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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Graphs are unavailable
due to technical issues.
Updates on
reimplementing the
Graph extension, which
will be known as the
Chart extension, can be
found on Phabricator and
on [Link].
 The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 6,963,878 articles.[1]

Wikipedia's main page (20 December 2001)

Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of
volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days
after the domain was registered.[2] It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free
encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.

The technological and conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia predate this; the earliest
known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993,[3] and the
concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open
source)[4] was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998.[5]

Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should
control editing. This contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such
as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2001, the license for Nupedia
was changed to GFDL, and Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a
complementary project, using an online wiki as a collaborative drafting tool.[6]

While Wikipedia was initially imagined as a place to draft articles and ideas for eventual
polishing in Nupedia, it quickly overtook its predecessor, becoming both draft space and
home for the polished final product of a global project in hundreds of languages,
inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.

In 2014, Wikipedia had approximately 495 million monthly readers.[7] In 2015, according
to comScore, Wikipedia received over 115 million monthly unique visitors from the
United States alone.[8] In September 2018, the projects saw 15.5 billion monthly page
views.[9]
Historical overview
Background
The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the
ancient Library of Alexandria and Library of Pergamum, but the modern concept of a
general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis
Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists.[10] 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 began in 1960.[11]

The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia. However, even
without the internet, huge complex projects of similar nature had made use of
volunteers. Specifically, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived
with the speech at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1857,
by Richard Chenevix Trench. It took about 70 years to complete. Dr. Trench envisioned
a grand new dictionary of every word in the English language, and to be used
democratically and freely. According to author Simon Winchester, "The undertaking of
the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English
literature – and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of
the magazines and journals – must be instead 'the combined action of many.' It would
be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge one – probably comprising hundreds
and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers."[12]

Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form
of encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia Britannica,
were often book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-
ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts
to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia
was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates;[3] this project died before generating any
encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the
usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998.[5] His
published document outlined how to "ensure that progress continues towards this best
and most natural outcome."

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that the concept of Wikipedia came when he
was a graduate student at Indiana University, where he was impressed with the
successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs
Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy interesting. Wales also
credits Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek's essay, "The Use of Knowledge in
Society," which he read as an undergraduate,[13] as "central" to his thinking about "how
to manage the Wikipedia project."[14] The essay asserts that information is decentralized
—that each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively—and
that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge, rather than by
a central authority. At the time, Wales was studying finance and was intrigued by the
incentives of the many people who contributed as volunteers toward creating free
software, where many examples were having excellent results.[15] According to The
Economist, Wikipedia "has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the
internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their
computers as tools for liberation, education, and enlightenment."[16]

Formulation of the concept

Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an
earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-
advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis.[17][18][19] Nupedia
was founded upon the use of qualified volunteer contributors and a considered multi-
step peer review process.[20] Despite its mailing list of over 2000 interested editors, and
the presence of Sanger as full-time editor-in-chief,[21] the production of content for
Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles written during the first year.[19]

The Nupedians discussed various ways to create content more rapidly.[18] Wikis had
been used elsewhere on the web to organize knowledge,[22] and the idea of a wiki-based
complement to Nupedia was seeded by a conversation between Sanger and Ben
Kovitz,[23][24][25] and by another between Wales and Jeremy Rosenfeld.[23] Kovitz was
a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki
"the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, over a dinner on 2 January
2001.[23][24][25][26] Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki
software" for people bored by Nupedia process,[27] and later stated in December 2005
that Rosenfeld had introduced him to the wiki concept.[28][29][30][31] 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:[32]

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy
Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not... As to
Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing
content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to
either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented
practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general, are very low-risk.
They're also a potentially great source of content. So there's little downside, as far as I
can determine.
Wales set one up and put it online on Wednesday 10 January 2001, under the
[Link] domain.[33] This moved to a new wiki under the [Link] domain on
15 January. On 17 January, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNUPedia project
went online, potentially competing with Nupedia,[34] but within a few years the FSF
encouraged people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]" instead.[35]

Founding of Wikipedia
See also: First Wikipedia edit, Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles, and Wikipedia:First
100 pages
There was some hesitation among editors about binding Nupedia too closely to a wiki-
style workflow.[19] After a Nupedia wiki was launched under [Link] on 10
January 2001,[36] Wales proposed launching the new project under its own name, and
Sanger proposed Wikipedia, framing it as "a supplementary project to Nupedia which
operates entirely independently."[37] A new wiki was launched at [Link] on
Monday 15 January 2001. The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for
these initial projects were donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later
contributed content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of
Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.

Wales stated in December 2008 that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the
text "Hello, World!", but this may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which soon
after was scrapped and replaced by a restart.[38][39] The first recovered edit to
[Link] was to the HomePage on 15 January 2001, reading "This is the new
WikiPedia!"; it can be found here.[40] The existence of the project was formally
announced and an appeal for volunteers to engage in content creation was made to the
Nupedia mailing list on 17 January 2001.[41]

The project received many new participants after being mentioned on

the Slashdot website in July 2001,[42] having already earned two minor mentions in
March 2001.[43][44] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited
technology and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July.[45] Between these 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.[46]

Divisions 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 [Link] (created on Friday 16
March 2001, 01:38 UTC),[47] followed after a few hours
by [Link] (at 13:07 UTC).[48] The Japanese Wikipedia, started
as [Link], was created around that period,[49][50] and initially used
only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most
articles in a non-English language,[51][52] although statistics of that early period are
imprecise.[53]

The French Wikipedia was created on or around 11 May 2001,[54] in a wave of new
language versions that also
included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish,
and Swedish.[55] These languages were soon joined by Arabic[56] and Hungarian.[57][58] In
September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of
Wikipedia,[59] 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.[60]

In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, fewer
than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase as the
encyclopedia grows. As of 2014, about 85% of all Wikipedia articles were in non-English
Wikipedia versions.[61] As of 2023, the English and Simple English Wikipedias have 7
million articles between them, but roughly 90% of articles were in non-English
Wikipedias.[62]

Development of Wikipedia

Wikipedia's main page (28 September 2002)

In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust,
Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia.[63] By 2002, he and Wales differed in their views
on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration
concept, but they disagreed on how to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for
experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.

Wales 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 restricted his role to occasional input on serious
matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar
reference projects.

Sanger said he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything,[64] and proposed that
experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. In 2006 he founded Citizendium, an
open encyclopedia that used real names for contributors 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".[65][66]

Past content of Wikipedia

Old, even obsolete, encyclopedia articles are highly valuable for historical research.
[67]
For each Wikipedia article, past versions are accessible through the "View history"
link at the top of the page. The full version history of all Wikipedia articles is also
available for download as data dumps, in the form of compressed XML files.[68]
In addition, the ZIM File Archive,[69] at Internet Archive, contains past full snapshots of
Wikipedia as well as article selections, in multiple languages, from different years. They
can be opened with Kiwix software. Between 2007 and 2011, three CD/DVD
versions (called Wikipedia Version 0.5, 0.7 and 0.8) containing a selection of articles
from English Wikipedia were released. They became available as Kiwix ZIM files, both
from the ZIM File Archive[69] and from the Kiwix download site.[70]

Evolution of logo


Founding – late 2001 (tentative)

Late 2001 – 12 October 2003

 

13 October 2003 – 13 May 2010

13 May 2010 – present

Timeline
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.
First decade: 2000–2009
2000

Bomis staff in mid-2000

In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to publish articles
written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by
Wales, with Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising
company Bomis.[71]

2001
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration
on articles prior to entering the peer-review process.[72] The name was suggested by
Sanger on 11 January 2001 as a portmanteau of the words wiki (Hawaiian for "quick")
and encyclopedia.[73] The [Link] and [Link] domain names were
registered on 12[74] and 13 January,[75] respectively, with [Link] being brought
online on the same day.[76] 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.[42] The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August
2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[77]

The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the
homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.[78] At the time,
approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created.[79] After the September 11
attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page,
resulting in a spike in traffic.[80]

2002
2002 saw the reduction of funding for Wikipedia from Bomis and the departure of
Sanger. A fork of the Spanish Wikipedia took place, with the establishment of
the Enciclopedia Libre. Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run
commercial advertising. The first portable MediaWiki software went live on 25
January. Bots were introduced. The first sister project (Wiktionary) and first
formal Manual of Style were launched. Close to 200 contributors were editing Wikipedia
daily.[81]

2003
 Wikipedia's main page (August 2003)
The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition,
the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established.
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 English Wikipedia's Arbitration system and
committee ("ArbCom") were developed. Wikisource was created as a separate project
on 24 November 2003, to host free textual sources as its aim in multiple languages and
translations.

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 half of
these articles. The website's server farms were moved from California to
Florida. Categories and CSS style configuration sheets were introduced. The first
attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two
weeks in June. Formal elections began for a board for the Foundation, and an
Arbitration Committee on English Wikipedia. The first national chapter of the
Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, was recognized. The first social meeting in the
United States took place in Boston, in July. Wikimedia Commons was created on 7
September 2004 to host media files for Wikipedia in all languages.

Bourgeois v. Peters,[82] (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.[83] 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.'"[82]
2005
In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet,
according to Hitwise, with 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, the Seigenthaler incident, occurred in 2005 when a
well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography that had gone unnoticed
for months. In the wake of this and other concerns,[84] 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 semi-protection, 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.[85] Wikimania 2005, the first Wikimania conference, was held from 4 to 8 August
2005 at the Haus der Jugend in Frankfurt, attracting about 380 attendees.

Duration: 8 minutes and 10 seconds.8:10Subtitles [Link] – the

Wikimentary, documentary about Wikimania 2005, featuring Jimmy Wales and Ward
Cunningham
2006
The English Wikipedia gained its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station, on 1
March 2006.[86][87] 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 five global
brands of 2006.[88]

Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient
volume and called 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 13 August.[89] The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a
combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words, by 13 August. [90] The
English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day,[91] with the
[Link] domain name ranked the 10th-busiest in the world. Wikipedia continued to
garner visibility in the press – the Essjay controversy broke out 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 than creating a distinct biographical article.[92]

On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia gained its two-millionth article, El

Hormiguero.[93] There was some controversy in late 2007 when the Volapük
Wikipedia jumped from 797 to over 112,000 articles, briefly becoming the 15th-largest
Wikipedia edition, due to automated stub generation by an enthusiast for
the Volapük constructed language.[94][95] According to the MIT Technology Review, the
number of regularly active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at
more than 51,000, and has since been declining.[96] In April 2007, Wikipedia Version 0.5
article selection release was published.[97]

2008
Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents
within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth Wikipedia article was created, and by
the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.

2009
On 25 June 2009 at 22:15 UTC, following the death of Michael Jackson, the website
temporarily crashed. The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly a million visitors to
Jackson's biography within one hour, probably the most visitors in a one-hour period to
any article in Wikipedia's history. By late August 2009, the number of articles in all
Wikipedia editions had exceeded 14 million.[98] The three-millionth article on the English
Wikipedia, Beate Eriksen, was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC.[99] On 27
December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded one million articles, becoming the
second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME article listed Wikipedia
among 2009's best websites.[100] Wikipedia content became licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in 2009.[101]

Second decade: 2010–2019

2010
On 24 March, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating
problem. Failover 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.[102][103]

On 13 May, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo,
new navigation tools, and a link wizard.[104] However, the classic interface remained
available for those who wished to use it. On 12 December, the English Wikipedia
passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia's millionth article was
created on 21 September. The 1-billionth Wikimedia project edit was performed on 16
April.[105] In early 2010, Wikipedia Version 0.7 article selection release was published.[97]
2011

One of several cakes made to celebrate Wikipedia's

10th anniversary in 2011.[106]
Wikipedia and its users held many celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's
10th anniversary on 15 January.[107] The site began efforts to expand its growth in India,
holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November 2011.[108][109] 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. The Dutch
Wikipedia exceeded 1 million articles on 17 December 2011, becoming the fourth
Wikipedia edition to do so.

On 3 March 2011, Wikipedia Version 0.8 article selection release was published.[110] The
"Wikimania 2011 – Haifa, Israel" stamp was issued by Israel Post on 2 August 2011.
This was the first-ever stamp dedicated to a Wikimedia-related project. Between 4 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.[111] Also in October 2011, Wikimedia
announced the launch of Wikipedia Zero, an initiative to enable free mobile access to
Wikipedia in developing countries through partnerships with mobile operators.[112][113]

2012
The staff at the Wikimedia Foundation the moment the SOPA blackout happened
On 16 January, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that the English
Wikipedia would shut down for 24 hours on 18 January as part of a protest meant to call
public attention to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, two anti-
piracy laws under debate in the United States Congress. Calling the blackout a
"community decision", Wales and other opponents of the laws believed that they would
endanger free speech and online innovation.[114] A similar blackout was staged on 10
July by the Russian Wikipedia, in protest against a proposed Russian internet regulation
law.[115]
In late March 2012, the Wikimedia Deutschland announced Wikidata, a universal
platform for sharing data between all Wikipedia language editions.[116][117] The US$1.7-
million Wikidata project was partly funded by Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[118] Wikimedia Deutschland
assumed responsibility for the first phase of Wikidata, and initially planned to make the
platform available to editors by December 2012. Wikidata's first phase became fully
operational in March 2013.[119][120]

Justin Knapp
In April 2012, Justin Knapp became the first single contributor to make over one million
edits to Wikipedia.[121][122] Jimmy Wales congratulated Knapp for his work and presented
him with the site's Special Barnstar medal and the Golden Wiki award for his
achievement.[123] Wales also declared that 20 April would be "Justin Knapp Day".[124]

On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia gained its 4-millionth article, Izbat al-Burj.[125] In
October 2012, historian and Wikipedia editor Richard J. Jensen opined that the English
Wikipedia was "nearing completion", noting that the number of regularly active editors
had fallen significantly since 2007, despite Wikipedia's rapid growth in article count and
readership.[126] According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia was the world's sixth-most-popular
website as of November 2012.[127] Dow Jones ranked Wikipedia fifth worldwide as of
December 2012.[128]

2013
On 22 January 2013, the Italian Wikipedia became the fifth language edition of
Wikipedia to exceed 1 million articles, while the Russian and Spanish Wikipedias gained
their millionth articles on 11 and 16 May respectively. On 15 July the Swedish and on 24
September the Polish Wikipedias gained their millionth articles, becoming the eighth
and ninth Wikipedia editions to do so. On 27 January, the main belt
asteroid 274301 was officially renamed "Wikipedia" by the Committee for Small Body
Nomenclature.[129]
The first phase of the Wikidata database, automatically providing interlanguage links
and other data, became available for all language editions in March 2013.[120] In April
2013, the French secret service was accused of attempting to censor Wikipedia by
threatening a Wikipedia volunteer with arrest unless "classified information" about a
military radio station was deleted.[130]

Presentation about the Wikipedia VisualEditor

In July, the VisualEditor editing system was launched, forming the first stage of an effort
to allow articles to be edited with a word processor-like interface instead of using wiki
markup.[131] An editor specifically designed for smartphones and other mobile devices
was also launched.[132]

2014
Video review of Wikipedia content in 2014, encouraging viewers to edit Wikipedia
In February 2014, a project to make a print edition of the English Wikipedia, consisting
of 1,000 volumes and over 1,100,000 pages, was launched by German Wikipedia
contributors.[7] The project sought funding through Indiegogo, and was intended to honor
the contributions of Wikipedia's editors.[133] On 22 October 2014, the first monument to
Wikipedia was unveiled in the Polish town of Slubice.[134]

On 8 June, 15 June, and 16 July 2014, the Waray Wikipedia, the Vietnamese
Wikipedia and the Cebuano Wikipedia each exceeded the one million article mark. They
were the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Wikipedias to reach that milestone. Despite having
very few active users, the Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias had a high number of
automatically generated articles created by bots.

2015
Video marking English Wikipedia's milestone of five million articles on 1 November 2015
In mid-2015, Wikipedia was the world's seventh-most-popular website according
to Alexa Internet,[135] down one place from the position it held in November 2012. At the
start of 2015, Wikipedia remained the largest general-knowledge encyclopedia online,
with a combined total of over 36 million mainspace articles across all 291 language
editions.[61] On average, Wikipedia receives a total of 10 billion global pageviews from
around 495 million unique visitors every month,[7][136] including 85 million visitors from the
United States alone,[8] where it is the sixth-most-popular site.[135]

Artist Michael Mandiberg talks about Print Wikipedia

Print Wikipedia was an art project by Michael Mandiberg that created the ability to print
7473 volumes of Wikipedia as it existed on 7 April 2015. Each volume has 700 pages
and only 110 were printed by the artist.[137] On 1 November 2015, the English Wikipedia
reached 5,000,000 articles with the creation of an article on Persoonia terminalis, a type
of shrub.

2016
On 19 January 2016, the Japanese Wikipedia exceeded the one million article mark,
becoming the thirteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was of
Wave 224, a World War II submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In mid-2016,
Wikipedia was once again the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa
Internet,[138] up one place from the position it held in the previous year.

2017
In mid-2017, Wikipedia was listed as the world's fifth-most-popular website according
to Alexa Internet,[139] rising one place from the position it held in the previous year.
Wikipedia Zero was made available in Iraq and Afghanistan. On 29 April 2017, online
access to Wikipedia was blocked across all language editions in Turkey by the Turkish
authorities. This block lasted until 15 January 2020, as the court of Turkey ruled that the
block violated human rights. The encrypted Japanese Wikipedia has been blocked in
China since 28 December 2017.[140]

2018
On 13 April 2018, the number of Chinese Wikipedia articles exceeded 1 million,
becoming the fourteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The Chinese Wikipedia has
been blocked in Mainland China since May 2015.[141] Later in the year, on 26 June,
the Portuguese Wikipedia exceeded the one million article mark, becoming the fifteenth
Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was Perdão de Richard
Nixon (the Pardon of Richard Nixon). During 2018, Wikipedia retained its listing as the
world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet.[142] One notable
development was the use of Artificial Intelligence to create draft articles on overlooked
topics.[143]

2019
On 23 April 2019, Chinese authorities expanded the block of Wikipedia to versions in all
languages.[144][145] The timing of the block coincided with the 30th anniversary of the 1989
Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth
Movement, resulting in stricter internet censorship in China.[146] In August 2019,
according to [Link], Wikipedia fell from fifth-placed to seventh-placed website in the
world for global internet engagement.[147]

Third decade: 2020–present

2020
See also: Wikipedia coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic
On 23 January 2020, the six millionth article, the biography of Maria Elise Turner
Lauder, was added to the English Wikipedia. Despite this growth in articles, Wikipedia's
global internet engagement, as measured by Alexa, continued to decline. By February
2020, Wikipedia fell to the eleventh-placed website in the world for global internet
engagement.[147] Both Wikipedia's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the
supporting edits, discussions, and even deletions were thought to be a useful resource
for future historians seeking to understand the period in detail.[148] The World Health
Organization collaborated with Wikipedia as a key resource for the dissemination of
COVID-19-related information as to help combat the spread of misinformation. [149][150]

2021
In January 2021, Wikipedia's 20th anniversary was noted in the media.[151][152][153][154] On 13
January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit
was made by Steven Pruitt.[155] MIT Press published an open access book of
essays Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Unfinished Revolution, edited by Joseph
Reagle and Jackie Koerner with contributions from prominent Wikipedians,
Wikimedians, researchers, journalists, librarians and other experts reflecting on
particular histories and themes.[156] By November 2021, Wikipedia had fallen to the
thirteenth-placed website in the world for global internet engagement.[147]

2022
On 6 December 2022, Wikipedian Richard Knipel created the article Artwork title, whose
first revision was a draft generated by ChatGPT that Knipel had made minor edits to
more closely conform with Wikipedia standards. Knipel stated on a talk page that he
believed this was the first time anyone had used ChatGPT to compose a Wikipedia
article. The posting of this article was criticized by other editors and sparked controversy
within the Wikipedia community, leading to an extensive debate about whether
ChatGPT and similar models should be used in writing content for Wikipedia and, if so,
to what extent.[157]

2023
In January 2023, the default Wikipedia desktop interface was changed for the first time
since 2010, to Vector 2022.[158] The new interface received massive critique from users,
of many, centered around the fixed width which resulted in an abundance of white
space on wide monitors, leading to a 90,000-word-long discussion on whether the new
skin should be default, the autumn prior. Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to reject
the new skin and "curtly" demanded a return to the old skin. Other critique was aimed at
the Wikimedia Foundation hiring a design team with limited wiki-experience. Brandon
Harris, who was a senior designer at Wikipedia from 2010 to 2014, said: "Wikimedia
Foundation often hires designers who aren’t familiar with the community, and they come
in and try to make all these changes—running head-first into a buzz saw—and the
community understandably resists".[159]

Duration: 4 seconds.0:04Sound logo of Wikimedia (including Wikipedia)[160]

After consultation and a contest, the first sound logo of Wikimedia (including Wikipedia)
was adopted.[160]

History by subject area

Hardware and software
Main article: MediaWiki
The software that runs Wikipedia, and the computer hardware, server farms and
other systems upon which Wikipedia relies.
 In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl by Clifford
Adams. The server still runs on Linux, although the original text was stored in
files rather than in a database. Articles were named with
the CamelCase convention.
 In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Wikipedia was
introduced, replacing the older UseModWiki. Written specifically for the project
by Magnus Manske, it included a PHP wiki engine.
 In July 2002, a major rewrite of the software powering Wikipedia went live;
dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and
became MediaWiki. It was written by Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the
increasing demands of the growing project.
 In October 2002, Derek Ramsey created a bot – an automated program
called Rambot – to add a large number of articles about United States towns;
these articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data. He thus
increased the number of Wikipedia articles by 33,832.[161] This has been called
"the most controversial move in Wikipedia history".[162]
 In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was added. The code
was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
 On 9 June 2003, Wikipedia's ISBN interface was amended to make ISBNs in
articles link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-
editable page Wikipedia:Book sources. Before this, ISBN link targets were coded
into the software and new ones were suggested on the Wikipedia:ISBN 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 administrators 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 Diego, California
to Tampa, Florida.[163]
 On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of
the MediaWiki software.
 On 30 May 2004, the first instances of "categorization" entries appeared.
Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed since
the founding of Wikipedia. However, Sanger had viewed the schemes as lists,
and even hand-entered articles, whereas the categorization 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.[164]
 After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing
the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:[Link].
 Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was
created, allowing transclusion of standard texts.[165]
 On 7 June 2005 at 3:00 a.m. 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 March 2013, the first phase of the Wikidata interwiki database became
available across Wikipedia's language editions.[120]
 In July 2013, the VisualEditor editing interface was inaugurated, allowing users to
edit Wikipedia using a WYSIWYG text editor (similar to a word processor)
instead of wiki markup.[131] An editing interface optimised for mobile devices was
also released.[132]
Look and feel
The external face of Wikipedia, its look and feel, and the Wikipedia branding, as
presented to users.

 On 4 April 2002, BrilliantProse, since renamed Featured Articles,[166] was

moved to the Wikipedia namespace from the article namespace.
 Around 15 October 2003, a new Wikipedia logo was installed. The logo
concept was selected by a voting process,[167] 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 [Link] was set up,
replacing a redirect to the English-language Wikipedia.
 On 5 February 2005, Portal:Biology was created, becoming the first thematic
"portal" on the English Wikipedia.[168] However, the concept was pioneered on
the German Wikipedia, where Portal:Recht (law studies) was set up in
October 2003.[169]
 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.[104]
Layout changes in 2023
"Vector 2022" redirects here. For information about using Vector 2022 on
Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Vector 2022.
 The Pluto article on the English Wikipedia, displayed with the Vector 2022 and Vector
2010 skins enabled
Vector 2022, an update to Wikipedia's previous skin Vector 2010, was
announced in September 2020, and initially slated for debut in 2021, before
being ultimately deployed in January 2023.[170] By January 2023, Wikimedia had
made the update available to 300 of its language editions; it was the default for
the Arabic and Greek versions.[171][172][173]

Vector 2022 features a revised user interface which makes numerous changes
to the arrangement of the interface elements. Among them, the language
selection menu, previously located to the left of the screen, now is found in the
top right corner of the display of the article that is currently read.[173] Additionally,
the sidebar is collapsible behind a hamburger button. Vector 2022 additionally
increases the margins of the article display, which has the effect of limiting the
width of the article;[173] a toggle exists which can decrease the margins and
expand the line width of the article to fill the screen.[174][172] The default size of the
text has not been increased, although the Wikimedia
Foundation told Engadget that they hope to make this an option in future.[171] The
search function was also updated in Vector 2022, as the suggested results in
response to user queries now include images and short descriptions from the
pages in question.[173][175]

The Wikimedia Foundation said that the change was motivated by a desire to
modernize the site and improve the navigation and editing experience for
readers inexperienced with the internet, as the previous skin was deemed
"clunky and overwhelming."[170][171][174] Tests conducted by the foundation yielded
results of a 30 percent increase in user searches, and a 15 percent decrease in
scrolling.[171][174] Early versions of Vector 2022 first went live in 2020 on the
French-, Hebrew-, and Portuguese-language Wikipedia sites,[170] as the skin's
new features were rolled out to users for testing gradually before its full release.
[176]
The skin went live as the default skin for readers of Wikimedia sites in 300
(out of 318) languages on 18 January 2023.[171][172][173]

Following the mass rollout of Vector 2022, it is still possible to read Wikipedia
using the previous skin. However, to do so requires readers to register for a
Wikipedia account, and then set their preferences to display Vector 2010
instead.[173] No changes were made to existing Wikipedia skins such as
Monobook and Timeless, which also remain available to use.[172][177]

Wikipedia users were divided on the changes. A request for comment on

the English Wikipedia asking the community whether or not Vector 2022 should
be deployed as the default skin accumulated over 90,000 words in responses.
[172]
Critics of the redesign objected most prominently to the white space left
empty in the new skin, while other users criticized said critics as having a
kneejerk resistance to change.[172] 165 editors participating in the discussion
disapproved of the new skin, while 153 were in favor, and nine remained neutral.
[178][172][179]
Despite the larger number of editors who expressed that they did not
want Vector 2022 to be deployed in its then-current form, as consensus on
Wikipedia is not decided by vote, the discussion was closed in favor of the
redesign, considering the positive comments left by other users.[178][172] The Vector
2022 developers made some changes to the skin in response to the criticisms,
such as adding a toggle to enable article content to fill the entire width of the
screen.[172][180] Users on the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously disagreed with the
enactment of the new skin.[172]

Journalists responding to Vector 2022's rollout considered the update and the
new features introduced as useful additions, but generally characterized the skin
as a minor update that did not fundamentally change their reading experience on
Wikipedia.[175][172][174] Annie Rauwerda, creator of the Depths of Wikipedia social
media accounts, wrote in Slate that Vector 2022 was not "dramatically different"
from the previous skin. Rauwerda additionally noted the similarity between the
Wikipedia community backlash against the design and previous resistances to
similar visual changes on popular sites such as Reddit.[172] Rauwerda, and Mike
Pearl of Mashable, commented that users displeased with the change could
weigh in on a discussion about the skin, or use the site's built-in customization
features to alter their reading experience.[178][172]

Internal structures
Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its
organization, internal structures, and policies.

 In April 2001, Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view",

[181]
Wikipedia's core non-negotiable editorial policy,[182] 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.[183]
 In September 2001, collaboration by subject matter in WikiProjects is
introduced.[184]
 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 Libre.[185] 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.[186]
 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.
[187]

 In November 2002, new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce were set
up, as well as other language mailing lists, to reduce the volume of traffic
on mailing lists.[188]
 In July 2003, the rule against editing one's autobiography is introduced.[189]
 On 28 October 2003, the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened
in Munich. 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 blog
website LiveJournal, have also sprung up since.
 From 10 July to 30 August 2004
the Wikipedia:Browse and Wikipedia:Browse by overview formerly on the
Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On 27 August 2004
the Community Portal was started,[190] 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,[191] several anti-abuse features
and policies were added to Wikipedia. These were:

 The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWiki extension to assist detection of

abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005.
[192]
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.[193]
 Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who
had created a user account.[194]
 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,[195] 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.[196] 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".[197] 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.[198]
 In April 2007, the results of a 4-month policy review by a working
group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia
policies into one core policy (Wikipedia:Attribution) were 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.
 A one-day blackout of Wikipedia was called by Jimmy Wales on 18
January 2012, in conjunction with Google and over 7,000 other
websites, to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act then under
consideration by the United States Congress.
The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures
Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia Foundation, 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 URL of Wikipedia was changed
from [Link] to [Link] (.com and .org).
 On 20 June 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation 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 (a ticket handling
system).
 Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to
the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. During this
time, Angela was active in editing content and setting policies,
such as privacy policy, within the Foundation.[199]
 On 10 January 2006, Wikipedia became a registered trademark of
Wikimedia Foundation.[200]
 In July 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of
the Wikimedia Foundation.[201]
  In October 2006, Florence Nibart-Devouard became chair of the
board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Edit milestones and projects
Main pages: Wikipedia:Statistics, List of Wikipedias,
and Wikipedia:Milestones
Sister projects and milestones related to articles, user base, and other statistics.

 On 15 January 2001, the first recorded edit of Wikipedia was

performed.
 In December 2002, the first sister project, Wiktionary, was
created; aiming to produce a dictionary and thesaurus of the
words in all languages. It uses the same software as
Wikipedia.
 On 22 January 2003, the English Wikipedia was
again slashdotted after having reached the 100,000 article
milestone with the Hastings, 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
Foundation was founded, "Wikiquote" was created. A month
later, "Wikibooks" was launched. "Wikisource" 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 Warnock, 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's total article count
exceeded 1,000,000 articles in over 105 languages; the
project received a flurry of related attention in the press.[202] The
one millionth article was published in the Hebrew
Wikipedia and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan.
 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
Union being announced in a press release as the landmark
article.[203]
 In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference
website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring
company Hitwise, relegating [Link] to second place.
 On 29 September 2005, the English Wikipedia passed
the 750,000-article mark.
 On 1 March 2006, the English Wikipedia passed
the 1,000,000-article mark, with Jordanhill railway
station being announced on the Main Page as the milestone
article.[204]
 On 8 June 2006, the English Wikipedia passed the 1,000-
featured-article mark, with Iranian peoples.[205]
 On 15 August 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation
launched Wikiversity.[206]
 On 1 September 2006, Wikipedia exceeded 5,000,000 articles
across all 229 language editions.
 On 24 November 2006, the English Wikipedia passed
the 1,500,000-article mark, with Kanab ambersnail being
announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.[204]
 On 4 April 2007, the first Wikipedia CD selection in English
was published as a free download.[207]
 On 22 April 2007, the English Wikipedia passed
the 1,750,000-article mark. RAF raid on La Caine HQ was the
1,750,000th article.
 On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia passed
the 2,000,000-article mark. El Hormiguero was accepted by
consensus as the 2,000,000th article.
 On 28 March 2008, Wikipedia exceeded 10 million articles
across all 251 language editions.
 On 11 October 2008, the English Wikipedia passed
the 2,500,000-article mark. While no attempt was made to
officially identify the 2,500,000th article, Joe Connor
(baseball) has been suggested as the possible article.
 On 17 August 2009, the English Wikipedia passed
the 3,000,000-article mark, with Beate Eriksen being
announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.
 On 27 December 2009, the German
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the second
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 21 September 2010, the French
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the third
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 12 December 2010, the English Wikipedia passed
the 3,500,000-article mark.
 On 22 November 2011, Wikipedia exceeded 20
million articles across all 282 language editions.
 On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia exceeded 100
million page edits.
 On 24 November 2011, the English Wikipedia exceeded 500
million page edits.
 On 17 December 2011, the Dutch
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the fourth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 13 July 2012, the English
Wikipedia exceeded 4,000,000 articles, with Izbat al-Burj.[125]
 On 22 January 2013, the Italian
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the fifth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 11 May 2013, the Russian
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the sixth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 16 May 2013, the Spanish
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the seventh
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 15 June 2013, the Swedish
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the eighth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 25 September 2013, the Polish
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the ninth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 21 October 2013, Wikipedia exceeded 30 million articles
across all 287 language editions.
 On 17 December 2013, the French
Wikipedia exceeded 100,000,000 page edits.
 On 25 April 2014, the English Wikipedia passed
the 4,500,000 article mark.
 On 8 June 2014, the Waray
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the tenth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 15 June 2014, the Vietnamese
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the eleventh
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 17 July 2014, the Cebuano
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the twelfth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 6 September 2015, the Swedish
Wikipedia exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the second
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 1 November 2015, the English Wikipedia
exceeded 5,000,000 articles, with Persoonia terminalis, and it
has over 125,000 editors who have made 1 or more edits in
the past 30 days.
 On 1 February 2016, the Japanese
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the
thirteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 14 February 2016, the Cebuano
Wikipedia exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the third
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 29 April 2016, the Swedish
Wikipedia exceeded 3,000,000 articles, becoming the third
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 26 May 2016, Wikipedia exceeded 40 million articles
across all 293 language editions.
 On 26 September 2016, the Cebuano
Wikipedia exceeded 3,000,000 articles, becoming the fourth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 19 November 2016, the German
Wikipedia exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the fifth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 3 March 2017, the Cebuano
Wikipedia exceeded 4,000,000 articles, becoming the second
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 6 July 2017, the Spanish
Wikipedia exceeded 100,000,000 page edits.
 On 15 September 2017, the Russian
Wikipedia exceeded 100,000,000 page edits.
 On 27 October 2017, the English Wikipedia passed
the 5,500,000-article mark.
 On 13 April 2018, the Chinese
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the
fourteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 27 June 2018, the Portuguese
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the fifteenth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 8 July 2018, the French
Wikipedia exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the fifth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 14 October 2018, the Arabic
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the
sixteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 20 January 2019, the Spanish
Wikipedia exceeded 1,500,000 articles, becoming the seventh
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 1 February 2019, the Wikipedia News recalculated that
the Italian Wikipedia exceeded 1,500,000 articles, becoming
the eighth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 9 March 2019, Wikipedia exceeded 50 million articles
across all 309 language editions.
 On 2 August 2019, the South Azerbaijani
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 page edits.
 On 17 November 2019, the Arabic
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the
eighteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 23 January 2020, the English Wikipedia
exceeded 6,000,000 articles, with Maria Elise Turner
Lauder as the milestone article.
 On 9 March 2020, the Dutch
Wikipedia exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the sixth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 23 March 2020, the Ukrainian
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the
seventeenth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 1 July 2020, the Egyptian Arabic
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the
eighteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 25 December 2020, the Bengali
Wikipedia exceeded 100,000 articles.[208]
 On 3 February 2021, the Malagasy
Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 page edits.
 On 4 February 2021, the English Wikipedia exceeded 1
billion page edits.
 On 14 October 2021, the Cebuano
Wikipedia exceeded 6,000,000 articles, becoming the second
Wikipedia language edition to do so.
 On 14 December 2021, the Polish
Wikipedia exceeded 1,500,000 articles, becoming the twelfth
Wikipedia language edition to do so.[209]
 On 26 December 2021, the Egyptian Arabic
Wikipedia exceeded 1,500,000 articles.[209]
 On 19 January 2022, the Indonesian Wikipedia exceeded 20
million page edits.
 On 17 October 2022, The Norwegian
Wikipedia exceeded 600,000 articles.[209]
 On 27 November 2022, Wikipedia exceeded 60
million articles across all 329 language editions.[210]
Fundraising
Financial development of the Wikimedia Foundation (in US$),
2003–2023
Black: Net assets (excluding the Wikimedia Endowment, which
currently stands at $100m+)
Green: Revenue (excluding third-party donations to Wikimedia
Endowment)
Red: Expenses (including WMF payments to Wikimedia
Endowment)[211]
Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation runs fundraising
campaigns on Wikipedia to support its operations. These
generally last about a month and happen at different times of the
year in different countries. In addition to the fundraising banners
on Wikipedia itself, there are also email campaigns; some emails
invite people to leave the Wikimedia Foundation money in their
wills.[212][213] Revenue has risen every year of the Wikimedia
Foundation's existence, reaching US$180.17 million as of 30 June
2023, versus expenses of US$169.1 million.[214][215] In addition, the
Wikimedia Endowment, an organizationally separate fundraising
effort begun in 2016, reached $100 million in 2021, five years
sooner than planned.[216]
 Sour Revenu Expense Asset Total
Year
ce e s rise assets

2022/20
23 PDF $180,174,1 $169,095,3 $15,619,8 $254,971,3
03 81 04 36

2021/20 $154,686,5 $145,970,9 $8,173,99 $239,351,5

PDF
22 21 15 6 32
2020/20 $162,886,6 $111,839,8 $50,861,8 $231,177,5
PDF
21 86 19 11 36
2019/20 $129,234,3 $112,489,3 $14,674,3 $180,315,7
PDF
20 27 97 00 25
2018/20 $120,067,2 $91,414,01 $30,691,8 $165,641,4
PDF
19 66 0 55 25
2017/20 $104,505,7 $81,442,26 $21,619,3 $134,949,5
PDF
18 83 5 73 70
2016/20 $91,242,41 $69,136,75 $21,547,4 $113,330,1
PDF
17 8 8 02 97
2015/20 $81,862,72 $65,947,46 $13,962,4 $91,782,79
PDF
16 4 5 97 5
2014/20 $75,797,22 $52,596,78 $24,345,2 $77,820,29
PDF
15 3 2 77 8
2013/20 $52,465,28 $45,900,74 $8,285,89 $53,475,02
PDF
14 7 5 7 1
2012/20 $48,635,40 $35,704,79 $10,260,0 $45,189,12
PDF
13 8 6 66 4
2011/20 $38,479,66 $29,260,65 $10,736,9 $34,929,05
PDF
12 5 2 14 8
2010/20 $24,785,09 $17,889,79 $9,649,41 $24,192,14
PDF
11 2 4 3 4
2009/20 $17,979,31 $10,266,79 $6,310,96 $14,542,73
PDF
10 2 3 4 1
2008/20 $3,053,59
PDF $8,658,006 $5,617,236 $8,231,767
09 9
2007/20 $3,519,88
PDF $5,032,981 $3,540,724 $5,178,168
08 6
2006/20
PDF $2,734,909 $2,077,843 $654,066 $1,658,282
07
2005/20
PDF $1,508,039 $791,907 $736,132 $1,004,216
06
 Sour Revenu Expense Asset Total
Year
ce e s rise assets

2004/20
PDF $379,088 $177,670 $211,418 $268,084
05
2003/20
PDF $ 80,129 $23,463 $56,666 $56,666
04
External impact

 In 2007, Wikipedia was deemed fit to be used as a major

source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in a Formula
One trademark case ruling.[217]
 Over time, Wikipedia gained recognition amongst more
traditional media as a "key source" for major new events, such
as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and related tsunami,
the 2008 American Presidential election,[218] and 2007 Virginia
Tech shooting. The latter article was accessed 750,000 times
in two days, with newspapers published locally to the
shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the
clearinghouse for detailed information on the event."[219]
 On 21 February 2007, Noam Cohen of the New York
Times reported that some academics were banning the use of
Wikipedia as a research tool.[220]
 On 27 February 2007, an article in The Harvard
Crimson newspaper reported that some professors at Harvard
University included Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there
was a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[221]
 In July 2013, a large-scale study by four major universities
identified the most disputed articles on Wikipedia, finding that
Israel, Adolf Hitler, and God were more fiercely debated than
any other subjects.[222]
Effect of biographical articles
Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated with new
information comes, 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 (Controversies) and has also led to novel uses of the
biographical material provided.

 In November 2005, the Seigenthaler controversy occurred

when a hoaxer asserted on Wikipedia that journalist John
Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy
assassination of 1963.
 In December 2006, German comedian Atze Schröder sued
Arne Klempert, secretary of Wikimedia Deutschland because
he did not want his real name published in Wikipedia.
Schröder later withdrew his complaint but wanted his
attorney's costs to be paid by Klempert. A court decided that
the artist had to cover those costs himself.[223]
 On 16 February 2007, Turkish historian Taner Akçam was
briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau
International Airport because of false information on his
Wikipedia biography claiming he was a terrorist.[224][225]
 In November 2008, the German Left Party politician Lutz
Heilmann claimed that some remarks in his Wikipedia article
caused damage to his reputation. He succeeded in getting a
court order to make Wikimedia Deutschland remove a key
search portal. The result was a national outpouring of support
for Wikipedia, more donations to Wikimedia Deutschland, and
a rise in daily pageviews of the Lutz Heilmann article from a
few dozen to half a million. Shortly after, Heilmann asked the
court to withdraw the court order.[226]
 In December 2008, Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch chapter,
won a preliminary injunction after an entrepreneur was linked
in "his" article with the criminal Willem Holleeder and wanted
the article deleted. The judge in Utrecht believed Wikimedia's
assertion that it has no influence on the content of Dutch
Wikipedia.[227]
 In February 2009, when Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann
Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und
zu Guttenberg became federal minister on 10 February 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 was reverted with regard to those newspapers. This
case about Wikipedia reliability and journalists copying from
Wikipedia became known as Falscher Wilhelm ("wrong
Wilhelm").[228]
Early roles of Wales and Sanger
Wales, along with others, came up with and funded the idea of an
open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would accept
contributions from ordinary people.[19] Sanger played an important
role in this as Nupedia's editor-in-chief and main employee.[229] In
Sanger's introductory message to the Nupedia mailing list, he said
that Jimmy Wales "contacted me and asked me to apply as editor-
in-chief of Nupedia. [...] He had had the idea for Nupedia since at
least last fall. He tells me that, when thinking about people
(particularly philosophers) he knew who could manage this sort of
long-term project, he thought I would be perfect for the job. This is
indeed my dream job".[230]

Sanger suggested using a wiki to provide a complementary

project for people "intimidated and bored" by Nupedia's elaborate
processes,[27] and coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the
project name.[231][229] This was broadly seen as a way to unblock the
growing community of Nupedians who found it hard to contribute.
[229]
Sanger continued to work on Nupedia while contributing to
Wikipedia (including drafting policies such as "Ignore all
rules"[232] and "Neutral point of view"[63]) and worked with an
outreach lead to build up the community of both Nupedia and
Wikipedia editors.[229] Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger
emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of funding
for his role, which was not viable part-time,[21] and encouraged
others to continue contributing to Wikipedia while noting that
Nupedia could not survive without a full-time editor-in-chief.
[21]
Later that year he stopped contributing to either project, and by
2004 had become publicly critical of Wikipedia. In December 2004
he wrote an essay arguing that Wikipedia was suffering from anti-
elitism.[233] In April 2005 he published a two-part memoir of his work
on Nupedia and Wikipedia, highlighting his role in their creation
and continuing belief that Nupedia deserved to be saved.[233] Later
that year Wales began to push back on Sanger's characterization
of his role in the project.[234][235][236] By 2006, after the launch of
Citizendium, Sanger was harshly critical of Wikipedia, describing it
as "broken beyond repair."[237]

In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of

Wikipedia;[234] however, according to Brian Bergstein of
the Associated Press, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-
founder."[229] Sanger and Wales were referred to as co-founders in
various press releases, interviews, and news reports from
2001[238] and 2002.[239] Before January 2004, Wales did not dispute
Sanger's status as co-founder.[240] 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".[241] Starting in 2006, when Sanger wrote and was
interviewed extensively about the launch of Citizendium, he
emphasized his status as co-founder, and these earlier sources
that described him as such.[229][238][242][243]

Controversies
Main articles: Criticism of Wikipedia, Litigation involving the
Wikimedia Foundation, and Reliability of Wikipedia

 In 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 Nature undertook a peer
reviewed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their
equivalents in Encyclopædia Britannica, and concluded they
are comparable in terms of accuracy.[244][245] Britannica rejected
their methodology and their conclusion.[246] Nature refused to
release any form of apology, and instead asserted the
reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms.[247]
 During early-to-mid-2006, the congressional aides biography
scandals were publicized, whereby several political aides were
caught trying to influence the Wikipedia biographies of several
politicians. The aides removed undesirable information
(including pejorative quotes, or broken campaign promises),
added favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replaced
the article in part or whole by staff-authored biographies. The
staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty
Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden and Gil
Gutknecht.[248] The activities documented were:

Politician Editing undertaken Sources

Replacement with a
Marty Congressional staffers edit boss's
staff-written
Meehan bio on Wikipedia
biography

"Web site's entry on Coleman

revised Aide confirms his staff
Rewrite to make more edited biography, questions
Norm
favorable, claimed to Wikipedia's accuracy". St. Paul
Coleman
be "correcting errors" Pioneer Press(Associated Press).
Archived from the original on 29
September 2007.

Removal of pejorative Williams, Walt (1 January

statements made by 2007). "Burns' office may have
Conrad
the Senator, replaced tampered with Wikipedia
Burns
with "glowing entry". Bozeman Daily
Montana
tributes" as "the voice Chronicle. Retrieved 13
of the farmer" February 2007.

Joe Biden Removal of Congressional staffers edit boss's

unfavorable
 information bio on Wikipedia

Staff rewrite and

removal of Multiple attempts, first using a
Gil
information named account, then an
Gutknecht
evidencing broken anonymous IP account.[249]
campaign promise.

In a separate but similar incident, the campaign manager

for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have
added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political
opponents.[250] Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off
around August 2006.

 In July 2006, Joshua Gardner was exposed as a fake Duke of

Cleveland with a Wikipedia page.[251]
 In January 2007, English-language Wikipedians in Qatar 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 address. Multiple media
sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar
from the site.[252]
 On 23 January 2007, a Microsoft employee offered to pay Rick
Jelliffe to review and change certain Wikipedia articles
regarding an open-source document standard which was rival
to a Microsoft format.[253]
 In February 2007, The New Yorker magazine issued a rare
editorial correction that a prominent English Wikipedia editor
and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona
using fictitious credentials.[254][255] The editor, Ryan Jordan,
became a Wikia 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 (Essjay
controversy).
 Also in February 2007, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued
Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business,
the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency.[256] In Bauer v. Glatzer,
Bauer claimed that information on Wikipedia critical of her
abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The Electronic
Frontier Foundation defended Wikipedia[257] and moved to
dismiss the case on 1 May 2008.[258] The case against the
Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on 1 July 2008.[259]
 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 the sister
site Wikinews.
 In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently deceased TV
theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media
organisations reported that he had co-written the S Club
7 song "Reach". In fact, he had not, and it was discovered that
this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to
Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article.[260]
 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 Commons (National Portrait Gallery and
Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute).[261][262][263][264][265]
 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.[266][267][268] It led to the
mass removal of pornographic content from Wikimedia
Foundation sites.[269][270]
 In November 2012, Lord Justice Leveson wrote in his report
on British press standards, "The Independent was founded in
1986 by the journalists Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen
Glover and Brett Straub..." He had used the Wikipedia article
for The Independent newspaper as his source, but an act of
vandalism had replaced Matthew Symonds (a genuine co-
founder) with Brett Straub (an unknown character).[271] The
Economist said of the Leveson report, "Parts of it are a
scissors-and-paste job culled from Wikipedia."[272]
 In late 2013, commentators publicly shared observations of the
reappearance of many of the pornographic images deleted
from Wikipedia since 2010.[273]
Notable forks and derivatives
There are a large number of Wikipedia mirror and forks. Other
sites also use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized
by Wikipedia. No list of them is maintained. Specialized foreign
language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia
Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susn
[Link] (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these
(such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as
used by Wikipedia, leading to the exchange of material with their
respective language Wikipedias. In 2006, Sanger
founded Citizendium, based upon a modified version
of MediaWiki.[274] The site said it aimed 'to improve on the
Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other
things'.[66][275] In 2006, conservative activist and lawyer Andrew
Schlafly founded Conservapedia, based on MediaWiki.

Publication on other media

The German 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[276] 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.[277] Originally, Directmedia also announced
plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes
of 800 pages each. The publication was due to begin in October
2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was
called off.[278]

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.[279] A free software project has also been launched to
make a static version of English Wikipedia available for use
on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March
2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th-generation iPods.[280]

English Wikipedia CD/DVD/Kiwix ZIM file releases

Link
Release Year Description to ZIM file
download

First CD version, containing a

2006
selection of articles from
Wikipedia
2006 the English Wikipedia. It was
CD
published in April 2006 by SOS
Selection
Children.[281]

[284][285]
Wikipedia 2007 A CD containing around 2000
Version articles selected from the online
0.5 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. It was created
as a test case in preparation for a
DVD version including far more
articles.[282][283] Articles are
categorized according to subject.
The CD version could be
purchased online, downloaded as
a DVD image file or Torrent file,
or accessed online at the project's
website.

First DVD version. General

release of around 31,000 articles
taken from all subject areas. A
Wikipedia manual effort was performed to
2009–
Version remove vandalism, which delayed [287][288]

2010
0.7 the release date.[286] Includes topical
and geographical indexes of
articles, in addition to the
alphabetical index.

General release of around 47,300

articles taken from all subject
areas. Article selection and
vandalism removal using systems
Wikipedia
developed by a group of
Version 2011 [289][290]

volunteers from the Wikipedia

0.8
community, greatly improved
release time. It includes only an
alphabetical index and no article
categorization.

As of June 2022, there have been no more article selection

releases since Wikipedia Version 0.8.[291]

Lawsuits
 In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section
230 of the Communications Decency Act. In the defamation
action Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had
no case to answer because of this section.[292] A similar law in
France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.[293] In
2013, a German appeals court or Oberlandesgericht (the Higher
Regional Court of Stuttgart) ruled that Wikipedia is a "service
provider" not a "content provider", and as such is immune from
liability as long as it takes down content that is accused of being
illegal.[294]

See also

 Internet portal

 History of wikis
 Predictions of the end of Wikipedia
 The Wikipedia Revolution – 2009 book by Andrew Lih
References
1. ^ "Wikistats - Statistics For Wikimedia
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2. ^ "[Link] WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info –
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2017. Retrieved 24 October 2016.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b "Wikipedia of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger".
History Computer. 2010. Archived from the original on 15 April
2012. Retrieved 9 November 2013.
4. ^ "Philosophy". GNU. Archived from the original on 14 October
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5. ^ Jump up to:a b Stallman, Richard (1998). "The Free Universal
Encyclopedia and Learning Resource (1998 Draft)".
GNU. Archived from the original on 24 January 2021.
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6. ^ "WikiHistory". WikiWikiWeb. Archived from the original on 21
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7. ^ Jump up to:a b c "The future of Wikipedia: WikiPeaks?". The
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8. ^ Jump up to:a b "comScore Ranks the Top 50 U.S. Digital Media
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9. ^ "Monthly overview". Wikimedia statistics. Wikimedia
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10. ^ Miloš, Todorović (2018). "From Diderot's Encyclopedia to
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11. ^ Jump up to:a b Reagle, Joseph (2010). Good Faith
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12. ^ Winchester, Simon (1998). The Professor and the Madman: A
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13. ^ "Know It All - The New Yorker". 30 September 2014. Archived
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14. ^ Mangu-Ward, Katherine (30 May 2007). "Wikipedia and
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15. ^ "Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales: "I have this crazy idea that people
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2018, archived from the original on 16 March 2023, retrieved 16
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16. ^ "Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been
higher". The Economist. 9 January 2021. ISSN 0013-
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17. ^ Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic
Monthly. Archived from the original on 23 December 2006.
Retrieved 25 March 2007. Wales and Sanger created the first
Nupedia wiki on 10 January 2001. The initial purpose was to get
the public to add entries that would then be "fed into the
Nupedia process" of authorization. Most of Nupedia's expert
volunteers, however, wanted nothing to do with this, so Sanger
decided to launch a separate site called "Wikipedia". Neither
Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a
lark. This is evident in Sanger's flip announcement of Wikipedia
to the Nupedia discussion list. "Humor me", he wrote. "Go there
and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes". And,
to Sanger's surprise, go they did. Within a few days, Wikipedia
outstripped Nupedia in terms of quantity, if not quality, and a
small community developed. In late January, Sanger created a
Wikipedia discussion list (Wikipedia-L) to facilitate discussion of
the project.
18. ^ Jump up to:a b Sidener, Jonathan (6 December
2004). "Everyone's Encyclopedia". The San Diego Union-
Tribune. Archived from the original on 21 February 2009.
Retrieved 25 March 2007.
19. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Sanger, Larry (18 April 2005). "The Early
History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir – Part I". Archived
from the original on 22 July 2009. "The Early History of Nupedia
and Wikipedia: A Memoir – Part II". Slashdot. 19 April 2005.
Archived from the original on 8 November 2006. My initial idea
was that the wiki would be set up as part of Nupedia; it was to
be a way for the public to develop a stream of content that could
be fed into the Nupedia process. I think I got some of the basic
pages written—how wikis work, what our general plan was, and
so forth—over the next few days. I wrote a general proposal for
the Nupedia community, and the Nupedia wiki went live January
10. The first encyclopedia articles for what was to become
Wikipedia were written then. It turned out, however, that a clear
majority of the Nupedia Advisory Board wanted to have nothing
to do with a wiki. Again, their commitment was to rigor and
reliability, a concern I shared with them and continue to have.
Still, perhaps some of those people are kicking themselves now.
They (some of them) evidently thought that a wiki could not
resemble an encyclopedia at all, that it would be too informal
and unstructured, as the original WikiWikiWeb was (and is), to
be associated with Nupedia. They of course were perfectly
reasonable to doubt that it would turn into the fantastic source of
content that it did. Who could reasonably guess that it would
work? But it did work, and now the world knows better.
20. ^ Kaplan Andreas, Haenlein Michael (2014) Collaborative
projects (social media application): About Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia. Business Horizons, Volume 57 Issue 5, pp. 617–
626
21. ^ Jump up to:a b c "My resignation – Larry Sanger –
Meta". [Link]. Archived from the original on 20
March 2023. Retrieved 16 March 2023. I was more or less
offered the job of editing Nupedia when I was, as an ABD
philosophy graduate student, soliciting Jimbo's (and other
friends') advice on a website I was thinking of starting. It was the
first I had heard of Jimbo's idea of an open content
encyclopedia, and I was delighted to take the job.
22. ^ "From the archives: Highland Park teen is finalist in web
competition". Chicago Tribune. 12 January 2013. Retrieved 21
August 2023.
23. ^ Jump up to:a b c "Ben Kovitz". WikiWikiWeb. Archived from the
original on 4 April 2007. Retrieved 25 March 2007. – see also
Ben Kovitz' fuller account which he links from there.
24. ^ Jump up to:a b Moody, Glyn (13 July 2006). "This time, it'll be a
Wikipedia written by experts". The Guardian.
London. Archived from the original on 22 February 2007.
Retrieved 25 March 2007. – While casting around for a way to
speed up article production, Sanger met with Kovitz, an old
friend, in January 2001. Kovitz introduced Sanger to the idea of
the wiki, invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham: web pages that
anyone could write and edit. "My first reaction was that this
 really could be what would solve the problem," Sanger explains,
"because the software was already written, and this community
of people on WikiWikiWeb" – the first wiki – "had created
something like 14,000 pages". Nupedia, by contrast, had
produced barely two dozen articles. Sanger took up the idea
immediately: "I wrote up a proposal and sent it [to Wales] that
evening, and the wiki was then set up for me to work on." But
this was not Wikipedia as we know it. "Originally it was the
Nupedia Wiki – our idea was to use it as an article incubator for
Nupedia. Articles could begin life on this wiki, be developed
collaboratively and, when they got to a certain stage of
development, be put into the Nupedia system."
25. ^ Jump up to:a b Sidener, Jonathan (23 September
2006). "Wikipedia co-founder looks to add accountability, end
anarchy". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Archived from the
original on 17 October 2007. Retrieved 25 March 2007. The
origins of Wikipedia date to 2000, when Sanger was finishing
his doctoral thesis in philosophy and had an idea for a Web site.
26. ^ Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic
Monthly. p. 3. Archived from the original on 10 November 2006.
Retrieved 25 March 2007. – "Over tacos that night, Sanger
explained his concerns about Nupedia's lack of progress, the
root cause of which was its serial editorial system. As Nupedia
was then structured, no stage of the editorial process could
proceed before the previous stage was completed. Kovitz
brought up the wiki and sketched out 'wiki magic,' the
mysterious process by which communities with common
interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental
contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of
programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online
collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia
bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all
over the project. With Kovitz in tow, Sanger rushed back to his
apartment and called Wales to share the idea. Over the next few
days, he wrote a formal proposal for Wales and started a page
on Cunningham's wiki called 'Wikipedia.'"
27. ^ Jump up to:a b Wales, Jimmy (30 October 2001). "LinkBacks?".
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28. ^ "Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink
Openness". Wired News. 3 May 2007. Archived from the
original on 28 March 2014. Retrieved 1
November 2007. [Link] states: "Wales offered the following
on-the-record comment in an e-mail to [Link]
editor [and NYU Professor] Jay Rosen ...' Larry Sanger was my
employee working under my direct supervision during the entire
process of launching Wikipedia. He was not the originator of the
proposal to use a wiki for the encyclopedia project – that was
Jeremy Rosenfeld'."
29. ^ Rogers Cadenhead. "Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for
Number 1". Archived from the original on 26 September 2008.
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Further reading
Scholarly studies

 Adams, Julia, Hannah Brückner, and Cambria Naslund. "Who

counts as a notable sociologist on Wikipedia?: Gender, race,
and the 'professor test'." Socius 5 (2019):
2378023118823946. online
 Bayliss, Gemma. "Exploring the cautionary attitude toward
Wikipedia in higher education: Implications for higher
education institutions." New Review of Academic
Librarianship 19.1 (2013): 36–57.
 Bridges, Laurie M., and Meghan L. Dowell. "A perspective on
Wikipedia: Approaches to educational use." Journal of
Academic Librarianship 46.1 (2020). online
 Davis, LiAnna L., et al. "The Wikipedia education program as
open educational practice: Global stories." in Open
Educational Resources in Higher Education: A Global
Perspective (Springer Nature Singapore, 2023) pp. 251–278.
 Gildersleve, Patrick, Renaud Lambiotte, and Taha Yasseri.
"Between news and history: Identifying networked topics of
collective attention on Wikipedia." Journal of Computational
Social Science (2023): 1–31.
 Graells-Garrido, Eduardo, Mounia Lalmas, and Filippo
Menczer. "First women, second sex: Gender bias in
Wikipedia." Proceedings of the 26th ACM conference on
hypertext & social media (2015) online
 Konieczny, Piotr. "Teaching with Wikipedia in a 21st‐century
classroom: Perceptions of Wikipedia and its educational
benefits." Journal of the Association for Information Science
and Technology 67.7 (2016): 1523–1534.
 London, Daniel A., et al. "Is Wikipedia a complete and
accurate source for musculoskeletal anatomy?" Surgical and
Radiologic Anatomy 41 (2019): 1187–1192.
 Reagle Jr., Joseph Michael. Good Faith Collaboration: The
Culture of Wikipedia (MIT Press, 2015)
 Salutari, Flavia, et al. "Analyzing Wikipedia users' perceived
quality of experience: A large-scale study." IEEE Transactions
on Network and Service Management 17.2 (2020): 1082–
1095. DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2020.2978685 States 85% of users
are satisfied.
 Sunvy, Ahmed Shafkat, and Raiyan Bin Reza. "Students'
Perception of Wikipedia as an Academic Information
Source." Indonesian Journal Of Educational Research and
Review 6.1 (2023). online
 Timperley, Claire. "The subversive potential of Wikipedia: A
resource for diversifying political science content online." PS:
Political Science & Politics 53.3 (2020): 556–560. online
 Torres-Salinas, Daniel, Esteban Romero-Frías, and
Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado. "Mapping the backbone of the
Humanities through the eyes of Wikipedia." Journal of
Informetrics 13.3 (2019): 793–803. online
 Van Dijck, José. "Neutrality and the Wikipedia Principle,"
in The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social
media by Van Dijck, (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 132–
153.
 Wagner, Claudia, et al. "Women through the glass ceiling:
Gender asymmetries in Wikipedia." EPJ Data Science 5
(2016): 1–24. online
 Wang, Ping, and Xiaodan Li. "Assessing the quality of
information on wikipedia: A deep‐learning approach." Journal
of the Association for Information Science and
Technology 71.1 (2020): 16–28. online
 Zheng, Lei, et al. "The roles bots play in
Wikipedia." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer
Interaction [Link] (2019): 1–20. online
Contemporary reports

 Baker, Nicholson. "The Charms of Wikipedia," New York

Review of Books (March 20, 2008) online
 Poe, Marshall. "The Hive" The Atlantic (Sept 2006), online
 Schiff, Stacy. "Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer
Expertise?" New Yorker (July 31, 2006) online
Primary sources

 Messer-Kruse, Timothy. "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on

Wikipedia," Chronicle Review of Higher Education (February
12, 2012) online
 Sanger, Larry. "The early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A
memoir." Open sources 2 (2005): 307–38. online
 External links
External videos

Jimmy Wales: The birth of

Wikipedia, 2005 TED (conference),
20 mins.

hide
Wikipediaat Wikipedia's sister projects

 Definitions from Wiktionary

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Wikipedia records and archives
Wikipedia's project files contain a large quantity of reference and archive
material. Useful internal resources on Wikipedia history include:
Historical summaries

 Category:Wikipedia years – historical events by year

 History of Wikipedia – from the Wikipedia:Meta
 meta:Wikimedia News – news and milestones index from
all Wikipedias
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of Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles
 Wikipedia:Historic debates
 Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots
 Wikipedia:Wikipedia records
 Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles
Milestones, size and statistics
 [Link] – the Wikimedia Foundation's main
interface for all project statistics, including the various and
combined Wikipedia's.
 Wikipedia milestones
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Discussion and debate archives

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Other

 MediaWiki history
 Nostalgia Wikipedia – a snapshot of Wikipedia from 20
December 2001, running a later version of MediaWiki for
security reasons but using a skin that looks like the
software of the time
 Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia
 Wikipedia:Magnus Manske Day – MediaWiki software
goes live into production
 Wikipedia:Volunteer Fire Department – handling of major
editorial influx. Disbanded when no longer needed (2004)
 ZIM File Archive, at Internet Archive, contains full
Wikipedia snapshots (as well as articles selections) in
multiple languages, from different years. Files can be open
with Kiwix software.
Third party

 "Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic

accuracy by the journal Nature". Encyclopædia Britannica.
March 2006.
 Early Wikipedia snapshot via Internet Archive. 28 February
2001.
 Giles, Jim, "Internet encyclopaedias go head to
head". Nature comparison between Wikipedia
and Britannica. 14 December 2005 (subscription required)
 Larry Sanger. "The Early History of Nupedia and
Wikipedia: A Memoir" and "Part II". Slashdot. 18 April 2005
to 19 April 2005.
 Nature's responses to Encyclopædia Britannica. Nature.
23 March 2006. (subscription required)
 New York Times on Wikipedia. September 2001.
  The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning
Resource – Free Software Foundation endorsement of
Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia). 1999.
show
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