Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and

Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...

. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source) was proposed by

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

in 1998. Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This characteristic greatly contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as

Microsoft Encarta ''Microsoft Encarta'' is a discontinued digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also available on the World Wide Web via an annual subscription, although later articles ...

, ''

Encyclopædia Britannica The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...

'', and even

Bomis Bomis ( to rhyme with "promise") was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. ...

Nupedia Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by ...

, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to

GFDL The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the ...

, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology of a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. In practice, Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects. Wikipedia's worldwide monthly readership in 2014 was approximately 495 million. Worldwide in September 2018, WMF Labs tallied 15.5 billion page views for the month. According to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 117 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.

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 The Library of Pergamum in Pergamum, Asia Minor or Anatolia (present day Turkey). It was one of the most important libraries in the ancient world. The city of Pergamum Founded sometime during 3rd century BC, during the Hellenistic Age, Perga ...

, but the modern concept of a general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with

Denis Diderot Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the '' Encyclopédie'' along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a promi ...

and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the

printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in which the ...

to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to

Paul Otlet Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (; ; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist; predicting the arrival of the internet before World War II, he is among those considered to be the father of infor ...

's 1934 book ''

Traité de Documentation ''Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique'' is a landmark book by Belgian author Paul Otlet, first published in 1934. Legacy The book is considered a landmark in the history of information science, with concepts p ...

''; Otlet also founded the

Mundaneum The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul ...

, 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 Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

World Brain'' (1938) and

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...

's future vision of the

microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...

-based

Memex Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of ...

in his essay " As We May Think" (1945).Reagle, Joseph (2010). ''Good Faith Collaboration. The Culture of Wikipedia''. MIT Press. . Chapter 2: "The Pursuit of the Universal Encyclopedia". Another milestone was

Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and '' hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms '' trans ...

's hypertext design

Project Xanadu Project Xanadu ( ) was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World ...

, which was begun in 1960. The use of volunteers was integral and instrumental in creating 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 The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...

was conceived with the speech at the London Library, on

Guy Fawkes Day Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night and Fireworks Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in Great Britain, involving bonfires and fireworks displays. Its history begins with the e ...

, Nov 5, 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." Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form of encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the ''

'', were often book-based, Microsoft's

Encarta ''Microsoft Encarta'' is a discontinued digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also available on the World Wide Web via an annual subscription, although later article ...

, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

led to many attempts to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia was

Interpedia Interpedia was the first-proposed online encyclopedia which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalogue of all Interpedia pages. History Interpedia was initiated by Rick Gates, who posted a ...

in 1993 by Rick Gates; this project died before generating any encyclopedic content.

Free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

proponent

described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998. His published document outlined how to "ensure that progress continues towards this best and most natural outcome." On Wednesday 17 January 2001, two days after the founding of Wikipedia, the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...

's (FSF)

GNUPedia GNE (originally GNUPedia) was a project to create a free content online encyclopedia, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation. The project was proposed by Richard Stallman in Decemb ...

project went online, competing with

, but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to ikipedia. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has stated that the germ of the concept for Wikipedia, for him, came back when he was a graduate student at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

where he was impressed with the successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

and a sharing economy to be quite interesting. 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 there were many examples having excellent results. According to ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Eco ...

'', 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."

Formulation of the concept

Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded

, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by

, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate multi-step

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

process. Despite its mailing list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief,

, a graduate philosophy student hired by Wales,My resignation: Larry Sanger
(meta.wikimedia.com) – "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." the writing of content for Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles written during the first year. Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a

-based complement originated from a conversation between Sanger and Ben Kovitz. – see also Ben Kovitz
fuller
account which he links from there.-- 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 o Walesthat 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 it into the Nupedia system." Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the

WikiWikiWeb The WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, or user-editable website. It was launched on 25 March 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns. The name ''WikiWikiWeb'' ori ...

". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on Tuesday 2 January 2001. -- 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." Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software", though he later stated in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept. Wired.com states: "Wales offered the following on-the-record comment in an e-mail to NewAssignment.net editor nd NYU Professor

Jay Rosen Jay Rosen (born May 5, 1956) is a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University. Rosen is a contributor to ''De Correspondent'' and a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards board of directors. Biography Rosen has been on ...

...'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'."Also stated on Wikipedia, on Friday 2 December 200
permanent reference
/ref> Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote: Wales set one up and put it online on Wednesday 10 January 2001.

Founding of Wikipedia

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. In his message to Nupedia mailing list sent on 11 January 2001, Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, ''Wikipedia'', and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, , on Monday 15 January 2001. The

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

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 edit may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which soon after was scrapped and replaced by a restart. 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. The project received many new participants after being mentioned on the

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and eval ...

website in July 2001, having already earned two minor mentions in March 2001. It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website

Kuro5hin Kuro5hin (K5; read "corrosion") was a collaborative discussion website founded by Rusty Foster in 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot. Articles were created and submitted by users and submitted to a queue for evaluation. Site members could ...

on 25 July. Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' on 20 September 2001. The project gained its 1,000th article around Monday 12 February 2001, and reached 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On Friday 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000. Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki software deleted old data after about a month. On Tuesday 14 December 2010, developer Tim Starling found backups on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

containing every change made to Wikipedia from its creation in January 2001 to 17 August 2001. It showed the first edit as being to HomePage on 15 January 2001, reading "This is the new WikiPedia!". That edit was imported in 2019 and can be found

here Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Technologies, Here Television * Here TV (form ...

. The first three edits that were known of before Tim Starling's discovery, are: *To page Wikipedia:UuU at 20:08, 16 January 2001 *To page

TransporT Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land ( rail and road), water, cable, pipelin ...

at 20:12, 16 January 2001 *To page User:ScottMoonen at 21:16, 16 January 2001

Divisions and internationalization

Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new

namespace In computing, a namespace is a set of signs (''names'') that are used to identify and refer to objects of various kinds. A namespace ensures that all of a given set of objects have unique names so that they can be easily identified. Namespaces ...

s, each with a distinct set of

username A user is a person who utilizes a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified to the system by a username (or user name). Other terms for username include login name, screenname (or screen name), accoun ...

s. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was (created on Friday 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC), followed after a few hours by (at 13:07 UTC). The

Japanese Wikipedia The is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of , it has over ar ...

, started as , was created around that period, and initially used only

Romanized Japanese The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...

. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language, although statistics of that early period are imprecise. The

French Wikipedia The French Wikipedia (french: Wikipédia en français) is the French-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia. It has articl ...

was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese,

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

, Esperanto,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

, and

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

. These languages were soon joined by

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

and Hungarian. In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia, notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged,

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...

Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...

, and Serbian versions were announced. 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. , about 85.5% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions.

Development of Wikipedia

In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. By 2002, Sanger and Wales differed in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but the two 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. , Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects. Sanger says he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything. He proposed that experts still have a place in the

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

world. He returned briefly to academia, then joined the Digital Universe Foundation. In 2006, Sanger founded

Citizendium Citizendium ( ; "the citizens' compendium of everything") is an English-language wiki-based free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was first announced in September 2006 as a fork of the Engli ...

, an open encyclopedia that used real names for contributors in an effort to reduce disruptive editing, and hoped to facilitate "gentle expert guidance" to increase the accuracy of its content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was to include a statement about "family-friendly content". He stated early on that he intended to leave Citizendium in a few years, by which time the project and its management would presumably be established.

Past content of Wikipedia

Old, even obsolete, encyclopedia articles are highly valuable for historical research. For each Wikipedia article, past versions are accessible through the "View history" link at the top of the page. In addition, ZIM File Archive, at

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

, contains past snapshots of full Wikipedia, as well as articles selections, in multiple languages, from different years. They can be open with

Kiwix Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia Foundati ...

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 The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

were released. They are now available as Kiwix ZIM files, both from ZIM File Archive, and from Kiwix download site.

Evolution of logo

File:Old wikipedia logo.png, alt=This is the very first logo, Founding – late 2001 (tentative) File:Wiki logo The Cunctator.png, alt=This is the second "improved" logo, Late 2001 – 12 October 2003 File:Wikipedia-logo-en.png, alt=This is the next logo., 13 October 2003 – 13 May 2010 File:Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg, alt=This is the present logo, 13 May 2010 – present

Timeline

First decade: 2000–2009

2000

In March 2000, the

project was started. Its intention was to publish articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising company

2001

In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process. The name was suggested by Sanger on 11 January 2001 as a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordswiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

'' ( Hawaiian for "quick") and '' encyclopedia''. The ''wikipedia.com'' and ''wikipedia.org'' domain names were registered on 12 and 13 January, respectively, with ''wikipedia.org'' being brought online on the same day. The project formally opened on 15 January (" Wikipedia Day"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan,

, and

editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" ( NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave arrived on 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper ''

Wales on Sunday Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in 20 ...

''. The

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commer ...

spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

's home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.

2002

2002 saw the end of funding for Wikipedia from

and the departure of

. The forking of the

Spanish Wikipedia The Spanish Wikipedia ( es, Wikipedia en español) is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006 and 1,000,000 articles on May 16, 2013 ...

also took place with the establishment of the '' Enciclopedia Libre''. The first portable

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWi ...

software went live on 25 January. Bots were introduced, Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (

Wiktionary Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a numbe ...

) and first formal Manual of Style were launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project was proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia. Close to 200 contributors were editing Wikipedia daily.

2003

The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

was established, and Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world

logo A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...

. Mathematical formulae using

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...

, Germany, in October. The basic principles of Wikipedia's (known colloquially as "ArbCom") were developed.

Wikisource Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...

was created as a separate project on 24 November 2003, to host free textual sources.

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 farm A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers, usually maintained by an organization to supply server functionality far beyond the capability of a single machine. They often consist of thousands of computers which require ...

s were moved from

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

, and CSS style configuration sheets were introduced, and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being blocked in China for two weeks in June. The formal election of a board and Arbitration Committee began. The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out

systemic bias Systemic bias, also called institutional bias, and related to structural bias, is the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes. The term generally refers to human systems such as institutions. Institutional bias and structur ...

arising from Wikipedia's community structure. ''Bourgeois v. Peters'', (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the

United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (in case citations, 11th Cir.) is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the following U.S. district courts: * Middle District of Alabama * Northern District of Alabama * ...

was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia. It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was 'elevated' at the time of the protest, 'to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times."

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

was created on 7 September 2004 to host media files for Wikipedia in all languages.

2005

In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to

Hitwise Hitwise is a division of Connexity, that measures behavior across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices. Hitwise provides marketers with online insights to help them understand, track and grow market share. Using Hitwise, marketers can define ...

, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005. The first major Wikipedia scandal, the Seigenthaler incident, occurred in 2005, when a well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months. In the wake of this and other concerns, WP:BLP was started on 17 December 2005, with the narrative "I started this due to the Daniel Brandt situation"
Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons
/ref> the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry investigations, a new feature called , a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005, after the Seigenthaler incident where an anonymous user posted a hoax. Wikimania 2005, the first

Wikimania Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

conference, was held from 4 to 8 August 2005 at the ''Haus der Jugend'' in

Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , " Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on it ...

, Germany, attracting about 380 attendees.

2006

The English Wikipedia gained its one-millionth article,

Jordanhill railway station , symbol_location = gb , symbol = rail , image = Jordanhill station 2016-08-25.jpg , borough = Jordanhill, Glasgow , country = Scotland , coordinates = , grid_name ...

, on 1 March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to download, and "Wikipedia" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals – multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top five global brands of 2006. 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. The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words, by 13 August. The English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day, with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked the 10th-busiest in the world. Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in

the press ''The Press'' is a daily newspaper published in Christchurch, New Zealand owned by media business Stuff Ltd. First published in 1861, the newspaper is the largest circulating daily in the South Island and publishes Monday to Saturday. One comm ...

– the

Essjay controversy The Essjay controversy was an incident in which Ryan Jordan, a Wikipedia editor who went by the username "Essjay", falsely presented himself as a university professor of religion from 2005 to 2007, during which time he was elected to top position ...

broke when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials.

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

El Hormiguero ''El Hormiguero'' (, Spanish for "The Anthill") is a Spanish television program with a live audience focusing on comedy, science, and guest interviews running since September 2006. It is hosted and produced by screenwriter Pablo Motos. The sho ...

. 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 Volapük (; , "Language of the World", or lit. "World Speak") is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an ...

constructed language. According to the ''

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

'', the number of regularly active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000, and has since been declining. In April 2007, Wikipedia Version 0.5 article selection release was published.

2008

Various 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 3:15 pm PDT (22:15 UTC), following the

death Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...

of pop icon

Michael Jackson Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and philanthropist. Dubbed the "King of Pop", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. Over a ...

, the website temporarily crashed. The

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."Wikipedia Statistics, Article count (official)"
. Wikimedia.org. December 2014. Retrieved 20 December 2014. The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia, Beate Eriksen, was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC. 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. Wikipedia content became licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in 2009.

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. On 13 May, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On 12 December, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the

's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1-billionth Wikimedia project edit was performed on 16 April. In early 2010, Wikipedia Version 0.7 article selection release was published.

2011

Wikipedia and its users held many celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January. The site began efforts to expand its growth in India, holding its first Indian conference in

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' fin ...

in November 2011. The

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 The Dutch Wikipedia ( nl, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia) is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was founded on 19 June 2001. As of , the Dutch Wikipedia is the -largest Wikipedia edition, with articles. It w ...

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. 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 The Italian Wikipedia ( it, Wikipedia in italiano) is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of , , it has articles and more than registered accounts. It is t ...

became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the

Italian Parliament The Italian Parliament ( it, Parlamento italiano) is the national parliament of the Italian Republic. It is the representative body of Italian citizens and is the successor to the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1943), the transitio ...

'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.
. PC Magazine. Retrieved 6 October 2011. Also in October 2011, Wikimedia announced the launch of

Wikipedia Zero Wikipedia Zero was a project by the Wikimedia Foundation to provide access to Wikipedia free of charge on mobile phones via zero-rating, particularly in developing markets. The objective of the program was to facilitate access to free knowled ...

, an initiative to enable free mobile access to Wikipedia in developing countries through partnerships with mobile operators.

2012

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 The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a controversial proposed United States congressional bill to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online copyright infringement and online trafficking in counterfeit goods. Introduced on O ...

and PROTECT IP Act, two anti-

piracy Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, v ...

laws under debate in the

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

. Calling the blackout a "community decision", Wales and other opponents of the laws believed that they would endanger free speech and online innovation. A similar blackout was staged on 10 July by the Russian Wikipedia, in protest against a proposed Russian internet regulation law. In late March 2012, the

Wikimedia Deutschland Wikimedia chapters are national or sub-national not-for-profit organizations created to promote the interests of Wikimedia projects locally. Chapters are legally independent of the Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or ...

announced

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...

, a universal platform for sharing data between all Wikipedia language editions. The US$1.7-million Wikidata project was partly funded by

, the

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements a ...

, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. 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. Justin Anthony Knapp (cropped)

In April 2012, Justin Knapp became the first single contributor to make over one million edits to Wikipedia. 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. Wales also declared that 20 April would be "Justin Knapp Day". On 13 July 2012, the English Wikipedia gained its 4-millionth article, Izbat al-Burj. In October 2012, historian and Wikipedia editor

Richard J. Jensen Richard Joseph Jensen (born October 24, 1941) is an American historian, who was professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from 1973 to 1996. He has worked on American political, social, military, and economic history as well as ...

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. According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia was the world's sixth-most-popular website as of November 2012.Wikipedia.org Site Info
. Alexa.com. Retrieved 8 November 2012. Dow Jones ranked Wikipedia fifth worldwide as of December 2012.

2013

On 22 January 2013, the

became the fifth language edition of Wikipedia to exceed 1 million articles, while the

and

s gained their millionth articles on 11 and 16 May respectively. On 15 July the

and on 24 September the

Polish Wikipedia The Polish Wikipedia ( pl, Polskojęzyczna Wikipedia) is the Polish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. Founded on September 26, 2001, it now has more than articles, making it the -largest Wikipedia edition overall.

s gained their millionth articles, becoming the eighth and ninth Wikipedia editions to do so. On 27 January, the

main belt asteroid The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

274301 was officially renamed "Wikipedia" by the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature. The first phase of the

database, automatically providing interlanguage links and other data, became available for all language editions in March 2013. 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. 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 A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

-like interface instead of using

wiki markup A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication Collaborative editing, collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be ...

. An editor specifically designed for

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

s and other mobile devices was also launched."Edit Wikipedia on the go"
. Wikimedia.org. 25 July 2013. Retrieved 2 April 2014.

2014

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. The project sought funding through Indiegogo, and was intended to honor the contributions of Wikipedia's editors. On 22 October 2014, the first monument to Wikipedia was unveiled in the Polish town of Slubice. On 8 June, 15 June, and 16 July 2014, the

Waray Wikipedia The Waray Wikipedia is the Waray language edition of Wikipedia. It is hosted on servers run by the Wikimedia Foundation since 25 September 2005. As of , , this edition has articles and is the largest Wikipedia edition. Despite having very few ...

, 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

In mid-2015, Wikipedia was the world's seventh-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, 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. On average, Wikipedia receives a total of 10 billion global

pageviews In web analytics and website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file ( web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web, a page request ...

from around 495 million unique visitors every month, including 85 million visitors from the United States alone, where it is the sixth-most-popular site. '' Print Wikipedia'' was an art project by

Michael Mandiberg Michael Mandiberg (born December 22, 1977) is an American artist, programmer, designer and educator. Mandiberg's works have been exhibited at venues, including the New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York City; the transmediale festival, Berlin ...

that created the ability to print 7473 volumes of

as it existed on 7 April 2015. Each volume has 700 pages and only 110 were printed by the artist. On 1 November 2015, the English Wikipedia reached 5,000,000 articles with the creation of an article on ''

Persoonia terminalis ''Persoonia terminalis'', also known as the Torrington geebung, is a shrub belonging to the family Proteaceae, and native to northern New South Wales and southern Queensland in eastern Australia. Reported as a subspecies of ''Persoonia nut ...

'', a type of shrub.

2016

On 19 January 2016, the

exceeded the one million article mark, becoming the thirteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The millionth article was 波号第二百二十四潜水艦 (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, up one place from the position it held in the previous year. In October 2016, the mobile version of Wikipedia got a new look.

2017

In mid-2017, Wikipedia was listed as the world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet, 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 Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...

. The encrypted

has been blocked in China since 28 December 2017.

2018

During 2018, Wikipedia retained its listing as the world's fifth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet. One notable development was the use of

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

to create draft articles on overlooked topics. On 13 April 2018, the number of

Chinese Wikipedia The Chinese Wikipedia () is the written vernacular Chinese (a form of Mandarin Chinese) edition of Wikipedia. It is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started on 11 May 2001, the Chinese Wikipedia currently has articles and registered users, o ...

articles exceeded 1 million, becoming the fourteenth Wikipedia to reach that milestone. The Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in

Mainland China "Mainland China" is a geopolitical term defined as the territory governed by the People's Republic of China (including islands like Hainan or Chongming), excluding dependent territories of the PRC, and other territories within Greater China. ...

since May 2015. Later in the year, on 26 June, the

Portuguese Wikipedia The Portuguese Wikipedia ( pt, Wikipédia em português) is the Portuguese language edition of Wikipedia (written Wikipédia, in Portuguese), the free encyclopedia. It was started on 11 May 2001. In addition to being the sixth most accessed web ...

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 Proclamation 4311 was a Presidential proclamation (United States), presidential proclamation issued by president of the United States Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974, granting a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon, his predecessor, ...

2019

In August 2019, according to Alexa.com, Wikipedia fell from fifth placed to seventh placed website in the world for global internet engagement. On 23 April 2019, Chinese authorities expanded the block of Wikipedia to versions in all languages. 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 The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) to protest the Chines ...

, resulting in stricter internet censorship in China.

Third decade: 2020–present

2020

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. Both Wikipedia's coverage of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

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. The

World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of ...

collaborated with Wikipedia as a key resource for the dissemination of COVID-19-related information as to help combat the spread of misinformation.

2021

In January 2021, Wikipedia's 20th anniversary was noted in the media. On 13 January 2021, the English Wikipedia reached one billion edits, where the billionth edit was made by Steven Pruitt.

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

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. By November 2021, Wikipedia had fallen to the thirteenth placed website in the world for global internet engagement.

History by subject area

Hardware and software

:''The

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

that runs Wikipedia, and the computer hardware,

s and other systems upon which Wikipedia relies.'' * In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

by Clifford Adams. The server still runs on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the

CamelCase Camel case (sometimes stylized as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation. The format indicates the separation of words with a single ...

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 Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24 May 1974) is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia and a number o ...

, it included a

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

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

. It was written by

Lee Daniel Crocker Lee Daniel Crocker (born July 3, 1963) is an American computer programmer. He is best known for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs, to address scalability problems. This software, originally known as "Phase III", went live in July ...

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. This has been called "the most controversial move in Wikipedia history". * In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in

was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski. * On 9 June 2003, Wikipedia's

ISBN The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency. An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition an ...

interface was amended to make ISBNs in articles link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page . Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the page. Se
the edit
that changed this. * After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Wikipedia users were no longer hard coded, allowing Wikipedia to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users. * On 12 February 2004, server operations were moved from

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United Stat ...

Tampa, Florida Tampa () is a city on the Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city's borders include the north shore of Tampa Bay and the east shore of Old Tampa Bay. Tampa is the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and ...

. * On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of the

software. * On 30 May 2004, the first instances of "categorization" entries appeared. Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed from the founding of Wikipedia. However, Larry Sanger had viewed the schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles, whereas the 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. * After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css. * Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was created, allowing

transclusion In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normal ...

of standard texts. * On 7 June 2005 at 3:00 a.m.

Eastern Standard Time The Eastern Time Zone (ET) is a time zone encompassing part or all of 23 U.S. states, states in the eastern part of the United States, parts of eastern Canada, the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico, Panama, Colombia, mainland Ecuador, Peru, and ...

, 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

interwiki database became available across Wikipedia's language editions. * In July 2013, the VisualEditor editing interface was inaugurated, allowing users to edit Wikipedia using a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

text editor (similar to a

) instead of

. An editing interface optimised for mobile devices was also released.

Look and feel

:''The external face of Wikipedia, its

look and feel In software design, the look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxe ...

, and the Wikipedia

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create ...

ing, as presented to users.'' * On 4 April 2002, BrilliantProse, since renamed Featured Articles, 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, 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) mad
its first Main Page appearance.
* On 23 February 2004, a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeare
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 a
www.wikipedia.org
was set up, replacing a redirect to the English-language Wikipedia. * On 5 February 2005, was created, becoming the first thematic "portal" on the English Wikipedia. However, the concept was pioneered on the German Wikipedia, where Portal:Recht (law studies) was set up in October 2003. * On 16 July 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page. * On 19 March 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English-language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years. * On 13 May 2010, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. The "classic" Wikipedia interface remained available as an option.

Internal structures

:''Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies.'' * April 2001, Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", Wikipedia's core non-negotiable editorial policy, a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Sanger for Nupedia in spring or summer 2000, which covered many of the same core principles. * In September 2001, collaboration by subject matter in is introduced. * In February 2002, concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bomis Inc (Wikipedia's original host) combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, led most participants of the

to break away and establish it independently as the '' Enciclopedia Libre''. Following clarification of Wikipedia's status and non-commercial nature later that year, re-merger talks between Enciclopedia Libre and the re-founded Spanish Wikipedia occasionally took place in 2002 and 2003, but no conclusion was reached. As of October 2009, the two continue to coexist as substantial Spanish language reference sources, with around 43,000 articles (EL) and 520,000 articles (Sp.W) respectively. * Also in 2002, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the ''Manual of Style'', along with a number of other policies and guidelines. * November 2002 – new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce are set up, as well as other language mailing lists (e.g. Polish), to reduce the volume of traffic on mailing lists. * In July 2003, the rule against editing one's autobiography is introduced. * On 28 October 2003, the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in

. 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 A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

website

LiveJournal LiveJournal (russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, a ...

, have also sprung up since. * From 10 July to 30 August 2004 the and formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On 27 August 2004 the ''Community Portal'' was started, to serve as a focus for community efforts. These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad hoc collaborations between like-minded editors. * During September to December 2005 following the Seigenthaler controversy and other similar concerns, several anti-abuse features and policies were added to Wikipedia. These were: ::* The policy for "Checkuser" (a

extension to assist detection of abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005. Checkuser function had previously existed, but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, so there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis. ::*Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who had created a user account. ::* The introduction and rapid adoption of the policy Wikipedia:Biographies of living people, giving a far tighter quality control and fact-check system to biographical articles related to living people. ::* The "semi-protection" function and policy, allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit. * In May 2006, a new "oversight" feature was introduced on the English Wikipedia, allowing a handful of highly trusted users to permanently erase page revisions containing copyright infringements or libelous or personal information from a page's history. Previous to this, page version deletion was laborious, and also deleted versions remained visible to other administrators and could be un-deleted by them. * On 1 January 2007, the subcommunity named

Esperanza Esperanza is the Spanish word for hope, and may refer to: Places Philippines * Esperanza, Agusan del Sur, a municipality * Esperanza, Masbate, a municipality * Esperanza, Sultan Kudarat, a municipality United States * Esperanza, Mississippi, ...

was disbanded by communal consent. Esperanza had begun as an effort to promote " wikilove" and a social support network, but had developed its own subculture and private structures. Its disbanding was described as the painful but necessary remedy for a project that had allowed editors to "see themselves as Esperanzans first and foremost". A number of Esperanza's subprojects were integrated back into Wikipedia as free-standing projects, but most of them are now inactive. When the group was founded in September 2005, there had been concerns expressed that it would eventually be condemned as such. * In April 2007, the results of 4 months policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia policies into one core policy (See: Wikipedia:Attribution) was polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focused policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal. * A one-day blackout of Wikipedia was called by Jimmy Wales on 18 January 2012, in conjunction with

and over 7,000 other websites, to protest the

then under consideration by the

The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures

:''Legal and organizational structure of the

, its executive, and its activities as a

foundation Foundation may refer to: * Foundation (nonprofit), a type of charitable organization ** Foundation (United States law), a type of charitable organization in the U.S. ** Private foundation, a charitable organization that, while serving a good cause ...

.'' * 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 The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...

and

.org The domain name .org is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used on the Internet. The name is truncated from ''organization''. It was one of the original domains established in 1985, and has been operated by th ...

). * On 20 June 2003, the

was founded. * Communications committee wa
formed
in January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Wikipedia via the newly implemented

OTRS OTRS (originally Open-Source Ticket Request System) is a service management suite. The suite contains an agent portal, admin dashboard and customer portal. In the agent portal, teams process tickets and requests from customers (internal or exter ...

(a ticket handling system). * Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to the Board of

Trustee Trustee (or the holding of a trusteeship) is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, is a synonym for anyone in a position of trust and so can refer to any individual who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility to ...

s of the

. During this time, Angela was active in editing content and setting policy, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation.Riehle, Dirk
"How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko"
. Riehle.org. 2006. * On 10 January 2006, ''Wikipedia'' became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation. * In July 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of the

."Angela Beesley resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board"
, Wikimedia Foundation press release, 7 July 2006. * In June 2006, Brad Patrick was hired to be the first executive director of the Foundation. He resigned in January 2007, and was later replaced by Sue Gardner (June 2007). * In October 2006, Florence Nibart-Devouard became chair of the board of Wikimedia Foundation.

Projects and 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,

, was created; aiming to produce a dictionary and

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym dictionar ...

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 Hastings () is a large seaside town and borough in East Sussex on the south coast of England, east to the county town of Lewes and south east of London. The town gives its name to the Battle of Hastings, which took place to the north-west ...

, New Zealand, article. Two days later, the German-language Wikipedia, the largest non-English language version, passed the 10,000 article mark. * On 20 June 2003, the same day that the

was founded, " Wikiquote" was created. A month later, "

Wikibooks Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that an ...

" was launched. "

" 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. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew Wikipedia and discusses the

flag of Kazakhstan The flag of Kazakhstan or Kazakh flag ( kk, Қазақстан туы, ; russian: Флаг Казахстана, translit=Flag Kazakhstana) was adopted on 4 June 1992, replacing the flag of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The flag was de ...

. * 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 Forced settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous p ...

being announced in a

press release A press release is an official statement delivered to members of the news media for the purpose of providing information, creating an official statement, or making an announcement directed for public release. Press releases are also considere ...

as the landmark article. * In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company

, relegating

Dictionary.com Dictionary.com is an online dictionary whose domain was first registered on May 14, 1995. The primary content on Dictionary.com is a proprietary dictionary based on ''Random House Unabridged Dictionary'', with editors for the site providing new ...

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 , symbol_location = gb , symbol = rail , image = Jordanhill station 2016-08-25.jpg , borough = Jordanhill, Glasgow , country = Scotland , coordinates = , grid_name ...

being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.While this article was announced as the milestone on the Main Page, multiple articles qualified due to the continuous creation and deletion of pages on the site. * On 8 June 2006, the English Wikipedia passed the 1,000-featured-article mark, with

Iranian peoples The Iranian peoples or Iranic peoples are a diverse grouping of Indo-European peoples who are identified by their usage of the Iranian languages and other cultural similarities. The Proto-Iranians are believed to have emerged as a separat ...

. * On 15 August 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation launched

Wikiversity Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...

. * 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. * On 4 April 2007, the first Wikipedia CD selection in English was published as a free download. * 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.

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

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

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. * On 22 January 2013, the

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

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

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

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

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

, and it has over 125,000 editors who have made 1 or more edits in the past 30 days. * On 1 February 2016, the

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 second 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 third Wikipedia language edition to do so. * On 19 November 2016, the German Wikipedia exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the fourth 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

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

exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the fourteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so. * On 27 June 2018, the

exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the fifteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so. * On 8 July 2018, the

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 9 March 2019, Wikipedia exceeded 50 million articles across all 309 language editions. * 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

exceeded 2,000,000 articles, becoming the sixth Wikipedia language edition to do so. * On 23 March 2020, the

Ukrainian Wikipedia The Ukrainian Wikipedia ( uk, Українська Вікіпедія, ''Ukrainska Vikipediia'') is the Ukrainian language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The first article was written on January 30, 2004. the Ukrainian Wiki ...

exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the seventeenth Wikipedia language edition to do so. * On 1 July 2020, the

Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia ( arz, ويكيبيديا مصرى , ') is the Egyptian Arabic version of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. This Wikipedia primarily acts as an alternative to the Arabic Wikipedia in favor of spe ...

exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the eighteenth Wikipedia language edition to do so. * On 25 December 2020, the

Bengali Wikipedia The Bengali Wikipedia or Bangla Wikipedia ( bn, বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়া) is the Bengali language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Launched on 27 January 2004, it surpassed 10,000 articles in October ...

exceeded 100,000 articles. * On 27 November 2022, Wikipedia exceeded 60 million articles across all 319 language editions.

Fundraising

WMF Support and Revenue, Expenses and Net Assets at Year End

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. Revenue has risen every year of the Wikimedia Foundation's existence, reaching in 2020/2021, versus expenses of : In addition, the Wikimedia Endowment, an organizationally separate fundraising effort begun in 2016, reached $100 million in 2021, five years sooner than planned.

External impact

* In 2007, Wikipedia was deemed fit to be used as a major source by the

UK Intellectual Property Office The Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom (often referred to as the UK IPO) is, since 2 April 2007, the operating name of The Patent Office. It is the official government body responsible for intellectual property rights in the UK ...

in a

Formula One Formula One (also known as Formula 1 or F1) is the highest class of international racing for open-wheel single-seater formula racing cars sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). The World Drivers' Championship, ...

trademark case ruling. * 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 A tsunami ( ; from ja, 津波, lit=harbour wave, ) is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater exp ...

, the 2008 American Presidential election, and the 2007

Virginia Tech shooting The Virginia Tech shooting was a spree shooting that occurred on April 16, 2007, comprising two attacks on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. Seung-Hui Cho, an u ...

. The latter article was accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published local to the shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event." * On 21 February 2007, Noam Cohen of the ''New York Times'' reported that some academics were banning the use of Wikipedia as a research tool. * On 27 February 2007, an article in ''

The Harvard Crimson ''The Harvard Crimson'' is the student newspaper of Harvard University and was founded in 1873. Run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates, it served for many years as the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beginning in the f ...

'' newspaper reported that some professors at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

included Wikipedia in their

syllabi A syllabus (; plural ''syllabuses'' or ''syllabi'') or specification is a document that communicates information about an academic course or class and defines expectations and responsibilities. It is generally an overview or summary of the curric ...

, but that there was a split in their perception of using Wikipedia. * In July 2013, a large-scale study by four major universities identified the most contested articles on Wikipedia, finding that

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

and

God In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...

were more fiercely debated than any other subjects.

Effect of biographical articles

Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see

Controversies Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin ''controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an opposite d ...

). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography. * November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy occurred when a hoaxer asserted on Wikipedia that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the

Kennedy assassination John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was in the vehicle with ...

of 1963. * December 2006: German comedian

Atze Schröder Hubertus Albers (born 27 September 1965), better known under his pseudonym Atze Schröder, is a German comedian.Wikimedia Deutschland Wikimedia chapters are national or sub-national not-for-profit organizations created to promote the interests of Wikimedia projects locally. Chapters are legally independent of the Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or ...

, 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 by himself. * 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."Caught in the deadly web of the internet"
. Robert Fisk. ''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...

''. 21 April 2007. Retrieved 24 July 2007. * 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 Lutz Heilmann's article from a few dozen to half a million. Shortly after, Heilmann asked the court to withdraw the court order. * 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 Utrecht ( , , ) is the fourth-largest city and a municipality of the Netherlands, capital and most populous city of the province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, in the very centre of mainland Net ...

believed Wikimedia's assertion that it has no influence on the content of Dutch Wikipedia. * 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"). * May 2009: An article about the German journalist Richard Herzinger in the German Wikipedia was vandalized. The IP user added that Herzinger, who wrote for ''

Die Welt ''Die Welt'' ("The World") is a German national daily newspaper, published as a broadsheet by Axel Springer SE. ''Die Welt'' is the flagship newspaper of the Axel Springer publishing group. Its leading competitors are the ''Frankfurter All ...

'', was Jewish; the sighter marked this as "sighted" (meaning that there is no vandalism in the article). Herzinger complained about that to Wikipedians who immediately deleted the assertion. According to Herzinger, who wrote about the incident in a newspaper article, he is regularly called a Jew by right-wing extremists due to his perceived pro-

stance. * October 2009: In 1990, the German actor

Walter Sedlmayr Walter Sedlmayr (6 January 1926 – 14 July 1990) was a popular German stage, television, and film actor from Bavaria. His murder in 1990 was widely publicized. Career After his 1945 wartime ''Abitur,'' Sedlmayr served as a '' Flakhelfer'' to ...

was murdered. Years later, when the two murderers were released from prison, German law prohibited the media from mentioning their names. The men's lawyer also sent the Wikimedia Foundation a cease and desist letter requesting the men's names be removed from the English Wikipedia.

Early roles of Wales and Sanger

Sanger played an important role in the early stages of creating Wikipedia.

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...

says that Sanger was his subordinate employee. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to

and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. It was Jimmy Wales, along with other people, who came up with the broader idea of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would accept contributions from ordinary people and it was Wales who invested in it.The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir – Part I
" and
Part II
",

, April 2005. Retrieved on 25 March 2007. "The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on. So I arrived in San Diego in early February, 2000, to get to work. One of the first things I asked Jimmy is how free a rein I had in designing the project. What were my constraints, and in what areas was I free to exercise my own creativity? He replied, as I clearly recall, that most of the decisions should be mine; and in most respects, as a manager, Jimmy was indeed very hands-off. Nevertheless, I always did consult with him about important decisions, and moreover, I wanted his advice. Now, Jimmy was quite clear that he wanted the project to be in principle open to everyone to develop, just as open source software is (to an extent). Beyond this, however, I believe I was given a pretty free rein. So I spent the first month or so thinking very broadly about different possibilities." —Larry Sanger. Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software." Sanger coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name. In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems. In terms of project roles, Sanger spearheaded and pursued the project as its leader in its first year, and did most of the early work in formulating policies (including "Ignore all rules" and "Neutral point of view") and building up the community. Upon departure in March 2002, Sanger emphasized the main issue was purely the cessation of Bomis' funding for his role, which was not viable part-time, and his changing personal priorities; however, by 2004, the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger criticized Wikipedia, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair." By 2005 Wales began to dispute Sanger's role in the project, three years after Sanger left. In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia; however, according to Brian Bergstein of the

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...

, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder." There is evidence that Sanger was called co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Wikipedia press releases and Wikipedia articles and in a September 2001 ''New York Times'' article for which both were interviewed. In 2006, Wales said, "He used to work for me ..I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title";James Niccolai
"Wikipedia taking on the vandals in Germany"
.

PC Advisor ''Tech Advisor'', previously known as ''PC Advisor'', is a consumer tech website and digital magazine published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG Inc, which also produces ''Macworld, PCWorld'' and ''TechHive.'' IDG Inc was acquired by Blackstone in 2 ...

. 26 September 2006. nonetheless, before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder and, indeed, identified himself as "co-founder" as late as August 2002. 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". As of March 2007: Wales emphasized this employer–employee relationship and his ultimate authority, terming himself Wikipedia's sole founder; and Sanger emphasized their statuses as co-founders, referencing earlier versions of Wikipedia pages (2004, 2006), press releases (2002–2004), and media coverage from the time of his involvement routinely terming them in this manner..

Controversies

* January 2001: Licensing and structure. After partial breakdown of discussions with

announced GNUpedia as a competing project. Besides having a nearly identical name, it was very similar functionally to Nupedia/Wikipedia (the former which launched in March 2000 but had as yet published very few articles—the latter of which was intended to be a source of seed-articles for the former). The goals and methods of GNUpedia were nearly identical to Wikipedia: anyone can contribute, small contributions welcome, plan on taking years, narrow focus on encyclopedic content as the primary goal, anyone can read articles, anyone can mirror articles, anyone can translate articles, use libre-licensed code to run the site, encourage peer review, and rely primarily on volunteers. GNUpedia was roughly intended to be a combination of Wikipedia and also

. The main exceptions were: # The strong prohibition against *any* sort of centralized control (" ust not bewritten under the direction of a single organization, which made all decisions about the content, and... published in a centralized fashion. ...we dare not allow any organization to decide what counts as part of ur encyclopedia). In particular, deletionists were not allowed; editing an article would require forking it, making a change, and then saving the result as a 'new' article on the same topic. # Assuming attribution for articles (rather than anonymous by default), requiring attribution for quotations, and allowing original authors to control straightforward translations, In particular, the idea was to have a set of N articles covering the

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth ...

, with some to-be-determined mechanism for readers to endorse/rank/like/plus/star the version of the article they found best. # Given the structure above, where every topic (especially controversial ones) might have a thousand articles purporting to be *the* GNUpedia article about Sarah Palin, Stallman explicitly rejected the idea of a centralized website that would specify which article of those thousand was worth reading. Instead of an official catalogue, the plan was to rely on search engines at first (the reader would begin by googling "gnupedia sarah palin"), and then eventually if necessary construct catalogues according to the same principles as articles were constructed. In Wikipedia, there is an official central website for each language (en.wikipedia.org), and an official catalogue of sorts (category-lists and lists-of-lists), but search engines still provide about 60% of the inbound traffic. The goals which led to GNUpedia were published at least as early as 18 December 2000, and these exact goals were finalized on the 12th and 13th of January 2001, albeit with a copyright of 1999, from when Stallman had first started considering the problem. The only sentence added between 18 December and the unveiling of GNUpedia the week of 12–16 January was this: "The GNU Free Documentation License would be a good license to use for courses." GNUpedia was "formally" announced on the ''slashdot'' website, on 16 January, the same day that their mailing list first went online with a test-message. Wales posted to the list on 17 January, the first full day of messages, explaining the discussions with Stallman concerning the change in Nupedia content-licensing, and suggesting cooperation. Stallman himself first posted on 19 January, and, in his second post on 22 January, mentioned that discussions about merging Wikipedia and GNUpedia were ongoing. Within a couple of months, Wales had changed his email

signature A signature (; from la, signare, "to sign") is a handwritten (and often stylized) depiction of someone's name, nickname, or even a simple "X" or other mark that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and intent. The writer of a ...

from the open source encyclopedia to the free encyclopedia; both Nupedia and Wikipedia had adopted the

; and the merger of GNUpedia into Wikipedia was effectively accomplished. * November 2001: Wales announced that advertising would soon begin on Wikipedia, starting in early or mid-2002. Instead, in early 2002, Chief Editor

was fired, since his salary was the largest expense in the operation of Wikipedia. By September 2002, Wales had publicly stated: "There are currently no plans for advertising on Wikipedia." By June 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was formally incorporated. The Foundation is explicitly against paid advertising; although, it does "internally" advertise Wikimedia Foundation fundraising events on Wikipedia. , the by-laws of the Wikimedia Foundation do not explicitly prohibit the adoption of a broader advertising policy, if such an action is deemed necessary—such by-laws are subject to vote. * 2003: No notable controversies occurred. * 2004: No notable controversies occurred. * January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, attempted to use a Wikipedia page for promotional purposes. * October 2005: Alan Mcilwraith was exposed as a fake war hero through a Wikipedia page. * November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy caused Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity was ascertained by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch. Following this, the scientific journal ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

'' undertook a

ed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in ''

'', and concluded they are comparable in terms of accuracy. ''Britannica'' rejected their methodology and their conclusion. ''Nature'' refused to release any form of apology, and instead asserted the reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms. * 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 Martin Thomas Meehan (born December 30, 1956) is an American academic administrator, politician, and attorney. Since July 2015, Meehan has served as the President of the University of Massachusetts after serving as Chancellor of the University of ...

Norm Coleman Norman Bertram Coleman Jr. (born August 17, 1949) is an American politician, attorney, and lobbyist. From 2003 to 2009, he served as a United States Senator for Minnesota. From 1994 to 2002, he was mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota. First elected ...

Conrad Burns Conrad Ray Burns (January 25, 1935 – April 28, 2016) was an American politician who served as a United States Senator from Montana and later was a lobbyist. He was only the second Republican popularly elected to represent Montana in the Senat ...

, Joe Biden and

Gil Gutknecht Gilbert William Gutknecht Jr. (born March 20, 1951) is an American politician. Gutknecht was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives first elected in 1994 to represent Minnesota's 1st congressional district. Gutknec ...

. The activities documented were: 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. Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006. * July 2006: Joshua Gardner was exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Wikipedia page. * January 2007: English-language Wikipedians in

Qatar Qatar (, ; ar, قطر, Qaṭar ; local vernacular pronunciation: ), officially the State of Qatar,) is a country in Western Asia. It occupies the Qatar Peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East; it ...

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 An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar from the site. * On 23 January 2007, a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

employee offered to pay

Rick Jelliffe Richard (Rick) Alan Jelliffe (born 1960) is an Australian programmer and standards activist ( ISO, W3C, IETF), particularly associated with web standards, markup languages, internationalization and schema languages. He is the founder and Chief T ...

to review and change certain Wikipedia articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format. * In February 2007, ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent

editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials. The editor, Ryan Jordan, became a

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, and communicated to the original article author. (See:

) * February 2007: Fuzzy Zoeller sued a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Wikipedia biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network. * 16 February 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist. * In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the

Chris Benoit murder-suicide Over a three-day period from June 22 to 24, 2007, Chris Benoit, a 40-year-old Canadian professional wrestler employed by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and living in Fayetteville, Georgia, murdered his wife Nancy and their 7-year-old son, D ...

, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site

Wikinews Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be ...

. * In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently deceased TV theme composer

Ronnie Hazlehurst Ronald Hazlehurst (13 March 1928 – 1 October 2007) was an English composer and conductor who, having joined the BBC in 1961, became its Light Entertainment Musical Director. Hazlehurst composed the theme tunes for many well-known Britis ...

, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the

S Club 7 S Club 7 were a British pop group from London, created by former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller and consisting of members Bradley McIntosh, Hannah Spearritt, Jo O'Meara, Jon Lee, Paul Cattermole, Rachel Stevens and Tina Barrett. The group ...

song " Reach". In fact, he hadn't, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article. * In February 2007, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. In ''Bauer v. Glatzer'', Bauer claimed that information on Wikipedia critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

defended Wikipedia and moved to dismiss the case on 1 May 2008. The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on 1 July 2008. * On 14 July 2009, the National Portrait Gallery issued a cease-and-desist letter for alleged breach of copyright, against a Wikipedia editor who downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the NPG website, and placed them on

. See National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute for more. * In April and May 2010, there was controversy over the hosting and display of sexual drawing and pornographic images including images of children on Wikipedia. It led to the mass removal of pornographic content from Wikimedia Foundation sites. * 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 ''

'' newspaper as his source, but an act of vandalism had replaced Matthew Symonds (a genuine co-founder) with Brett Straub (an unknown character). ''The Economist'' said of the

Leveson report The Leveson Inquiry was a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press following the News International phone hacking scandal, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, who was appointed in July 2011. A series o ...

, "Parts of it are a scissors-and-paste job culled from Wikipedia." * In late 2013, commentators publicly shared observations of the reappearance of many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010.

Notable forks and derivatives

There are a number of . Other sites also use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by

. No list of them is maintained. Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), ''Wikiweise'' (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and

Baidu Baike Baidu Baike (; , also known as Baidu Wiki) is a semi-regulated Chinese-language collaborative online encyclopedia owned by the Chinese technology company Baidu. The beta version was launched on April 20, 2006, and the official version was lau ...

(Chinese). Some of these (such as ''Enciclopedia Libre'') use

or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias. In 2006,

founded

, based upon a modified version of

. The site said it aimed 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other things'. (See also

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 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139-page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. Publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off. In September 2008,

Bertelsmann Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA () is a German private multinational conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is one of the world's largest media conglomerates, and is also active in the service sector and ...

published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to

. A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of

available for use on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.

English Wikipedia CD/DVD/Kiwix ZIM file releases

As of June 2022, there have been no more article selection releases since Wikipedia Version 0.8.

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. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007. In 2013, a German appeals court (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.In legal victory, German court rules Wikimedia Foundation need not proactively check for illegal or inaccurate content
, Wikimedia Blog

Notes

References

External links

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 * :Wikipedia years – historical events by year * Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles * Wikipedia:BrilliantProse – predecessor of Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles * :meta:History of Wikipedia, History of Wikipedia – from the Wikipedia:Meta * Wikipedia:Historic debates * Wikipedia:Wikipedia records * meta:Wikimedia News – news and milestones index from all Wikipedias * Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots Milestones, size and statistics
Stats.wikimedia.org
– the Wikimedia Foundation's main interface for all project statistics, including the various and combined Wikipedia's. * meta:Wikipedia milestones, Wikipedia milestones * Wikipedia:Milestones (inactive) * Wikipedia:Statistics * Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia Discussion and debate archives * Wikipedia:Mailing lists * Wikipedia:Announcement archive Other
ZIM File Archive
at

, contains full Wikipedia snapshots (as well as articles selections) in multiple languages, from different years. Files can be open with

software. * Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia
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
Larry Sanger on the origins of Wikipedia
* Wikipedia:Volunteer Fire Department – handling of major editorial influx. Disbanded when no longer needed (2004) * Wikipedia:Magnus Manske Day – MediaWiki software goes live into production * mw:MediaWiki history, MediaWiki history

Third party

The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource
– Free Software Foundation endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia). 1999.
Early Wikipedia snapshot
via Internet Archive. 28 February 2001.

September 2001. *

"The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir"
an
"Part II"

. 18 April 2005 – 19 April 2005. * Giles, Jim
"Internet encyclopaedias go head to head"
Nature (journal), ''Nature'' comparison between Wikipedia and ''Britannica''. 14 December 2005
"Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal ''Nature''"
''

''. March 2006.
''Nature's'' responses to ''Encyclopædia Britannica''
''

''. 23 March 2006. {{Wikipedias History of Wikipedia, Articles containing video clips Computing timelines, Wikipedia Encyclopedism Jimmy Wales