History of Wikipedia
, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
The technological and conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998.
Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This contrasted with contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a complementary project, using an online wiki as a collaborative drafting tool.
While Wikipedia was initially imagined as a place to draft articles and ideas for eventual polishing in Nupedia, it quickly overtook its predecessor, becoming both draft space and home for the polished final product of a global project in hundreds of languages, inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.
In 2014, Wikipedia had approximately 495 million monthly readers. In 2015, according to comScore, Wikipedia received over 115 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone. In September 2018, the projects saw 15.5 billion monthly page views.
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, and there are ancient precursors of the idea of a comprehensive encyclopedia, such as Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia, but the modern concept of a general-purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originates with Denis Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's 1934 book Traité de Documentation. Otlet also founded the Mundaneum, an institution dedicated to indexing the world's knowledge, in 1910. This concept of a machine-assisted encyclopedia was further expanded in H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm-based Memex in his essay "As We May Think". Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, which began in 1960.The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia. However, even without the internet, huge complex projects of similar nature had made use of volunteers. Specifically, the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived with the speech at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1857, by Richard Chenevix Trench. It took about 70 years to complete. Dr. Trench envisioned a grand new dictionary of every word in the English language, and to be used democratically and freely. According to author Simon Winchester, "The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literatureand to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journalsmust be instead 'the combined action of many.' It would be necessary to recruit a teammoreover, a huge oneprobably 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 Encyclopædia Britannica, were often book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts to develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates; this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998. His published document outlined how to "ensure that progress continues towards this best and most natural outcome."
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that the concept of Wikipedia came when he was a graduate student at Indiana University, where he was impressed with the successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy interesting. Wales also credits Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek's essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," which he read as an undergraduate, as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Wikipedia project." The essay asserts that information is decentralized—that each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively—and that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge, rather than by a central authority. At the time, Wales was studying finance and was intrigued by the incentives of the many people who contributed as volunteers toward creating free software, where many examples were having excellent results. According to The Economist, Wikipedia "has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterised the internet at the end of the 20th century. It held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education, and enlightenment."
Formulation of the concept
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis. Nupedia was founded upon the use of qualified volunteer contributors and a considered multi-step peer review process. Despite its mailing list of over 2000 interested editors, and the presence of Sanger as full-time editor-in-chief, the production of content for Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles written during the first year.The Nupedians discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. Wikis had been used elsewhere on the web to organize knowledge, and the idea of a wiki-based complement to Nupedia was seeded by a conversation between Sanger and Ben Kovitz, and by another between Wales and Jeremy Rosenfeld. Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, over a dinner on 2 January 2001. Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software" for people bored by Nupedia process, and later stated in December 2005 that Rosenfeld had introduced him to the wiki concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki 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, under the nupedia.com domain. This moved to a new wiki under the wikipedia.com domain on 15 January. On 17 January, the Free Software Foundation's GNUPedia project went online, potentially competing with Nupedia, but within a few years the FSF encouraged people "to visit and contribute to " instead.
Founding of Wikipedia
There was some hesitation among editors about binding Nupedia too closely to a wiki-style workflow. After a Nupedia wiki was launched under on 10 January 2001, Wales proposed launching the new project under its own name, and Sanger proposed Wikipedia, framing it as "a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently." A new wiki was launched at on Monday 15 January 2001. The bandwidth and server used for these initial projects were donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later contributed content to the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.Wales stated in December 2008 that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!", but this may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which soon after was scrapped and replaced by a restart. The first recovered edit to Wikipedia.com was to the HomePage on 15 January 2001, reading "This is the new WikiPedia!"; it can be found here. 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 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 on 25 July. Between these influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on 20 September 2001.
Divisions and internationalization
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for a non-English Wikipedia was , followed after a few hours by . The Japanese Wikipedia, started as, was created around that period, and initially used only Romanized Japanese. 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 was created on or around 11 May 2001, in a wave of new language versions that also included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These languages were soon joined by Arabic 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, Norwegian, 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% of all Wikipedia articles were in non-English Wikipedia versions., the English and Simple English Wikipedias have 7 million articles between them, but roughly 90% of articles were in non-English Wikipedias.