. On the eve of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, December 14, 2010, developer Tim Starling found backups on SourceForge
containing every change made to Wikipedia from its creation in January 2001 to August 17, 2001.
(created on 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC), followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com
(at 13:07 UTC). The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com
, was created around that period, and initially used only Romanized
Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language, although statistics of that early period are imprecise. The French Wikipedia
was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese
, Dutch
, Esperanto
, Hebrew
, Italian
, Portuguese
, Russian
, Spanish
, and Swedish
. These languages were soon joined by Arabic
and Hungarian
. In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia, notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans
, Norwegian
, and Serbian
versions were announced.
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, less than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase. As of 2007, around 75% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions.
In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust
, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. By 2004 Sanger and Wales had differences in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but the two differed on how best to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.
Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management, went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up
self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day-to-day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects.
Sanger says he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything. He proposed that experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. He returned briefly to academia, then after joining the Digital Universe
Foundation, went on in 2006 to found Citizendium
, an open encyclopedia which used real names for contributors intended to reduce disruptive editing, and hoped to facilitate "gentle expert guidance" to increase the accuracy of its content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was to include a statement about "family-friendly content." He stated early on that he intended to leave in a few years, by which time the project and its management should be established.
to act as an umbrella body and the growth of software and policies to address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below:
project was started. Its intention was to have articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content
. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by Bomis
.
The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were registered on 12 January 2001 and 13 January 2001, respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day. The project formally opened on 15 January ("Wikipedia Day"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan
, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave
arrived on 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday. The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.
and the departure of Larry Sanger
. The forking
of the Spanish Wikipedia
also took place with the establishment of the Enciclopedia Libre
. The first portable Mediawiki
software went live on 25 January. Bot
s were introduced, Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary
) and first formal Manual of Style were launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project was proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia.
was established, and Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo
. Mathematical formulae using TeX
were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich
, Germany, in October. The basic principles of Wikipedia's (known colloquially as "Arbcom") were developed, mostly by , and other early Wikipedians.
s were moved from California
to Florida
, and CSS
style configuration sheets were introduced, and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two weeks in June. The formal election of a board and Arbitration Committee began. The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias
arising from Wikipedia's community structure.
Bourgeois v. Peters, (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia. It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was "elevated" at the time of the protest, "to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times."
, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005.
The first major Wikipedia scandal occurred in 2005, when a well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months. In the wake of this and other concerns, the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry
investigations, a new feature called , a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005.
, on 1 March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to download, and "Wikipedia" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals
– multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.
Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles. A new privilege, "oversight", was created, allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable. Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proved more popular than expected, with over 1,000 pages being semi-protected at any given time in 2006.
broke when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium
, a competing online encyclopedia, launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather creating a distinct biographical article.
exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME magazine article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best websites.
The Arbitration Committee of the English Wikipedia to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology
IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists. A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were also topic-banned. The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties". Wikipedia content became licensed under Creative Commons
in 2009.
to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS
resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.
On May 13, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On December 12, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia
's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1,000,000,000th Wikimedia project edit was performed on April 16.
, holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai
in November 2011. The English Wikipedia
passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia
exceeded 100 million page edits, becoming the second language edition to do so after the English edition, which attained 500 million page edits on 24 November 2011.
As of 18 November 2011, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet
, with a combined total of over 20 million articles across all language editions. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives more than 10 billion global pageviews every month, of which 2.7 billion are from the United States alone.
Between 4 October and 6 October 2011, the Italian Wikipedia
became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the Italian Parliament's proposed DDL intercettazioni
law, which, if approved, would allow any person to force websites to remove information that is perceived as untrue or offensive, without the need to provide evidence.
A significant number of sites use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia
.
Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre
(Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu
(Swedish), and Baidu Baike
(Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.
In 2006, Larry Sanger
founded Citizendium
, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki
. The site cited its aims were 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other things'. (see also Nupedia
).
was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139 page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia
in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.
In September 2008, Bertelsmann
published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.
The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Wikipedia
was published in April 2006 by SOS Children as the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection
. In April 2007, "Wikipedia Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the Wikimedia Foundation
and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles. The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file
or Torrent file, or accessed online at the project's website.
A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of Wikipedia available for use on iPod
s. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.
. In the defamation action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer due to the provisions of this section. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.
and Sanger
played important roles in the early stages of Wikipedia. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. To Wales is ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Wikipedia; Sanger wrote, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine" (emphasis in original text). He also wrote, "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia." Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software." Sanger coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name. In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems. In terms of project roles, Sanger spearheaded and pursued the project as its leader in its first year, and did most of the early work in formulating policies (including "Ignore all rules" and "Neutral point of view") and building up the community. Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of Bomis' funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and his changing personal priorities; however, by 2004, the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger criticized Wikipedia, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair." In 2002 Sanger parted ways with Wikipedia; by 2005 Wales began to dispute Sanger's role in the project, three years after Sanger left.
In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia; however, according to Brian Bergstein
of the Associated Press
, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder." There is evidence that Sanger was called co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Wikipedia press releases and Wikipedia articles and in a September 2001 New York Times article for which both were interviewed. In 2006, Wales said, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title"; nonetheless, before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder and, indeed, identified himself as "co-founder" as late as August 2002.
As of March 2007: Wales emphasized this employer–employee relationship and his ultimate authority, terming himself Wikipedia's sole founder; and Sanger emphasized their statuses as co-founders, referencing earlier versions of Wikipedia pages (2004, 2006), press releases (2002–2004), and media coverage from the time of his involvement routinely terming them in this manner.
, Syria
, Pakistan
, Thailand
, Tunisia
, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan
.
s in mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking
contentious Web sites and Wikimedia sites have been blocked multiple times in its history, sometimes all articles, and sometimes selectively by topic, region, language version, or ISP. Notable blocks include:
The first block had an effect on the vitality of Chinese Wikipedia
, which suffered sharp dips in various indicators such as the number of new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. In some cases, it took anywhere from six to twelve months in order to recover to the levels of May 2004.
On 31 July 2008, the BBC
reported that the Chinese Wikipedia had been unblocked that day in China; it had still been blocked the previous day. This came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the upcoming Olympic Games
, and websites such as the Chinese edition of the BBC were being unblocked following talks between the International Olympic Committee
and the Games' Chinese organisers.
was blocked in Syria between 30 April 2008 and 13 February 2009, although other language editions remained accessible.
has been blocked by most Thai ISPs since October 2008, due to lèse majesté
concerns.
article and the associated picture :File:Virgin Killer.jpg, following a claim that the image was "potentially illegal" under the Protection of Children Act 1978
. An estimated 95% of British users were affected by the block, which was put in place on the recommendation of the Internet Watch Foundation
. The IWF's recommendation was rescinded on 9 December 2008.
Historical summaries
Size and statistics
Discussion and debate archives
Other
Rick Gates
Rick Gates is an Internet pioneer mostly known because he organised the The Internet Hunt and raised the ideas of Interpedia. He studied at the Graduate Library School at the University of Arizona. In 1992 he started the monthly competition The Internet Hunt where questions had to be answered...
in 1993, but the concept of an open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
web-based online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
around 1999. Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
and Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
, using the concept and technology of a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
pioneered by Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...
. Initially, Wikipedia was created to complement Nupedia
Nupedia
Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of additional reference projects. , Wikipedia includes over 20 million freely usable
Copyleft
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...
articles in 282 languages, written by over 31 million registered users and countless anonymous contributors worldwide.
Background
The thought of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place goes back to the ancient Library of AlexandriaLibrary of Alexandria
The Royal Library of Alexandria, or Ancient Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the...
and Pergamon
Pergamon
Pergamon , or Pergamum, was an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey, in Mysia, today located from the Aegean Sea on a promontory on the north side of the river Caicus , that became the capital of the Kingdom of Pergamon during the Hellenistic period, under the Attalid dynasty, 281–133 BC...
, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
dates from shortly before Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet
Paul Otlet
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent...
's book Traité de documentation (1934; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum
Mundaneum
The Mundaneum was an institution created in 1910 out of the initiative of two Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as part of their documentation science...
institution, 1910), H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
' book of essays World Brain
World Brain
World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells written during the period 1936-38...
(1938) and Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
's future vision of the microfilm based Memex
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
in As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
(1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
's hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
design Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper...
, begun in 1960.
While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopedia Britannica were book-based, Microsoft's Encarta
Encarta
Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and...
published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM, and hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
ed.
With the development of the web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia project
Internet encyclopedia project
An Internet encyclopedia project is a large database of useful information, accessible via the World Wide Web. The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the 1993 Interpedia proposal; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could...
s. An early proposal was Interpedia
Interpedia
Interpedia was the name given to the first proposals for an Internet encyclopedia which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalog of all Interpedia pages....
in 1993 by Rick Gates
Rick Gates
Rick Gates is an Internet pioneer mostly known because he organised the The Internet Hunt and raised the ideas of Interpedia. He studied at the Graduate Library School at the University of Arizona. In 1992 he started the monthly competition The Internet Hunt where questions had to be answered...
; but this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
exponent Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. His published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On 17 January 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
's GNUPedia
GNUpedia
GNUPedia was a project to create a free content encyclopedia under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation...
project went online, competing with Nupedia
Nupedia
Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
, but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".
Formulation of the concept
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for NupediaNupedia
Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis
Bomis
Bomis was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia...
, a web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate multi-step peer review
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
process. Despite its mailing-list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
, a graduate philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
student hired by Wales, the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz. Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...
's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb
WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository ; the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first...
". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on 2 January 2001. Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software", though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis
Bomis
Bomis was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia...
employee, introduced him to the concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
that a wiki based upon UseModWiki
UseModWiki
UseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...
(then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:
Wales set one up and put it online on 10 January 2001.
Founding of Wikipedia
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on 15 January 2001.The bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
and server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
(located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by Bomis. Many current and past Bomis
Bomis
Bomis was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia...
employees have contributed some content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and current CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.
In December 2008, Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
stated that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!". The oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
website in July 2001, with two minor mentions in March 2001. It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin is a collaborative discussion website. Articles are created and submitted by Kuro5hin's users and submitted to queue for evaluation. Site members can vote for or against publishing an article and, once the article has reached a certain number of votes, it is then published to the site...
on 25 July. Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media
Mainstream media
Mainstream media are those media disseminated via the largest distribution channels, which therefore represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter...
coverage was in the New York Times on 20 September 2001.
The project passed 1,000 articles around 12 February 2001, and 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created—a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000.
Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki
UseModWiki
UseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...
software deleted old data after about a month. On the eve of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, December 14, 2010, developer Tim Starling found backups on SourceForge
SourceForge
SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
containing every change made to Wikipedia from its creation in January 2001 to August 17, 2001.
Namespaces, subdomains, and internationalization
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.comGerman Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and mostly publicly editable online encyclopedia.Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest and, with over articles, the second-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia...
(created on 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC), followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com
Catalan Wikipedia
The Catalan Wikipedia is the Catalan language edition of Wikipedia. Founded on 16 March 2001 and reaching 200,000 articles by September 2009, it contains about articles, with active users as of . It was created just a few minutes after the first non-English Wikipedia, the German version...
(at 13:07 UTC). The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com
Japanese Wikipedia
is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. It has over articles, making it the ninth largest language edition of Wikipedia after the English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Russian editions. Started in September 2002, the edition attained...
, was created around that period, and initially used only Romanized
Romanization of Japanese
The romanization of Japanese is the application of the Latin alphabet to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is known as , less strictly romaji, literally "Roman letters", sometimes incorrectly transliterated as romanji or rōmanji. There are several different romanization systems...
Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language, although statistics of that early period are imprecise. The French Wikipedia
French Wikipedia
The French Wikipedia is the French language edition of Wikipedia, spelt Wikipédia. This edition was started in March 2001, and has about articles as of , making it the third-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-language and German-language editions...
was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese
Chinese Wikipedia
Chinese Wikipedia is the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started in October 2002, Chinese Wikipedia had over 270,000 articles as of September 2009 and 383,391 articles as of November 7, 2011...
, Dutch
Dutch Wikipedia
The Dutch Wikipedia is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. As of November 2011, the Dutch Wikipedia is the fourth-largest Wikipedia edition, with over articles.-History:...
, Esperanto
Esperanto Wikipedia
The Esperanto Wikipedia is the Esperanto edition of Wikipedia, which started in December 2001 as the eleventh edition of Wikipedia...
, Hebrew
Hebrew Wikipedia
Hebrew Wikipedia is the Hebrew edition of Wikipedia. This edition began in July 2003 and has about articles as of .-Milestones:* July 8, 2003: The Hebrew edition of Wikipedia was launched....
, Italian
Italian Wikipedia
The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of 2011 it has over articles and more than registered accounts...
, Portuguese
Portuguese Wikipedia
The Portuguese Wikipedia is a Portuguese language edition of Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia. It was the fifth edition of Wikipedia, started in June 2001. It is currently the tenth largest Wikipedia by article count, containing articles.From late 2004, the edition grew rapidly...
, Russian
Russian Wikipedia
The Russian Wikipedia is the Russian language edition of Wikipedia. It has over articles. It was founded on 20 May 2001. By May 2008 it became the 10th largest Wikipedia by size and in February 2011 it ranked 8th. It surpassed 750,000 articles in August 2011...
, Spanish
Spanish Wikipedia
The Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. It currently has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 6th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Polish...
, and Swedish
Swedish Wikipedia
The Swedish Wikipedia is the Swedish language edition of Wikipedia. It was the third edition of Wikipedia, started in May 2001 alongside German Wikipedia, after English Wikipedia and Catalan Wikipedia...
. These languages were soon joined by Arabic
Arabic Wikipedia
The Arabic Wikipedia is the Arabic language version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of September 2011, it has over 150,000 articles, 400,000 registered users and over 11,000 images...
and Hungarian
Hungarian Wikipedia
The Hungarian Wikipedia is the Hungarian/Magyar version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Started on July 8, 2003, this version reached the 200,000 article milestone in September 2011.-History:...
. In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia, notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans
Afrikaans Wikipedia
The Afrikaans Wikipedia is an Afrikaans language edition of the Web-based free-content encyclopedia Wikipedia. The project was started on 16 November 2001, and was the 11th Wikipedia to be created. As of 12 November 2011, this edition has over 20,000 articles and is the 80th largest Wikipedia by...
, Norwegian
Norwegian Wikipedia
There are two Norwegian language editions of Wikipedia: one for articles written in Bokmål or Riksmål, and one for articles written in Nynorsk. The first site, the original Norwegian Wikipedia, launched on November 26, 2001, and originally allowed articles to be written in any written Norwegian...
, and Serbian
Serbian Wikipedia
The Serbian Wikipedia is the Serbian version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was created on February 16, 2003. This language version exceeded 100,000 articles on November 20, 2009...
versions were announced.
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, less than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase. As of 2007, around 75% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions.
Development
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. By 2004 Sanger and Wales had differences in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but the two differed on how best to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.
Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management, went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up
Business development
A subset of the field of commerce, business development comprises a number of techniques and responsibilities which aim at:1. Researching new types of business/products/services with an emphasis on identifying gaps in the mitigation of needs of potential clients .2. Attracting new customers3...
self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day-to-day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects.
Sanger says he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything. He proposed that experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. He returned briefly to academia, then after joining the Digital Universe
Digital Universe
Digital Universe is a free online information service founded in 2006. The project aims to create a "network of portals designed to provide high-quality information and services to the public"...
Foundation, went on in 2006 to found Citizendium
Citizendium
Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001....
, an open encyclopedia which used real names for contributors intended to reduce disruptive editing, and hoped to facilitate "gentle expert guidance" to increase the accuracy of its content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was to include a statement about "family-friendly content." He stated early on that he intended to leave in a few years, by which time the project and its management should be established.
Organization
The Wikipedia project has grown rapidly in the course of its life, at several levels. Individual wikis have grown organically through the addition of new articles, new wikis have been added in English and non-English languages, and entire new projects replicating these growth methods in other related areas (news, quotations, reference books and so on) have been founded as well. Respectively, Wikipedia itself has grown, with the creation of the Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
to act as an umbrella body and the growth of software and policies to address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below:
Logo
Historical overview by year
- Articles summarizing each year are held within the Wikipedia project namespace and are linked to below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.
2000
In March 2000, the NupediaNupedia
Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
project was started. Its intention was to have articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content
Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...
. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by Bomis
Bomis
Bomis was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia...
.
2001
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process.The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were registered on 12 January 2001 and 13 January 2001, respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day. The project formally opened on 15 January ("Wikipedia Day"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave
Slashdot effect
The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from...
arrived on 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday. The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.
2002
2002 saw the end of funding from BomisBomis
Bomis was a dot-com company founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell. Its primary business was the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal, and to provide support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia...
and the departure of Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
. The forking
Fork (software development)
In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...
of the Spanish Wikipedia
Spanish Wikipedia
The Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. It currently has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 6th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Polish...
also took place with the establishment of the Enciclopedia Libre
Enciclopedia Libre
Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.-History:...
. The first portable Mediawiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
software went live on 25 January. Bot
Internet bot
Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone...
s were introduced, Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary
Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
) and first formal Manual of Style were launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project was proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia.
2003
The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
was established, and Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo
Logo
A logo is a graphic mark or emblem commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition...
. Mathematical formulae using TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany, in October. The basic principles of Wikipedia's (known colloquially as "Arbcom") were developed, mostly by , and other early Wikipedians.
2004
The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continued to grow rapidly in 2004, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of 2004. The English Wikipedia accounted for just under than half of these articles. The website's server farmServer farm
A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability of one machine. Server farms often have backup servers, which can take over the function of primary servers in the event of a primary server...
s were moved from California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
to Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, and CSS
CSS
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
style configuration sheets were introduced, and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two weeks in June. The formal election of a board and Arbitration Committee began. The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias
Systemic bias
Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.-Bias in...
arising from Wikipedia's community structure.
Bourgeois v. Peters, (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:* Middle District of Alabama...
was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia. It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was "elevated" at the time of the protest, "to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times."
2005
In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to HitwiseHitwise
Experian Hitwise is a global online competitive intelligence service which collects data directly from ISP networks to aid website managers in analysing trends in visitor behavior and to measure website market share. The Hitwise product is a commercial platform whereby customers pay Hitwise a...
, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005.
The first major Wikipedia scandal occurred in 2005, when a well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months. In the wake of this and other concerns, the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry
Sockpuppet (Internet)
A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term—a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock—originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about himself while pretending to be another...
investigations, a new feature called , a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005.
2006
The English Wikipedia gained its 1 millionth article, Jordanhill railway stationJordanhill railway station
Jordanhill railway station is a side platformed suburban railway station in the Jordanhill area in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland. The station, which is governed by Transport Scotland and managed by First ScotRail, lies on the Argyle Line and the North Clyde Line...
, on 1 March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to download, and "Wikipedia" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals
Congressional staffer edits to Wikipedia
Some Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia have created controversy, notably in the early to mid-2006 timeframe...
– multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.
Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles. A new privilege, "oversight", was created, allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable. Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proved more popular than expected, with over 1,000 pages being semi-protected at any given time in 2006.
2007
Wikipedia continued to grow rapidly in 2007, possessing over 5 million registered editor accounts by August 2011. The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words in approximately 250 languages, by 13 August. The English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day, with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked the 10th-busiest on the Internet (See Wikipedia:Statistics). Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in the press – the Essjay controversyEssjay controversy
The Essjay controversy was an incident concerning a prominent Wikipedia participant and salaried Wikia employee, known by the username Essjay, who later identified himself as Ryan Jordan. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Wikipedia known as administrator, bureaucrat, arbitrator and...
broke when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium
Citizendium
Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001....
, a competing online encyclopedia, launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather creating a distinct biographical article.
2008
Various in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth overall Wikipedia article was created, and by the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.2009
In August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions totalled 14 million. The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC. On 27 December 2009, the German WikipediaGerman Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and mostly publicly editable online encyclopedia.Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest and, with over articles, the second-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia...
exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME magazine article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best websites.
The Arbitration Committee of the English Wikipedia to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology
Church of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is an organization devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. The Church of Scientology International is the Church of Scientology's parent organization, and is responsible for the overall ecclesiastical management, dissemination and...
IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists. A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were also topic-banned. The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties". Wikipedia content became licensed under Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
in 2009.
2010
On March 24, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. FailoverFailover
In computing, failover is automatic switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, or network...
to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS
Domain name system
The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.
On May 13, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On December 12, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia
French Wikipedia
The French Wikipedia is the French language edition of Wikipedia, spelt Wikipédia. This edition was started in March 2001, and has about articles as of , making it the third-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-language and German-language editions...
's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1,000,000,000th Wikimedia project edit was performed on April 16.
2011
Wikipedia and its users held hundreds of celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January. The site began efforts to expand its growth in IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai
Mumbai
Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...
in November 2011. The English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia
German Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and mostly publicly editable online encyclopedia.Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest and, with over articles, the second-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia...
exceeded 100 million page edits, becoming the second language edition to do so after the English edition, which attained 500 million page edits on 24 November 2011.
As of 18 November 2011, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet
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...
, with a combined total of over 20 million articles across all language editions. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives more than 10 billion global pageviews every month, of which 2.7 billion are from the United States alone.
Between 4 October and 6 October 2011, the Italian Wikipedia
Italian Wikipedia
The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of 2011 it has over articles and more than registered accounts...
became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the Italian Parliament's proposed DDL intercettazioni
DDL intercettazioni
DDL Intercettazioni or the Wiretapping Act is a piece of legislation put before the Italian Parliament in 2008.-Background:The Max Planck Institute calculated that in 2006, a higher proportion of Italians had had their phones tapped than citizens of any other European country...
law, which, if approved, would allow any person to force websites to remove information that is perceived as untrue or offensive, without the need to provide evidence.
Hardware and software
- The software that runs Wikipedia, and the hardwareHardwareHardware is a general term for equipment such as keys, locks, hinges, latches, handles, wire, chains, plumbing supplies, tools, utensils, cutlery and machine parts. Household hardware is typically sold in hardware stores....
, server farmServer farmA server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability of one machine. Server farms often have backup servers, which can take over the function of primary servers in the event of a primary server...
s and other systems upon which Wikipedia relies.- In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWikiUseModWikiUseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...
, written in PerlPerlPerl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
by Clifford Adams. The server has run on LinuxLinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
to this day, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the CamelCaseCamelCaseCamelCase , also known as medial capitals, is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are joined without spaces, with each element's initial letter capitalized within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "LaBelle", "BackColor",...
convention. - In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Wikipedia was introduced, replacing the older UseModWikiUseModWikiUseModWiki is a wiki engine written in the Perl programming language. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Something similar to the interface can be seen in MediaWiki with the classic skin.- History...
. Written specifically for the project by Magnus Manske, it included a PHPPHPPHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
wiki engine. - In July 2002, a major rewriteRewrite (programming)A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
of the software powering Wikipedia went live; dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and became MediaWikiMediaWikiMediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
. It was written by Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the increasing demands of the growing project. - In October 2002, Derek Ramsey started to use a "bot", or program, to add a large number of articles about United States towns; these articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data. Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics. These articles were generally well received, but some users criticized them for their initial uniformity and writing style (for example, see this version of an original bot-generated town article, and compare to current versionLa Grange, IllinoisLa Grange, a suburb of Chicago, is a village in Cook County, in the U.S. state of Illinois. The population was 15,608 at the 2000 census.-History:...
). - In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeXTeXTeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski. - 9 June 2003 – ISBNs in articles now link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page . Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the page. See the edit that changed this.
- After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Wikipedia users were no longer hard coded, allowing Wikipedia to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users.
- On 12 February 2004, server operations were moved from San DiegoSan Diego, CaliforniaSan Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...
, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
to TampaTampa, FloridaTampa is a city in the U.S. state of Florida. It serves as the county seat for Hillsborough County. Tampa is located on the west coast of Florida. The population of Tampa in 2010 was 335,709....
, FloridaFloridaFlorida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
. - On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of the MediaWikiMediaWikiMediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
software. - On 30 May 2004, the first instances of "categorization" entries appeared. Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed from the founding of Wikipedia. However, Larry Sanger had viewed the schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles, whereas the categorizationCategorizationCategorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...
effort centered on individual categorization entries in each article of the encyclopedia, as part of a larger automatic categorization of the articles of the encyclopedia. - After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing the CSSCascading Style SheetsCascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css. - Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was created, allowing transclusionTransclusionIn computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
of standard texts. - On 7 June 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time the bulk of the Wikimedia servers were moved to a new facility across the street. All Wikimedia projects were down during this time.
- In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki
Look and feel
- The external face of Wikipedia, its look and feelLook and feelIn software design, look and feel is a term used in respect of a graphical user interface and comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces , as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes, and menus...
, and the Wikipedia brandBrandThe American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...
ing, as presented to users- On 4 April 2002,
- Around 15 October 2003, the current Wikipedia logo was installed. The logo concept was selected by a voting process, which was followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The final selection was created by David Friedland (who edits Wikipedia under the username
"nohat") based on a logo design and concept created by Paul Stansifer.- On 22 February 2004, Did You Know (DYK) made its first Main Page appearance.
- On 23 February 2004, a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared at 19:46 UTC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look.
- On 10 January 2005, the multilingual portal at www.wikipedia.org was set up, replacing a redirect to the English-language Wikipedia.
- On 5 February 2005, the was created, first "portal" on the English Wikipedia. However, the concept was pioneered on the German Wikipedia where Portal:Recht (law studies) was set up in October 2003.
- On 16 July 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page.
- On 19 March 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English-language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years.
- On 13 May 2010, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. The "classic" Wikipedia interface remained available as an option.
Internal structures
- Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies.
- April 2001, Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", Wikipedia's core non-negotiable editorial policy, a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Sanger for Nupedia in spring or summer 2000, which covered many of the same core principles.
- In September 2001, collaboration by subject matter in is introduced.
- In February 2002, concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bomis Inc (Wikipedia's original host) combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, led most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia to break away and establish it independently as the Enciclopedia LibreEnciclopedia LibreEnciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.-History:...
. Following clarification of Wikipedia's status and non-commercial nature later that year, re-merger talks between Enciclopedia Libre and the re-founded Spanish Wikipedia occasionally took place in 2002 and 2003, but no conclusion was reached. As of October 2009, the two continue to coexist as substantial Spanish language reference sources, with around 43,000 articles (EL) and 520,000 articles (Sp.W) respectively. - Also in 2002, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the Manual of Style, along with a number of other policies and guidelines.
- November 2002 – new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce are set up, as well as other language mailing lists (e.g. Polish), to reduce the volume of traffic on mailing lists.
- In July 2003, the rule against editing one's autobiography is introduced.
- On 28 October 2003, the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in MunichMunichMunich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
. Many cities followed suit, and soon a number of regular Wikipedian get-togethers were established around the world. Several Internet communities, including one on the popular blogBlogA blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
website LiveJournalLiveJournalLiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....
, have also sprung up since. - From 10 July to 30 August 2004 the and formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On 27 August 2004 the Community Portal was started, to serve as a focus for community efforts. These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad-hoc collaborations between like-minded editors.
- During September to December 2005 following the Seigenthaler controversy and other similar concerns, several anti-abuse features and policies were added to Wikipedia. These were:
-
- The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWikiMediaWikiMediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
extension to assist detection of abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005. Checkuser function had previously existed, but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, so there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis. - Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who had created a user account.
- The introduction and rapid adoption of the policy Wikipedia:Biographies of living people, giving a far tighter quality control and fact-check system to biographical articles related to living people.
- The "semi-protection" function and policy, allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit.
- In May 2006, a new "oversight" feature was introduced on the English Wikipedia, allowing a handful of highly trusted users to permanently erase page revisions containing copyright infringements or libelous or personal information from a page's history. Previous to this, page version deletion was laborious, and also deleted versions remained visible to other administrators and could be un-deleted by them.
- On 1 January 2007, the subcommunity named Esperanza was disbanded by communal consent. Esperanza had begun as an effort to promote "wikilove" and a social support network, but had developed its own subculture and private structures. Its disbanding was described as the painful but necessary remedy for a project that had allowed editors to "see themselves as Esperanzans first and foremost". A number of Esperanza's subprojects were integrated back into Wikipedia as free-standing projects, but most of them are now inactive. When the group was founded in September 2005, there had been concerns expressed that it would eventually be condemned as such.
- In April 2007 the results of 4 months policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia policies into one core policy (See: Wikipedia:Attribution) was polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focused policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal.
- The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWiki
The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures
- Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
, its executive, and its activities as a foundation.- In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URLUniform Resource LocatorIn computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
of Wikipedia was changed from
.comThe domain name com is a generic top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations...
and .org.orgThe domain name org is a generic top-level domain of the Domain Name System used in the Internet. The name is derived from organization....
).- On 20 June 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
was founded.- Communications committee was formed in January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Wikipedia via the newly implemented OTRS
OTRSOTRS, an initialism for Open-source Ticket Request System, is a free and open-source trouble ticket system software package that a company, organization, or other entity can use to assign tickets to incoming queries and track further communications about them...
(a ticket handling system).- Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to the Board of Trustee
TrusteeTrustee is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, can refer to any person who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility for the benefit of another...
s of the Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
. During this time, Angela was active in editing content and setting policy, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation.- On 10 January 2006, Wikipedia became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation.
- In July 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
.- In June 2006, Brad Patrick was hired to be the first executive director of the Foundation. He resigned in January 2007, and was later replaced by Sue Gardner (June 2007).
- In October 2006, Florence Nibart-Devouard became chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation.
- In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL
Projects and milestones
- Sister projects and milestones related to articles, user base, and other statistics.
- 15 January 2001, the first recorded edit of Wikipedia.
- In December 2002, the first sister project, WiktionaryWiktionaryWiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
, was created; aiming to produce a dictionaryDictionaryA dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
and thesaurusThesaurusA thesaurus is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning , in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations...
of the words in all languages. It uses the same software as Wikipedia. - On 22 January 2003, the English Wikipedia was again slashdottedSlashdot effectThe Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from...
after having reached the 100,000 article milestone with the HastingsHastings, New ZealandThe city of Hastings is a major urban settlement in the Hawke's Bay region of the North Island of New Zealand, and it is the largest settlement by population in Hawke's Bay. Hastings city is the administrative centre of the Hastings District...
, New Zealand article. Two days later, the German language Wikipedia, the largest non-English language version, passed the 10,000 article mark. - On 20 June 2003, the same day that the Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia FoundationWikimedia 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...
was founded, "WikiquoteWikiquoteWikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books,...
" was created. A month later, "WikibooksWikibooksWikibooks is a Wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit....
" was launched. "WikisourceWikisourceWikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has...
" was set up towards the end of the year. - In January 2004, Wikipedia reached the 200,000-article milestone in English with the article on Neil WarnockNeil WarnockNeil Warnock is an English former footballer who is currently manager of English Premier League club Queens Park Rangers....
, and reached 450,000 articles for both English and non-English Wikipedias. The next month, the combined article count of the English and non-English reached 500,000. - On 20 April 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached 250,000.
- On 7 July 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached 300,000.
- On 20 September 2004, Wikipedia reached one million articles in over 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew WikipediaHebrew WikipediaHebrew Wikipedia is the Hebrew edition of Wikipedia. This edition began in July 2003 and has about articles as of .-Milestones:* July 8, 2003: The Hebrew edition of Wikipedia was launched....
, and discusses the flag of KazakhstanFlag of KazakhstanThe current flag of Kazakhstan or Kazakh flag was adopted on 4 June 1992, replacing the flag of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The flag was designed by Shaken Niyazbekov.-Description:...
. - On 20 November 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached 400,000.
- On 18 March 2005, Wikipedia passed the 500,000 article milestone in English, with Involuntary settlements in the Soviet UnionInvoluntary settlements in the Soviet UnionForced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
being announced in a press release as the landmark article. - In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company HitwiseHitwiseExperian Hitwise is a global online competitive intelligence service which collects data directly from ISP networks to aid website managers in analysing trends in visitor behavior and to measure website market share. The Hitwise product is a commercial platform whereby customers pay Hitwise a...
, relegating Dictionary.com to second place. - On 29 September 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 750,000 article mark.
- On 1 March 2006, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000,000 article mark, with Jordanhill railway stationJordanhill railway stationJordanhill railway station is a side platformed suburban railway station in the Jordanhill area in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland. The station, which is governed by Transport Scotland and managed by First ScotRail, lies on the Argyle Line and the North Clyde Line...
being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article - On 8 June 2006, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000 featured article mark, with Iranian peoplesIranian peoplesThe Iranian peoples are an Indo-European ethnic-linguistic group, consisting of the speakers of Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, as such forming a branch of Indo-European-speaking peoples...
. - On 15 August 2006 the Wikimedia Foundation launches WikiversityWikiversityWikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project, which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than...
. - On 24 November 2006, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,500,000 article mark, with Kanab ambersnailKanab ambersnailThe Kanab ambersnail, scientific name Oxyloma haydeni kanabensis or Oxyloma kanabense, is a critically endangered subspecies or species of small, air-breathing land snail, a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc in the family Succineidae, the amber snails...
being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article. - On 4 April 2007, the first CD selection in English was published as a free download (see 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection2006 Wikipedia CD SelectionThe Wikipedia Selection is a DVD selection of articles taken from Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, and was first produced in April 2006. There have been two major revisions since then, the 2007 version in April 2007 and the 2008/9 version in October 2008. It was the first available English...
). - On 9 September 2007, the English language Wikipedia passed the 2,000,000 article mark. El HormigueroEl HormigueroEl Hormiguero is a Spanish television program with a live audience focusing on comedy, science, and politics running since September 2006. It is hosted and produced by screenwriter Pablo Motos and aired on Cuatro, a Spanish television station, until June 11, 2011 but since September 5, 2011 is...
, an article which covers a Spanish TV comedy show, is accepted by consensus as the 2,000,000th article. - On 17 August 2009, the English language Wikipedia passed the 3,000,000 article mark, with Beate EriksenBeate EriksenBeate Marie Eriksen is a Norwegian actress and director. Eriksen has acted at several Norwegian theatres and is known for her role on the popular soap opera Hotel Cæsar....
being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article. - On 12 December 2010, the English language Wikipedia passed the 3,500,000 article mark.
Fundraising
Every year, Wikipedia runs a fundraising campaign to support its operations.- One of the first fundraisers was held from 18 February 2005 to 1 March 2005, raising US$94,000, which was US$21,000 more than expected.
- On 6 January 2006, the Q4 2005 fundraiser concluded, raising a total of just over US$390,000.
- In 2009, the fundraising campaign gained Wikipedia more than US$6 million.
- The 2010 campaign was launched on November 13, 2010. Notably, the campaign's banner advertisements, featuring Jimmy WalesJimmy WalesJimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
, became the subject of an internet memeInternet memeThe term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
. - In 2011, the campaign raised US$16 million.
External impact
- In 2007, Wikipedia is deemed fit to be used as a major source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in the Formula OneFormula OneFormula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1 and referred to officially as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile . The "formula" designation in the name refers to a set of rules with which...
trademark case ruling. - Over time Wikipedia gains recognition amongst other traditional media as a "key source" for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake2004 Indian Ocean earthquakeThe 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The quake itself is known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake...
and related tsunamiTsunamiA tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...
, the biographies of 2008 Presidential election candidates, and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacreVirginia Tech massacreThe Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people...
. The latter article was accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published local to the shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event." - On 21 February, Noam Cohen of the New York Times publishes A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
- On 27 February, An article in The Harvard CrimsonThe Harvard CrimsonThe Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...
newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
do include Wikipedia in their syllabiSyllabusA syllabus , is an outline and summary of topics to be covered in an education or training course. It is descriptive...
, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.
Effect of biographical articles
Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography.- November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy. Someone, who later admitted that he wanted to make a joke, wrote into the article that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy murder of 1963.
- December 2006: German comedian "Atze Schröder", who does not want his real name published, sued Arne Klempert, secretary of Wikimedia Deutschland, because of the Wikipedia article. Then the artist drew back his complaint, but wanted his attorney's costs to be paid by Klempert. Trial decided that the artist had to cover those costs by himself.
- 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner AkçamTaner AkçamAltuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish historian and sociologist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide, and is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject....
was briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International AirportMontréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International AirportMontréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport or Montréal-Trudeau, formerly known as Montréal-Dorval International Airport, is located on the Island of Montreal, from Montreal's downtown core. The airport terminals are located entirely in Dorval, while the Air Canada headquarters complex...
because of false information on his biography that he was a terrorist. - September 2008: Changes or "manipulations" at the Sarah PalinSarah PalinSarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...
article in English Wikipedia have been noticed by the media. - November 2008: Germany's Left Party politician Lutz HeilmannLutz HeilmannLutz Heilmann is a German politician of the left-wing party Die Linke. He was elected to the Bundestag in the 2005 federal election as a member of the party list in Schleswig-Holstein. Shortly thereafter it was revealed that he had worked for the Stasi...
believed that some remarks in "his" article caused damage to his reputation. He succeeded in getting a court order to make Wikimedia Deutschland stop linking from its page www.wikipedia.de to German Wikipedia de.wikipedia.org. The result was a huge national support for Wikipedia, more donations to Wikimedia Deutschland, a rise from several dozen page views of "Lutz Heilmann" daily to half a million the two days after, and after a couple of days Heilmann asked the court to withdraw the court order. - December 2008: Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch chapter, won a preliminary injunction. An entrepreneur was linked in "his" article with the criminal Willem HolleederWillem HolleederWillem Frederik Holleeder is perhaps one of the best known Dutch criminals. In 2007 he was sentenced to nine years in prison for several counts of extortion, including the extortion of Willem Endstra, who was murdered in 2004 after falling-out with Holleeder. He is currently serving his sentence...
and wanted the article deleted. The judge in UtrechtUtrecht (province)Utrecht is the smallest province of the Netherlands in terms of area, and is located in the centre of the country. It is bordered by the Eemmeer in the north, Gelderland in the east, the river Rhine in the south, South Holland in the west, and North Holland in the northwest...
did not follow him but believed the chapter that it has no influence on the content of Dutch Wikipedia. - February 2009: When Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jakob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu GuttenbergKarl-Theodor zu GuttenbergKarl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg is a German politician of the Christian Social Union ....
became federal minister on February 10, 2009, an unregistered user added an eleventh given name in the article on German Wikipedia: Wilhelm. Numerous newspapers took it over. When wary Wikipedians wanted to erase Wilhelm, the revert has been reverted with regard to those newspapers. This case about Wikipedia reliability and journalists copying from Wikipedia became known as Falscher Wilhelm (wrong Wilhelm). - May 2009: Richard Herzinger, a German journalist writing for Die WeltDie WeltDie Welt is a German national daily newspaper published by the Axel Springer AG company.It was founded in Hamburg in 1946 by the British occupying forces, aiming to provide a "quality newspaper" modelled on The Times...
, has an article in German Wikipedia which was vandalized. The IP user added that Herzinger was Jewish; the sighter marked this as "sighted" (meaning that there is no vandalism in the article). Herzinger complained about that to Wikipedians who immediately deleted the assertion. According to Herzinger who wrote about the incident in a newspaper article it happens frequently that right wing extremists call him a Jew due to his articles considered being pro Israel. - October 2009: In 1990, the German actor Walter SedlmayrWalter SedlmayrWalter Sedlmayr was a Bavarian stage, television, and movie actor.-Career:After his 1945 wartime Abitur, Sedlmayr served as a Flakhelfer towards the end of World War II...
was murdered. Years later, when the two murderersWolfgang Werlé and Manfred LauberWolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber are German half-brothers who were convicted of the 1990 murder of actor Walter Sedlmayr. The murder, and subsequent trial and conviction of Werlé and Lauber in 1993, received extensive media coverage in Germany and elsewhere.In 2009, Werlé and Lauber again received...
were released from prison, they wanted to begin a new life and not be connected in public to the murder. According to German law they prohibited the media from mentioning their names. The men's lawyer also sent the Wikimedia Foundation a cease and desistCease and desistA cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity and not to take it up again later or else face legal action. The recipient of the cease-and-desist may be an individual or an organization....
letter requesting the men's names be removed from the English language Wikipedia. The case is an example of differing law in Germany (which strongly considers privacy) and the US (which favors freedom of speech).
Controversies
- January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake2004 Indian Ocean earthquakeThe 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The quake itself is known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake...
, attempted to promote itself on its Wikipedia page. - October 2005: Alan McilwraithAlan McilwraithAlan Mcilwraith is a former call centre worker from Glasgow, Scotland who was exposed by a tabloid newspaper after passing himself off as a much-decorated British Army officer....
was exposed as a fake war hero with a Wikipedia page. - November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy caused Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity was ascertained by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch. Following this, the scientific journal NatureNatureNature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
undertook a peer reviewPeer reviewPeer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
ed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in Encyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaThe Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
, and concluded they are comparable in terms of accuracy. Britannica rejected their methodology and their conclusion. Nature refused to make any apologies, asserting instead the reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms. (For studies like this, see Reliability of WikipediaReliability of WikipediaThe reliability of Wikipedia , compared to other encyclopedias and more specialized sources, is assessed in many ways, including statistically, through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in the editing process unique to Wikipedia.Several...
.) - Early-to-mid 2006: The congressional aides biography scandalsCongressional staffer edits to WikipediaSome Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia have created controversy, notably in the early to mid-2006 timeframe...
came to public attention, in which several political aides were caught trying to influence the Wikipedia biographies of several politicians to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replace the article in part or whole by staff authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty MeehanMarty MeehanMartin Thomas "Marty" Meehan is an American attorney and politician from the state of Massachusetts. He is the current Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, a position he assumed on July 1, 2007...
, Norm ColemanNorm ColemanNorman Bertram Coleman, Jr. is an American attorney and politician. He was a United States senator from Minnesota from 2003 to 2009. Coleman was elected in 2002 and served in the 108th, 109th, and 110th Congresses. Before becoming a senator, he was mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota, from 1994 to 2002...
, Conrad BurnsConrad BurnsConrad Ray Burns is a former United States Senator from Montana. He is only the second Republican to represent Montana in the Senate since the passage in 1913 of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and is the longest-serving Republican senator in Montana history.While in...
, Joe BidenJoe BidenJoseph Robinette "Joe" Biden, Jr. is the 47th and current Vice President of the United States, serving under President Barack Obama...
, Gil GutknechtGil GutknechtGilbert William "Gil" Gutknecht, Jr. is an American politician. Gutknecht was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives first elected in 1994 to represent Minnesota's 1st congressional district, one of eight congressional districts in Minnesota...
. In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy CoxCathy CoxLera Catharine "Cathy" Cox is a Georgia politician, a member of the Democratic Party, the former Secretary of State of Georgia, and a candidate for Governor of Georgia in 2006...
, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents. Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006. - July 2006: Joshua GardnerJoshua GardnerThe 5th Duke of Cleveland hoax garnered media attention in January 2006 after Joshua Adam Gardner allegedly misrepresented himself to the students and staff of Stillwater Area High School in Oak Park Heights, Minnesota as a fictional fifth Duke of Cleveland from England.When student journalists...
was exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Wikipedia page. - January 2007: English-language Wikipedians in QatarQatarQatar , also known as the State of Qatar or locally Dawlat Qaṭar, is a sovereign Arab state, located in the Middle East, occupying the small Qatar Peninsula on the northeasterly coast of the much larger Arabian Peninsula. Its sole land border is with Saudi Arabia to the south, with the rest of its...
were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP addressIP addressAn Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar from the site. - On 23 January 2007, a MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
employee offered to pay Rick JelliffeRick JelliffeRichard Alan Jelliffe is an Australian programmer and standards activist , particularly associated with web standards, markup languages, internationalization and schema languages. He is the founder and Chief Technical Officer of Topologi Pty. Ltd, an XML tools vendor in Sydney...
to review and change certain Wikipedia articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format. - In February 2007, The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent English WikipediaEnglish WikipediaThe English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials. The editor, Ryan JordanEssjay controversyThe Essjay controversy was an incident concerning a prominent Wikipedia participant and salaried Wikia employee, known by the username Essjay, who later identified himself as Ryan Jordan. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Wikipedia known as administrator, bureaucrat, arbitrator and...
, became a WikiaWikiaWikia is a free web hosting service for wikis . It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki...
employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, and communicated to the original article author. (See: Essjay controversyEssjay controversyThe Essjay controversy was an incident concerning a prominent Wikipedia participant and salaried Wikia employee, known by the username Essjay, who later identified himself as Ryan Jordan. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Wikipedia known as administrator, bureaucrat, arbitrator and...
) - February 2007: Fuzzy ZoellerFuzzy ZoellerFrank Urban "Fuzzy" Zoeller, Jr. is an American professional golfer. He is one of three golfers to have won The Masters in his first appearance in the event. He also won the 1984 U.S. Open, which earned him the 1985 Bob Jones Award....
sued a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Wikipedia biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network. - 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner AkçamTaner AkçamAltuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish historian and sociologist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide, and is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject....
was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist. - In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site Wikinews.
- In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently-deceased TV theme composer Ronnie HazlehurstRonnie HazlehurstRonald "Ronnie" Hazlehurst was an English composer and conductor who, having joined the BBC in 1961, became its Light Entertainment Musical Director....
, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the S Club 7S Club 7S Club, formerly known as S Club 7, were a pop group created by former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller, consisting of members Tina Barrett, Paul Cattermole, Jon Lee, Bradley McIntosh, de facto lead singer Jo O'Meara, Hannah Spearritt and Rachel Stevens. The group rose to fame by starring in their...
song "ReachReach (S Club 7 song)"Reach" is a song by S Club 7, released as a single on 22 May 2000. "Reach" is an up-tempo track co-written by Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd .. The lyrics were probably inspired by a Shirley Bassey double A-side of "Reach For The Stars" and "Climb Every Mountain" although the song itself sounds...
". In fact, he hadn't, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article. - In February 2007, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. In Bauer v. Glatzer, Bauer claimed that information on Wikipedia critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The Electronic Frontier FoundationElectronic Frontier FoundationThe Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
defended Wikipedia and moved to dismiss the case on 2 May 2008. The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on 1 July 2008. - On 14 July 2009, the National Portrait Gallery issued a cease and desist letter for alleged breach of copyright, against a Wikipedia editor who downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the NPG website, and placed them on Wikimedia CommonsWikimedia CommonsWikimedia Commons is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation....
. See National Portrait Gallery copyright conflictsNational Portrait Gallery copyright conflictsIn July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London sent a demand letter threatening possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement, to an editor-user of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation...
for more. - In April and May 2010, there was controversy over the hosting and display of sexual drawing and pornographic images including images of children on Wikipedia. It led to the mass removal of pornographic content from Wikimedia Foundation sites.
Notable forks and derivatives
See for a partial list of Wikipedia mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is maintained.A significant number of sites use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
.
Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre
Enciclopedia Libre
Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.-History:...
(Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu
Susning.nu
Susning.nu was a Swedish language wiki, started in October 2001 by Lars Aronsson . In its first three years , Susning.nu ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit...
(Swedish), and Baidu Baike
Baidu Baike
Baidu Encyclopedia is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based encyclopedia provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Like Baidu itself, the encyclopedia is heavily self-censored in line with government regulations....
(Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.
In 2006, Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
founded Citizendium
Citizendium
Citizendium is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001....
, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
. The site cited its aims were 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other things'. (see also Nupedia
Nupedia
Nupedia was an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief...
).
Publication on other media
The German WikipediaGerman Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and mostly publicly editable online encyclopedia.Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest and, with over articles, the second-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia...
was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139 page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia
German Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and mostly publicly editable online encyclopedia.Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest and, with over articles, the second-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia...
in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off.
In September 2008, Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann AG is a multinational media corporation founded in 1835, based in Gütersloh, Germany. The company operates in 63 countries and employs 102,983 workers , which makes it the most international media corporation in the world. In 2008 the company reported a €16.118 billion consolidated...
published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.
The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
was published in April 2006 by SOS Children as the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection
2006 Wikipedia CD Selection
The Wikipedia Selection is a DVD selection of articles taken from Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, and was first produced in April 2006. There have been two major revisions since then, the 2007 version in April 2007 and the 2008/9 version in October 2008. It was the first available English...
. In April 2007, "Wikipedia Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the 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...
and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles. The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file
Disk image
A disk image is a single file or storage device containing the complete contents and structure representing a data storage medium or device, such as a hard drive, tape drive, floppy disk, CD/DVD/BD, or USB flash drive, although an image of an optical disc may be referred to as an optical disc image...
or Torrent file, or accessed online at the project's website.
A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of Wikipedia available for use on iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
s. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.
Lawsuits
In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency ActSection 230 of the Communications Decency Act
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is a landmark piece of Internet legislation in the United States, codified at...
. In the defamation action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer due to the provisions of this section. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.
Early roles of Wales and Sanger
Both WalesJimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
and Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
played important roles in the early stages of Wikipedia. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. To Wales is ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Wikipedia; Sanger wrote, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine" (emphasis in original text). He also wrote, "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia." Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software." Sanger coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name. In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems. In terms of project roles, Sanger spearheaded and pursued the project as its leader in its first year, and did most of the early work in formulating policies (including "Ignore all rules" and "Neutral point of view") and building up the community. Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of Bomis' funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and his changing personal priorities; however, by 2004, the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger criticized Wikipedia, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair." In 2002 Sanger parted ways with Wikipedia; by 2005 Wales began to dispute Sanger's role in the project, three years after Sanger left.
In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia; however, according to Brian Bergstein
Brian Bergstein
Brian Bergstein is the National Technology Editor for the American Associated Press news agency, based in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. From 2004 to 2005, he held one of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships...
of the Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder." There is evidence that Sanger was called co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Wikipedia press releases and Wikipedia articles and in a September 2001 New York Times article for which both were interviewed. In 2006, Wales said, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title"; nonetheless, before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder and, indeed, identified himself as "co-founder" as late as August 2002.
As of March 2007: Wales emphasized this employer–employee relationship and his ultimate authority, terming himself Wikipedia's sole founder; and Sanger emphasized their statuses as co-founders, referencing earlier versions of Wikipedia pages (2004, 2006), press releases (2002–2004), and media coverage from the time of his involvement routinely terming them in this manner.
Blocking of Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities, most notably in the People's Republic of China, IranIran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
, Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, Thailand
Thailand
Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
, Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...
, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....
.
People's Republic of China
The People's Republic of China and internet service providerInternet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s in mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking
Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China is conducted under a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. There are no specific laws or regulations which the censorship follows...
contentious Web sites and Wikimedia sites have been blocked multiple times in its history, sometimes all articles, and sometimes selectively by topic, region, language version, or ISP. Notable blocks include:
- June 2004: Access to the Chinese WikipediaChinese WikipediaChinese Wikipedia is the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started in October 2002, Chinese Wikipedia had over 270,000 articles as of September 2009 and 383,391 articles as of November 7, 2011...
from Beijing blocked on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989Tiananmen Square protests of 1989The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...
. Possibly related to this, on 31 May an article from the IDG News Service was published, discussing the Chinese Wikipedia's treatment of the protests. - September 2004: A second and less serious outage. Access to Wikipedia was erratic or unavailable to some users in mainland China — this block was not comprehensive and some users in mainland China were never affected. The exact reason for the block is unknown, but it may have been linked with the closing down of YTHT BBS, a popular Peking UniversityPeking UniversityPeking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...
-based BBS that was shut down a few weeks earlier for hosting overtly radical political discussions. - October 2005 to around mid October 2006: For the first few days the English Wikipedia seems to have been unblocked in most provinces in China, while users were still unable to access the Chinese version in certain provinces, varying by ISP. By November, both versions seemed to be accessible in all provinces and by all ISPs. The end of the block coincided with the Chinese Wikipedia's 100,000th article milestone.
The first block had an effect on the vitality of Chinese Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, which suffered sharp dips in various indicators such as the number of new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. In some cases, it took anywhere from six to twelve months in order to recover to the levels of May 2004.
On 31 July 2008, the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
reported that the Chinese Wikipedia had been unblocked that day in China; it had still been blocked the previous day. This came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the upcoming Olympic Games
2008 Summer Olympics
The 2008 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, was a major international multi-sport event that took place in Beijing, China, from August 8 to August 24, 2008. A total of 11,028 athletes from 204 National Olympic Committees competed in 28 sports and 302 events...
, and websites such as the Chinese edition of the BBC were being unblocked following talks between the International Olympic Committee
International Olympic Committee
The International Olympic Committee is an international corporation based in Lausanne, Switzerland, created by Pierre de Coubertin on 23 June 1894 with Demetrios Vikelas as its first president...
and the Games' Chinese organisers.
Syria
Access to the Arabic WikipediaArabic Wikipedia
The Arabic Wikipedia is the Arabic language version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of September 2011, it has over 150,000 articles, 400,000 registered users and over 11,000 images...
was blocked in Syria between 30 April 2008 and 13 February 2009, although other language editions remained accessible.
Thailand
Wikipedia's article on Thailand's King Bhumibol AdulyadejBhumibol Adulyadej
Bhumibol Adulyadej is the current King of Thailand. He is known as Rama IX...
has been blocked by most Thai ISPs since October 2008, due to lèse majesté
Lèse majesté
Lese-majesty is the crime of violating majesty, an offence against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state.This behavior was first classified as a criminal offence against the dignity of the Roman republic in Ancient Rome...
concerns.
Tunisia
The Wikimedia website was blocked in Tunisia between 23 November and 27 November 2006.Pakistan
According to local bloggers and the Internet community in Pakistan, access to Wikipedia was restricted for several hours in March 2006.United Kingdom
On 5 December 2008, users in the United Kingdom were affected by a block of the Virgin KillerVirgin Killer
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976 and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude...
article and the associated picture :File:Virgin Killer.jpg, following a claim that the image was "potentially illegal" under the Protection of Children Act 1978
Protection of Children Act 1978
The Protection of Children Act 1978 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.The Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament as a Private Member's Bill by Cyril Townsend in the 1977-1978 session of Parliament....
. An estimated 95% of British users were affected by the block, which was put in place on the recommendation of the Internet Watch Foundation
Internet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
. The IWF's recommendation was rescinded on 9 December 2008.
Uzbekistan
Access to the Uzbek Wikipedia was blocked in Uzbekistan on 10 January 2008; the block was lifted 5 March 2008. This was reportedly the second time Wikipedia had been blocked in Uzbekistan; the first case was in 2007.Wikipedia records and archives
- Wikipedia's project files contain a large quantity of reference and archive material. Useful resources on Wikipedia history within Wikipedia are:
Historical summaries
Size and statistics
Discussion and debate archives
Other
Third party
- The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource — Free Software Foundation endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia) 1999.
- Even older Wikipedia snapshot – 28 February 2001
- Early Wikipedia snapshot – 30 March 2001
- New York Times on Wikipedia, September 2001
- Larry SangerLarry SangerLawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir and Part II SlashdotSlashdotSlashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
(18 April 2005 – 19 April 2005) - Giles, Jim, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, NatureNature (journal)Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica, 14 December 2005 (subscription required) - Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., March 2006
- Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature, 23 March 2006