History of Wikipedia

Founding and Early Development

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. The idea for Wikipedia stemmed from an earlier project called Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that featured articles written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia's slow pace led to the creation of Wikipedia, which allowed anyone to contribute and edit articles, thus speeding up content creation.

The first edit on Wikipedia was made on January 15, 2001, and the site quickly grew in popularity. By the end of its first year, Wikipedia had amassed over 20,000 articles in 18 languages. The rapid growth continued, and by 2004, Wikipedia had over 250,000 articles.

Technological and Conceptual Underpinnings

The technological foundation of Wikipedia is the MediaWiki software, which was developed by Magnus Manske. MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software that allows for collaborative editing of content. The conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia can be traced back to earlier ideas about online encyclopedias, such as the proposal by Rick Gates in 1993 and the concept of a free online encyclopedia proposed by Richard Stallman in 1998.

Growth and Milestones

Wikipedia's growth has been marked by several significant milestones. In 2007, Wikipedia became one of the top ten most popular websites globally. By 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions had exceeded 14 million. As of 2023, Wikipedia is available in over 300 languages and contains more than 6 million articles in the English edition alone.

Community and Governance

Wikipedia is maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians. The community operates under a set of guidelines and policies, including neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research. The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization, oversees the operation of Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Challenges and Controversies

Throughout its history, Wikipedia has faced several challenges and controversies. Issues such as vandalism, bias, and the gender gap among contributors have been ongoing concerns. Wikipedia has implemented various measures to address these issues, including the introduction of edit-a-thons to improve coverage of underrepresented topics.

Impact and Legacy

Wikipedia has had a profound impact on the way information is accessed and shared. It is often cited as a key resource for information on a wide range of topics, from historical events to scientific discoveries. The collaborative nature of Wikipedia has also influenced other online platforms and projects, making it a model for open-source and community-driven initiatives.

Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors, known as Wikipedians, through a model of open collaboration. It is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.

History

The concept of a new free encyclopedia began with the Interpedia proposal on Usenet in 1993, which outlined an Internet-based online encyclopedia to which anyone could submit content and that would be freely accessible. Early projects in this vein included Everything2 and Open Site. In 1999, Richard Stallman proposed the GNUPedia, an online encyclopedia which, similar to the GNU operating system, would be a "generic" resource.

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.

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.

Features

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity if they choose.

The site is a wiki-based site, meaning that anyone can edit any unprotected page and improve articles immediately for all readers. Wikipedia's editors are known as Wikipedians. The site is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also manages other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikimedia Commons.

Impact

Wikipedia has had a significant impact on the way people access information. It is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of May 2024, it was ranked fifth by Semrush, and sixth by Similarweb. On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore". As of March 2023, it ranked 6th in popularity, according to Similarweb.

Wikipedia has also been involved in various controversies and criticisms. Some studies highlight the fact that Wikipedia (and in particular the English Wikipedia) has a "western cultural bias" or "Eurocentric bias". Due to this persistent Eurocentrism, scholars like Carwil Bjork-James call for a "decolonization" of Wikipedia. Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy.

Governance and Community

The English Wikipedia has the Arbitration Committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site.

Wikipedia isn't raised up wholesale, like a barn; it's assembled grain by grain, like a termite mound. This barrier to entry exists even in places where there are many experts and large volumes of material to draw from. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square.