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| Background | |
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The thought 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 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).[8] Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, begun in 1960.[8]
While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia 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.[2] 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,[9] but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".[10]
[edit] Tags:Rick Gates,Richard Stallman,Wikipedia,Wiki,Library Of Alexandria,Pergamon,Encyclopedia,Denis Diderot,Encyclopedists,Printing Press,Paul Otlet,Mundaneum,H. G. Wells,World Brain,Vannevar Bush,Microfilm,Memex,As We May Think,Ted Nelson,Hypertext,Project Xanadu,Encyclopædia Britannica,Encarta,Hyperlinked,Web,Internet Encyclopedia Projects,Interpedia,Free Software,Free Software Foundation,Gnupedia,Nupedia,Tex, | |
| Formulation of the concept | |
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Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis.[11][12][13] 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,[14] the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.[13]
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly.[12] The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz.[15][16][17] 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.[15][16][17][18] Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software",[19] though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept.[20][21][22][23] 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.[24]
[edit] Tags:Jimmy Wales,Larry Sanger,Ward Cunningham,Bomis,Tim Shell,Peer Review,Philosophy,Computer Programmer,Wikiwikiweb,Mailing List,Wales,Usemodwiki, | |
| Founding of Wikipedia | |
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This section is outdated. Please update this section to reflect recent events or newly available information. Please see the talk page for more information. (December 2010)
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!".[25] The oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.[26][27]
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 on the Slashdot website in July 2001,[28] with two minor mentions in March 2001.[29][30] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July.[31] 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.[32]
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.
Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki software deleted old data after about a month. On the eve of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, December 14, 2010, developer Tim Starling found backups on SourceForge containing every change made to Wikipedia from its creation in January 2001 to August 17, 2001.[33]
[edit] Tags:Bandwidth,Server,Slashdot,Kuro5hin,Google,Mainstream Media,New York Times,Sourceforge, | |
| Namespaces, subdomains, and internationalization | |
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Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on 16 March 2001, 01:38 UTC),[34] followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC).[35] The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period,[36][37] and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language,[38][39] although statistics of that early period are imprecise.[40] The French Wikipedia was created on or around 11 May 2001,[41] in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.[42] These languages were soon joined by Arabic[43] and Hungarian.[44][45] In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia,[46] 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.[47]
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.
[edit] Tags:Deutsche.wikipedia.com,Catalan.wikipedia.com,Nihongo.wikipedia.com,Romanized,French Wikipedia,Chinese,Dutch,Esperanto,Hebrew,Italian,Portuguese,Russian,Spanish,Swedish,Arabic,Hungarian, | |
| Development | |
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A Screenshot from the main page, 28 September 2002.
In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia.[48] 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.
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.[49] 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 in 2006 to found Citizendium, an open encyclopedia which used real names for contributors intended 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[50] about "family-friendly content." He stated early on that he intended to leave in a few years, by which time the project and its management should be established.[51]
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| Organization | |
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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:
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| Logo | |
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Foundation–late 2001
December 6, 2001 –October 12, 2003
October 13, 2003–May 13, 2010
May 13, 2010–present
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| Historical overview by year | |
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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.
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| 2000 | |
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The Bomis staff in the summer of 2000.
In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to have 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 Bomis.[52]
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| 2001 | |
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In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process.[53] The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were registered on 12 January 2001[54] and 13 January 2001,[55] respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day.[56] The project formally opened on 15 January ("Wikipedia Day"), with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter wave arrived on 26 July.[28] The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August 2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[57] The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.[58]
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| 2002 | |
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2002 saw the end of funding from Bomis and the departure of Larry Sanger. The forking of the Spanish Wikipedia also took place with the establishment of the Enciclopedia Libre. The first portable Mediawiki software went live on 25 January.[dubious – discuss] Bots were introduced, Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) 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.
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| 2003 | |
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The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established, and Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo. Mathematical formulae using TeX were reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich, Germany, in October. The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee (known colloquially as "ArbCom") were developed, mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other early Wikipedians.
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| 2004 | |
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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 than half of these articles. The website's server farms were moved from California to Florida, Categories 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 arising from Wikipedia's community structure.
Bourgeois v. Peters,[59] (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia.[citation needed] 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."[59]
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| 2005 | |
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In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to Hitwise, 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 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,[60] the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry investigations, a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005.[61]
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| 2006 | |
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The English Wikipedia gained its 1 millionth article, Jordanhill railway station, 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 2006 global brands.[62]
Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had 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", 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.
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| 2007 | |
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Wikipedia continued to grow rapidly in 2007, possessing over 5 million registered editor accounts by August 2011.[63] The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words in approximately 250 languages, by 13 August.[64] The English Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day,[65] with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked the 10th-busiest on the Internet (See Wikipedia:Statistics). Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in the press – the Essjay controversy broke when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium, a competing online encyclopedia, launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather creating a distinct biographical article.[66]
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| 2008 | |
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Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth overall Wikipedia article was created, and by the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.
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| 2009 | |
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One of many cakes made to celebrate Wikipedia's 10th anniversary in 2011.
In August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions totalled 14 million.[4] The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC.[67] On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME magazine article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best websites.[68]
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.[69][70][71] A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were also topic-banned.[70][71] The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties".[70] Wikipedia content became licensed under Creative Commons in 2009.
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| 2010 | |
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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.[72][73]
On May 13, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard.[74] However, the classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it. On December 12, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1,000,000,000th Wikimedia project edit was performed on April 16.[75]
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| 2011 | |
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Wikipedia and its users held hundreds of celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January.[76] The site began efforts to expand its growth in India, holding its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November 2011.[77][78] The English Wikipedia passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia exceeded 100 million page edits, becoming the second language edition to do so after the English edition, which attained 500 million page edits on 24 November 2011. The Dutch Wikipedia exceeded 1 million articles on 17 December 2011, becoming the fourth Wikipedia edition to do so.
Between 4 October and 6 October 2011, the Italian Wikipedia became intentionally inaccessible in protest against the Italian Parliament's proposed DDL intercettazioni law, which, if approved, would allow any person to force websites to remove information that is perceived as untrue or offensive, without the need to provide evidence.[79]
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| 2012 | |
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As of January 2012, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet,[7] with a combined total of 20.7 million articles across all language editions.[3] It is estimated that Wikipedia receives more than 10 billion global pageviews every month,[80] of which 2.7 billion are from the United States alone.[81]
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 an anti-piracy law under development in the United States Congress. Calling Tags: | |
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