   #copyright

History of Wikipedia

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Recent History

   Wikipedia, a project to produce a free content encyclopedia that can be
   edited by anyone, formally began on 15 January 2001 as a complement to
   the similar, but expert-written, Nupedia project. It has since replaced
   Nupedia, growing to become a large global project. As of 2006, it
   includes millions of articles and pages worldwide, and content from
   hundreds of thousands of contributors.
   Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder
   Enlarge
   Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder

Antecedents

   The concept of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place
   goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon, but the
   modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed
   encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th
   century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond
   the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to
   H. G. Wells' short story World Brain ( 1937) and Vannevar Bush's future
   vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think ( 1945). Another
   milestone was Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu in 1960.

   With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop
   Internet encyclopedia projects. Free software exponent Richard Stallman
   described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning
   Resource" in 1999. He described Wikipedia's formation as "exciting
   news" and his Free Software Foundation encourages people "to visit and
   contribute to the site". One never-realized predecessor was the
   Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia.

Formulation of the idea

   Wikipedia was founded as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now
   defunct) project founded by Jimmy Wales to produce a free encyclopedia.
   Nupedia had an elaborate multi-step peer review process, and required
   highly qualified contributors. The writing of articles was slow
   throughout 2000, the first year that project was online, despite having
   a mailing-list of interested editors and a full-time editor-in-chief,
   Larry Sanger.

   During Nupedia's first year, Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to
   supplement Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Wales has
   claimed that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the
   concept of a wiki. Independently, Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and
   regular on Ward Cunningham's wiki (the WikiWikiWeb), introduced Sanger
   to wikis over dinner on January 2, 2001. Sanger thought a wiki would be
   a good platform to use, and proposed that a UseModWiki (then v. 0.90)
   be set up for Nupedia. Wales set one up and put it online on January
   10.

Beginnings of a new project

   The Wikipedia logo used until late 2001

   There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and
   reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website.
   Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and
   Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on
   January 15. This day is now known as " Wikipedia Day" within the
   community.

   The bandwidth and Server (located in San Diego) used for these projects
   were donated by Bomis. Many current and past Bomis employees have
   contributed some content to the encyclopedia; notably Tim Shell,
   co-founder and current CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.

   The first edits ever made on Wikipedia are believed to be test edits by
   Wales, however the oldest article still preserved is (as documented at
   Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles) the article UuU, created by the
   user Eiffel.demon.co.uk on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC. This was on
   the second day after the start of Wikipedia.

   The project received many new participants after being mentioned three
   times on the Slashdot website — two minor mentions in March 2001.. It
   then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited
   technology and culture website Kuro5hin on July 25. Between these
   relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there has been a steady stream of
   traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent
   hundreds of new visitors to the site every day.
   The Wikipedia logo, designed by The Cunctator, used from late 2001
   until 2003

   The project passed 1,000 articles around February 12, 2001, and 10,000
   articles around September 7. In the first year of its existence, over
   20,000 encyclopedia entries were created — a rate of over 1,500
   articles per month. On August 30, 2002, the article count reached
   40,000. The rate of growth has more or less steadily increased since
   the inception of the project, except for a few software- and
   hardware-induced slow-downs.

International expansion

   Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally.
   The first domain reserved for a non-English Wikipedia was
   deutsche.wikipedia.com (on 16 March 2001), followed after some minutes
   by the Catalan, being the latter during for about two months the only
   one with articles in a non-English language. The first reference of the
   French Wikipedia is from 23 March and then in May 2001 it followed a
   wave of new language versions in Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew,
   Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. They were
   soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian In September, a further commitment
   to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the
   year, when international statistics first began to be logged,
   Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.

Continuing growth

2002

   Size of Wikipedia, until September 2002.
   Enlarge
   Size of Wikipedia, until September 2002.
   Wikipedia growth rate, until September 2002.
   Enlarge
   Wikipedia growth rate, until September 2002.
   Wikipedia traffic rate, until September 2002.
   Enlarge
   Wikipedia traffic rate, until September 2002.

   Until January 2002, Sanger was employed by Bomis as editor-in-chief of
   Nupedia and the unofficial leader of Wikipedia. Funding ran out,
   however, and Sanger resigned from both positions in March 2002.
     * In February 2002, most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia broke
       away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre. The project is
       occasionally visited by "vandals" who remove valid articles or post
       inappropriate content. While such vandalism is generally quickly
       reverted, the project's main page was, for a time, subjected to
       repeated vandalism. This led to the protection of the page so that
       it could only be changed by administrators.
     * On April 4, 2002 Brilliant Prose, since renamed to
       Wikipedia:Featured Articles, was moved to the Wikipedia Namespace
       from the article namespace. At that time, selection was informal;
       the Featured Articles Candidacy process was not to be instituted
       for several years yet.
     * In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would
       never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of
       Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org (see:
       .com and .org).
     * In the same summer, policy and style issues were clarified with the
       creation of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, along with a number of
       other policies and guidelines.
     * In October 2002, Derek Ramsey started to use a "bot", or program,
       to add a large number of articles about United States towns; these
       articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data.
       Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics.
       These articles were generally well received, but some users
       criticized them for their uniformity and generally machine-like
       writing style (for example, see this version of a town article).
     * 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.

2003

     * In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was
       added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
     * On January 22, 2003, the English Wikipedia was again slashdotted
       after having reached the 100,000 article milestone. Two days later,
       the German language Wikipedia, the largest non-English version,
       passed the 10,000 article mark.
     * On June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded. On the same
       day " Wikiquote" was created. A month later, " Wikibooks" was
       launched.
     * Around October 15, 2003, the current Wikipedia logo was installed.
       The logo concept was selected by a voting process, which was
       followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The
       final selection was created by David Friedland based on a logo
       design and concept created by Paul Stansifer.
     * On October 28, 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.
     * After 6 December 2003, Wikipedia administrators could change the
       text of the interface by editing the pages in the MediaWiki
       namespace such as the page that a blocked user will see when they
       try to edit a page. ( MediaWiki:Blockedtext).

2004

     * In January 2004, Wikipedia passed the 200,000 article milestone in
       English and reached 450,000 articles for both English and
       non-English wikis. The next month, the combined article count of
       the English and non-English wikis reached 500,000.
     * In late February 2004 a coordinated new look for the Main Page
       appeared. On February 25, the listing of important overview
       articles, was replaced by a single link to Template:WikipediaTOC.
       Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries,
       In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look. On February
       26, 2004, User:maveric149 (Daniel Mayer) implemented the first
       entries of an automated archive for the Selected anniversaries
       which appear on the Main Page. This feature updates daily on the
       Main Page of the English Wikipedia.
     * On April 20, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached
       250,000.
     * On May 29, 2004, all the various Wikiprojects were updated to a new
       version of MediaWiki, the software that runs the various
       Wikiprojects.
     * On May 30, 2004, the first instances of Wikipedia:Categorization
       entries appeared: Category:Mathematics and Category:World War II.
       Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had
       existed from the founding of Wikipedia. However Larry Sanger had
       viewed the schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles,
       whereas the 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.
     * On June 2, 2004, the People's Republic of China blocked the access
       to the Chinese Wikipedia in mainland China. A few days later, all
       language Wikipedias were blocked. The ban was lifted on June 17.
     * After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the
       interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at
       MediaWiki:Monobook.css.
     * On July 7, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached
       300,000.
     * From July 10 to August 30, 2004 the Wikipedia:Browse and
       Wikipedia:Browse by overview formerly on the Main Page were
       replaced by links to overviews. On August 27, 2004 the Community
       Portal was started, to serve as a focus for community efforts.
       These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by
       individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad-hoc
       collaborations between like-minded editors.
     * On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia reached one million articles in
       over 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in
       the press. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew
       language Wikipedia, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan.
     * On November 20, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached
       400,000.

2005

     * On February 5, 2005, the first Wikipedia:Portal, since renamed to
       Portal:Biology was created.
     * On March 18, 2005, Wikipedia passed the 500,000 article milestone
       in English.
     * On 7 June 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time the bulk of the
       Wikimedia servers were moved to a new facility across the street.
       All Wikimedia projects were down during this time.
     * On June 19, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 600,000 article
       mark.
     * On July 16, 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of
       including the day's Wikipedia:Featured pictures on the Main Page,
       in the space until then occupied by the " Wikipedia:Did you know"
       section. The featured picture of the day now appears daily as part
       of the recent Main Page redesign.
     * On August 25, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 700,000
       article mark.
     * On September 29, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 750,000
       article mark.
     * As of Saturday, October 15, 2005, there were over 500,000 accounts
       registered on English Wikipedia.
     * On October 20, 2005, direct access to all the Wikipedia sites was
       blocked in most areas of mainland China.
     * On November 1, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 800,000
       article mark.
     * And all during the year, other languages versions were also active
       (which might not be obvious from this summary)

Seigenthaler incident

   On November 29, 2005, John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote an op-ed in USA Today
   to criticize a biography written about him at Wikipedia. Earlier
   versions of the Wikipedia entry, online from May through September of
   that year, had contained incorrect statements about Seigenthaler, and
   this information also appeared on Wikipedia syndicate sites
   Reference.com and Answers.com. Specifically the statement, "For a brief
   time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy
   assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever
   proven." Seigenthaler described the statements, which had been written
   by an anonymous Wikipedia user, as "Internet character assassination".
   Seigenthaler did not use the collaborative editing feature of Wikipedia
   to correct the misstatement himself. Seigenthaler said "I am interested
   in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and
   irresponsible research tool." He also equated Wikipedia to gossip. In
   an Interview with a CNN reporter, the reporter also expressed concern
   about her own biography which she said portrayed her as she did not
   wish to be portrayed. The author of the hoax, Brian Chase, was
   discovered in December 2005. He subsequently resigned from his job and
   apologized in person to Seigenthaler. Chase was traced through the IP
   address of the 26 May post, which led to his employer's computer
   system. The controversy brought Wikipedia an unprecedented level of
   (mainly negative) publicity in major media outlets. Wikipedia's share
   of internet page views as recorded by Alexa doubled in less than two
   months after the publication of the editorial, which was well above the
   average rate of growth through 2005.

   Image:Seigenthaler effect.gif
     * On December 5, 2005, registration became a requirement for the
       creation of New pages on the English speaking Wikipedia. See
       Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-12-05/Page creation restrictions.

Nature study

   On December 14, 2005, the scientific journal Nature published the
   results of a comparative review between the Britannica and the
   Wikipedia Encyclopedias concerning scientific articles. This, being the
   first comparative review concerning Wikipedia of its kind, was done by
   scientific experts in their field. They were given articles about the
   same subject, one from Britannica, and one from Wikipedia. Scientists
   did not know the source, and were told to look for factual errors,
   critical omissions, and misleading statements. After examining 42
   articles in both the encyclopedias, Nature obtained the following
   results:

          Britannica: 123 errors, an average of 2.92 by article
          Wikipedia: 162 errors, an average of 3.86 by article.

   The data shows that, at least in science, Wikipedia has comparable
   accuracy to other modern encyclopedias. However, some of the Wikipedia
   articles were found to be "poorly structured and confusing". In March,
   2006, Britannica criticised the study as inaccurate, stating "Almost
   everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for
   identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text
   and its headline, was wrong and misleading."
     * On December 22, 2005, a Semi-protection policy was implemented in
       Wikipedia's MediaWiki software.

2006

     * On January 10, Wikipedia® became a registered trademark of
       Wikimedia Foundation.
     * On February 28, the one-millionth user account was registered for
       the English language edition.
     * On March 1, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000,000
       article mark, with Jordanhill railway station.
     * On March 19, following a vote, the Main Page of the English
       language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years.
     * On April 4, the first CD selection in English was published as a
       free download (see 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection).
     * On June 8, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000 featured
       article mark, with Iranian peoples.
     * On November 24, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,500,000
       article mark, with Kanab Ambersnail.

Access in Mainland China

   The People's Republic of China and internet service providers in
   Mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking contentious Internet
   sites in mainland China, and Wikimedia sites have been blocked at least
   three times in its history. Currently, Wikimedia appears to be
   undergoing the third block in its history.

   The first block lasted between June 2 and June 21, 2004. It began when
   access to the Chinese Wikipedia from Beijing was blocked on the
   fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

   Possibly related to this, on May 31 an article from the IDG News
   Service was published, discussing the Chinese Wikipedia's treatment of
   the protests. The Chinese Wikipedia also has articles related to
   Taiwanese independence, written by contributors from Taiwan and
   elsewhere. A few days after the initial block of Chinese Wikipedia, all
   Wikimedia sites were blocked in Mainland China. In response to the
   blocks, two sysops prepared an appeal to lift the block and asked their
   regional internet service provider to submit it. All Wikimedia sites
   were unblocked between June 17 and June 21, 2004.

   The first block had an effect on the vitality of Chinese Wikipedia,
   which suffered sharp dips in various indicators such as the number of
   new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. In some
   cases, it took anywhere from six to twelve months in order to recover
   to the levels of May 2004.

   The second and less serious outage lasted between September 23 and
   September 27, 2004. During this four day period, access to Wikipedia
   was erratic or unavailable to some users in mainland China — this block
   was not comprehensive and some users in mainland China were never
   affected. The exact reason for the block is unknown, but it may have
   been linked with the closing down of YTHT BBS, a popular Peking
   University-based BBS that was shut down a few weeks earlier for hosting
   overtly radical political discussions. Refugees from the BBS had
   arrived en masse on Chinese Wikipedia. Chinese Wikipedians once again
   prepared a written appeal to regional ISPs, but the block was lifted
   before the appeal was actually sent out; the reasons of which are, once
   again, a mystery.

   The third block began on October 19, 2005, and seems to have ended
   around mid October, 2006. For the first few days the English Wikipedia
   seems to have been unblocked in most provinces in China, while users
   are still unable to access the Chinese version in certain provinces,
   varying by ISP. By November, both versions seemed to be accessible in
   all provinces and by all ISPs. The end to the block came about a year
   after it began, and also coincided with the Chinese Wikipedia's
   100,000th article milestone. However, both the Chinese and English
   Wikipedias were re-blocked on November 17.

Authorship of the Wikipedia concept

   There has been debate about Sanger’s role in the creation of Wikipedia
   and the extent to which he has been given accurate credit for his
   contributions. Sanger has claimed variously to have "conceived of"
   Wikipedia and to have co-founded it, which Jimmy Wales has disputed,
   stating, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a
   co-founder, but he likes the title." Part of the disparity in outlook
   may lie in the difference between the terms "open source" and "wiki"
   and Nupedia versus Wikipedia. Sanger concedes that it was Wales alone
   who conceived of an encyclopedia that non-experts could contribute to,
   i.e., the Nupedia. "To be clear, the idea of an open source,
   collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people,
   was entirely Jimmy’s, not mine" (emphasis in original text). However,
   Sanger maintains that it was he who brought the wiki concept to Wales
   and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and that, after some initial
   skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. Wales has claimed that Jeremy
   Rosenfeld first suggested the idea of a wiki to him, though he claimed
   earlier, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki
   software." Sanger also maintains that he "came up with the name
   'Wikipedia', a silly name for what was at first a very silly project."

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
