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| Background |
The concept of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to librarian Charles Ammi Cutter's article "The Buffalo Public Library in 1983" (Library Journal, 1883, p. 211–217), Paul Otlet's book Traité de documentation (1934; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum institution, 1910), H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu in 1973.
While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopedia Britannica were book-based, Microsoft's Encarta published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM, and hyperlinked.
With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates;[1] but this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.[5] His published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On 17 January 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation's GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia,[6] but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".[7]
[ | Tags:Rick Gates,Richard Stallman,Wikipedia,Wiki,Nupedia,Library Of Alexandria,Pergamon,Encyclopedia,Denis Diderot,Encyclopedists,Printing Press,Charles Ammi Cutter,Paul Otlet,Mundaneum,H. G. Wells,World Brain,Vannevar Bush,Microfilm,Memex,As We May Think,Ted Nelson,Project Xanadu,Encyclopedia Britannica,Encarta,Hyperlinked,Web,Internet Encyclopedia Projects,Interpedia,Free Software,Free Software Foundation,Gnupedia, Formulation of the concept |
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, founded by Bomis, a web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis.[8][9][10] Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate multi-step peer review process. Despite its mailing-list of interested editors, and the presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger, a graduate philosophy student hired by Wales,[11] the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.[10]
The Wikipedia logo used until late 2001
The logo used from late 2001 until 2003
The logo used from 2003 until May 13, 2010
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly.[9] The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz.[12][13][14] Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on 2 January 2001.[12][13][14][15] Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software",[16] though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept.[17][18][19][20] 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:
“
No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I can determine.
”
Wales set one up and put it online on 10 January 2001.[21]
[ | Tags:Jimmy Wales,Larry Sanger,Ward Cunningham,Bomis,Tim Shell,Michael E. Davis,Peer Review,Philosophy,Computer Programmer,Wikiwikiweb,Mailing List,Wales,Logo, Founding of Wikipedia |
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on 15 January 2001.
The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by Bomis. Many current and past Bomis employees have contributed some content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and current CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.
In December 2008, Wales stated that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!".[22] The oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.[23][24]
The UuU edit, the first edit that is still preserved on Wikipedia to this day, as it appears using the Nostalgia skin.
The project received many new participants after being mentioned three times on the Slashdot website,[citation needed] with two minor mentions in March 2001.[25][26] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July.[27] Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in the New York Times on 20 September 2001.[28]
The project passed 1,000 articles around 12 February 2001, and 10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created—a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On 30 August 2002, the article count reached 40,000. The rate of growth has more or less steadily increased since the inception of the project, except for a few software- and hardware-induced slow-downs.[dubious – discuss]
[ | Tags:Bandwidth,Server,Slashdot,Citation Needed,Kuro5hin,Google,Mainstream Media,New York Times,Dubious, Namespaces and internationalization |
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first domain created for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC),[29] followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC).[30] The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period,[31][32] and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language,[33][34] although statistics of that early period are imprecise.[35] The French Wikipedia was created on or around 11 May 2001,[36] in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.[37] These languages were soon joined by Arabic[38] and Hungarian.[39][40] In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia,[41] notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.[42]
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, less than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase. As of 2007, around 75% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions.
[ | Tags:Deutsche.wikipedia.com,Catalan.wikipedia.com,Nihongo.wikipedia.com,Romanized,French Wikipedia,Chinese,Dutch,Esperanto,Hebrew,Italian,Portuguese,Russian,Spanish,Swedish,Arabic,Hungarian,Afrikaans,Norwegian, Development |
In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia.[43] By 2004 Sanger and Wales had differences in their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-collaboration concept, but the two differed on how best to handle disruptive editors, specific roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.
A Screenshot from the main page, 28 September 2002.
Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management,[citation needed] went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day to day management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of similar reference projects.
Sanger says he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything. He proposed that experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. He returned briefly to academia, then after joining the Digital Universe Foundation, went on to found Citizendium, an alternative open encyclopedia which uses real names for contributors in order to reduce disruptive editing, and set in place a role for "gentle expert guidance" to help ensure the accuracy of information. Decisions about article content will be up to the community, but the site will include a statement about "family-friendly content." He has stated that he intends to leave in a few years, when the project and its management are established.[44]
[ | Tags: Organization |
The Wikipedia project has grown rapidly in the course of its life, at several levels. Individual wikis have grown organically through the addition of new articles, new wikis have been added in English and non-English languages, and entire new projects replicating these growth methods in other related areas (news, quotations, reference books and so on) have been founded as well.
Respectively, Wikipedia itself has grown, with the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation to act as an umbrella body and the growth of software and policies to address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below:
[ | Tags: Historical overview by year |
Articles summarizing each year are held within the Wikipedia project namespace and are linked to below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.
[ | Tags: 2000 |
The Nupedia project is started with Larry Sanger running the daily operations and formulating many of the initial policies.
[ | Tags: 2001 |
The Wikipedia.com and Wikipedia.org domain names are registered on 12 January 2001[45] and 13 January 2001,[46] respectively, with the Wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day, according to Alexa; project formally opens 15 Jan ('Wikipedia Day'); the first international Wikipedias are created (March–May: French, German, Catalan, Swedish); "Neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy is formally formulated; first slashdotter wave arrives 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appears in August 2001 coincidentally by the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[47] The 11 September 2001 attacks spur the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.[48]
[ | Tags: 2002 |
Year 2002 sees: the end of funding from Bomis and the departure of Larry Sanger; the forking of the Spanish Wikipedia to establish the Enciclopedia Libre; and the creation of the first portable Mediawiki software (went live 25 Jan)[dubious – discuss]. Bots are introduced, Jimmy Wales confirms Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style are launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project is proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia.
[ | Tags: 2003 |
Mathematical formulae using TeX are introduced; English Wikipedia passes 100,000 articles (the next largest, German, passes 10,000); the Wikimedia Foundation is established; Wikipedia adopts its jigsaw world logo; and the first Wikipedian social meeting is organized. The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee (known colloquially as "Arbcom") are developed mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other key early Wikipedians.
[ | Tags: 2004 |
The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continues to grow rapidly, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles to over 1 million (English Wikipedia was just less than half of these) in over 100 languages. The server farms are moved from California to Florida; Categories and CSS style configuration sheets are introduced; and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurs (China, June 2004, duration 2 weeks). Formal election of a board and Arbitration Committee begin – Devouard is the only person elected who was instrumental in the Committee.[citation needed] She and others begin to criticize balance and focus problems and lead efforts to fill in articles in neglected areas. The first formal projects are proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias arising from Wikipedia's community structure.
Bourgeois v. Peters,[49] (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit becomes 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."[cite this quote]
[ | Tags: 2005 |
Multilingual and subject portals are established; the first quarter's formal fundraiser raises almost US $ 100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand; Wikipedia becomes the most popular reference website on the Internet according to Hitwise; China again blocks Wikipedia (October); English Wikipedia passes 750,000 articles. The first Wikipedia scandal occurs, when a well known figure is found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months (the "Seigenthaler incident"). In the wake of this and other concerns,[50] the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse are established. These include a new Checkuser privilege policy update (checkuser is a Mediawiki tool that assists in sock puppetry investigations), a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005 following an incident involving former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler.[51]
[ | Tags: 2006 |
English Wikipedia gains its 1½ millionth article; the first approved Wikipedia article selection is made freely available to download; "Wikipedia" becomes registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation; The congressional aides biography scandals come to public attention: multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager are caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies, the campaign manager resigns.
Jimmy Wales indicates, at Wikimania 2006, that Wikipedia has achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles; A new privilege "oversight" is created allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable; Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proves more popular than anticipated, with over 1,000 pages semi-protected at any given time.
Wikipedia is rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.[52]
[ | Tags: 2007 |
Wikipedia continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts;[53] the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages;[54] the English Wikipedia gains a steady 1,700 articles a day,[55] with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked at around the 10th busiest on the Internet (See Wikipedia Statistics); Wikipedia continues to garner visibility in the press and to slowly but steadily gain traction as a tertiary source both in serious legal decision-making and as a source of collated information on current events; the Essjay controversy breaks when a prominent member of Wikipedia is found to have lied about his credentials; Citizendium launches publicly; a trend develops that the encyclopedia addresses people whose notability stems from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creation of a distinct biographical article.[56]
[ | Tags: 2008 |
Various WikiProjects in many areas continue to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April, the 10 millionth Wikipedia article was created and several months later the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.
[ | Tags: 2009 |
In August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedias totalled 14 million.[2] The three millionth article on the English Wikipedia was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC.[57]
The Arbitration Committee of the English Wikipedia decided in May 2009 to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists.[58][59][60] A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were topic-banned as well.[59][60] The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties".[59]
[ | Tags: 2010 |
On March 24, 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.[61][62]
On May 13, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard amongst other things. More about the changeover can be read here.
As of 3 September 2010 there are approximately 3,401,453 articles in the English Wikipedia.
[ | Tags: Hardware and software |
Main article: Mediawiki
The software that runs Wikipedia, and the hardware, server farms and other systems upon which Wikipedia relies.
In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl by Clifford Adams. The server has run on Linux to this day, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the CamelCase convention.
In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Wikipedia was introduced, replacing the older UseModWiki. Written specifically for the project by Magnus Manske, it included a PHP wiki engine.
In July 2002, a major rewrite of the software powering Wikipedia went live; dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and became MediaWiki. It was written by Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the increasing demands of the growing project.
In October 2002, Derek Ramsey started to use a "bot", or program, to add a large number of articles about United States towns; these articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data. Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics. These articles were generally well received, but some users criticized them for their initial uniformity and writing style (for example, see this version of an original bot-generated town article, and compare to current version).
In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
9 June 2003 – ISBNs in articles now link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page Wikipedia:Book sources. Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the Wikipedia:ISBN page. See the edit that changed this.
After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Wikipedia users were no longer hard coded, allowing Wikipedia administrators to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users.
On 12 February 2004, server operations were moved from San Diego, California to Tampa, Florida.[63]
On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of the MediaWiki | Tags: |