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History of Wikipedia
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This article needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (August 2018)
The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 5,870,520 articles, equivalent to over 2,500 print volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Including all language editions, Wikipedia has over 48 million articles,[1] equivalent to over 19,000 print volumes.
Wikipedia's Main Page as it appeared on 20 December 2001
Wikipedia began with its launch on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered[2] by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993,[3] but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source)[4] was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.[5]
Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This characteristic greatly contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and even Bomis's Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham.[6] Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. In practice, Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.
According to Alexa Internet, as of September 2018, Wikipedia is the world's fifth-most-popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic.[7] Wikipedia's worldwide monthly readership is approximately 495 million.[8] Worldwide in September 2018, WMF Labs tallied 15.5 billion page views for the month.[9] According to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 117 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[10]
Contents
1 Historical overview
1.1 Background
1.2 Formulation of the concept
1.3 Founding of Wikipedia
1.4 Divisions and internationalization
1.5 Development of Wikipedia
1.6 Organization
1.7 Evolution of logo
2 Timeline
2.1 First decade: 2000–2009
2.1.1 2000
2.1.2 2001
2.1.3 2002
2.1.4 2003
2.1.5 2004
2.1.6 2005
2.1.7 2006
2.1.8 2007
2.1.9 2008
2.1.10 2009
2.2 Second decade: 2010–present
2.2.1 2010
2.2.2 2011
2.2.3 2012
2.2.4 2013
2.2.5 2014
2.2.6 2015
2.2.7 2016
2.2.8 2017
2.2.9 2018
2.2.10 2019
3 History by subject area
3.1 Hardware and software
3.2 Look and feel
3.3 Internal structures
3.4 The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures
3.5 Projects and milestones
3.6 Fundraising
3.7 External impact
3.7.1 Effect of biographical articles
3.8 Early roles of Wales and Sanger
3.9 Controversies
3.10 Notable forks and derivatives
3.11 Publication on other media
3.12 Lawsuits
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
6.1 Wikipedia records and archives
6.2 Third party
Historical overview
Background
The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the ancient Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, but the modern concept of a general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's 1934 book Traité de documentation; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum, an institution dedicated to indexing the world's knowledge, in 1910. This concept of a machine-assisted encyclopedia was further expanded in H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm-based Memex in his essay "As We May Think" (1945).[11] Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, which was begun in 1960.[11]
