History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone and that aims to provide free encyclopedic information to its readers. It was formally launched on 15 January 2001. Initially it was created as a complement and 'feeder' to the expert-written English-language encyclopedia project 'Nupedia', in order to provide an additional source of draft articles and ideas. It quickly overtook Nupedia, growing to become a large global project, and originating a wide range of additional reference projects. As of 2008, Wikipedia includes several million freely usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors.

Contents

History overview

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 (1937) 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.

With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. One little-acknowledged predecessor was the Interpedia (initiated in 1993), which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia. Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.[1] 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 January 17, 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation's GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia[2], but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".[3]

Formulation of the concept

Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project founded by Jimmy Wales to produce a free encyclopedia.[4][5][6] Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified 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,[7] the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles written during the first year.[6]

The Wikipedia logo used until late 2001
The logo used from late 2001 until 2003

Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly.[5] The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz.[8][9][10] Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's wiki (the WikiWikiWeb), introduced Sanger to wikis over dinner on January 2, 2001.[8][9][10][11] Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software",[12] though he later claimed in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept.[13][14][15] 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 January 10 2001.[16]

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 January 15 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.

The first edits ever made on Wikipedia are believed to be test edits by Wales. However, the oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.[17]

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, with two minor mentions in March 2001.[18][19] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technologies and culture website Kuro5hin on July 25.[20] 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 September 20, 2001.[21]

The project passed 1,000 articles around February 12, 2001, and 10,000 articles around September 7. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created—a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On August 30, 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.

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),[22] followed after a few hours by catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07 UTC).[23] The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around that period,[24][25] and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language,[26][27] although statistics of that early period are imprecise.[28] The French Wikipedia was created on or around May 11, 2001,[29] in a wave of new language versions that included also Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, , Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.[30] These languages were soon joined by Arabic[31] and Hungarian.[32][33] In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia,[34] 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.[35]

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.

Development

In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. Initially amicable, by 2004 differences between Sanger and Wales had driven a wedge between them, centering upon Sanger's criticism of Wikipedia's approach, his role in Wikipedia's success, and their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias (see Early roles of Wales and Sanger). 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, September 28th, 2002.

Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management, 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 advocated a "two tier" expert-led culture and more "hands on" executive management, with final editorial control by chief editors closer to the traditional model. 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, supports the specific recognition of experts, and is governed by a system of top-down management, including himself or agreed-upon editors or committees. He has stated that he intends to leave in a few years, when the project and its management are established.[36]

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.

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.
2000

The Nupedia project is started with Larry Sanger running the daily operations and formulating many of the initial policies.

2001

The Wikipedia.com and Wikipedia.org domain names are registered on January 12, 2001[37] and January 13, 2001,[38] respectively, with the latter being brought online on January 13, according to Alexa; project formally opens Jan 15 ('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 July 26. The first media report about Wikipedia appears in August 2001 coincidentally by the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[39]

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 Jan 25). 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.

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.

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 ArbCom begin - Devouard is the only person elected who was instrumental in ArbCom. 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.

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,[40] 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, and restriction of new article creation to registered users only.

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 successful than anticipated, with over 1,000 pages semi-protected at any given time; Wikipedia is rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.[41]

Wales leaves his formal role to focus on Wikia and other projects. He and Larry Sanger publicly clash over project philosophy and co-foundership.

2007

Wikipedia continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts;[42] the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages;[43] the English Wikipedia gains a steady 1,700 articles a day,[44] 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.[45]

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, an article within the Hungarian Wikipedia, and, only several months later, the English Wikipedia exceeds 2.5 million articles, containing 29,373 articles as of October 27, 2009.

History by subject area

Hardware and software

Main article: Mediawiki
The software that runs Wikipedia, and the hardware, server farms and other systems upon which Wikipedia relies.

Look and feel

The external face of Wikipedia, its look and feel, and the Wikipedia branding, as presented to users

Internal structures

Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies.
  • The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWiki extension to assist detection of abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005.[63] but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, as a result of which there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis.[64]
  • Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who had created a user account.[65]
  • 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,[66] allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit.

The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures

Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia Foundation, its executive, and its activities as a foundation.

Projects and landmarks

Main article: Wikipedia:Statistics
Sister projects, and landmarks related to articles, user base, and other statistics.

Funding

External impact

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). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography.

Controversies

Notable forks and derivatives

See Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for a partial list of Wikipedia mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is maintained. A significant number of sites utilize the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia.

Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), and Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.

In 2006, Larry Sanger founds Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki. It has expert-led top-down culture, the absence of which in Wikipedia he views as a major concern.[104]

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[105] 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.[106] 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.[107]

In September 2008, Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles, in fact their introductions. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to Wikimedia Deutschland.[108]

The first CD version containing a selection of articles from the English Wikipedia was published in April 2006 by SOS Children as the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection.[109] In April 2007, "Wikipedia Version 0.5", a CD containing around 2000 articles selected from the online encyclopedia was published by the Wikimedia Foundation and Linterweb. The selection of articles included was based on both the quality of the online version and the importance of the topic to be included. This CD version was created as a test-case in preparation for a DVD version including far more articles.[110][111] The CD version can be purchased online, downloaded as a DVD image file or Torrent file, or accessed online at the project's website.

A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of Wikipedia available for use on iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th generation iPods.[112] iPhone and iPod touch are able to edit Wikipedia pages.

Lawsuits

In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007.[113]

Other notable occurrences

Early roles of Wales and Sanger

Both Wales and Sanger played important roles in the early stages of Wikipedia. Sanger initially brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and then, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it.[9] Wales ascribed the broader idea of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Wikipedia. Sanger wrote, "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine" (emphasis in original text). He also wrote, "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia."[6] Wales stated in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software."[12] Sanger coined the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name.[6] In review, Larry Sanger conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems.[114] 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"[115] and "Neutral point of view"[116]) and building up the community.[114] 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,[7] however by 2004 the two had drifted apart and Sanger became more critical. Two weeks after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger heavily criticized Wikipedia, describing the latter as "broken beyond repair."[117]

Wales claims to be the founder of Wikipedia,[118] however, as explained by Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press, "Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder."[114] 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 The New York Times article for which both were interviewed.[119] Wales later disputed this, stating, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title."[120] There is no evidence from before January 2004 of Wales disputing Sanger's status as co-founder.[121]

Today, Wales emphasizes this employer-employee relation and the fact that he was therefore the ultimate authority, to assert that this makes him the "sole founder," and Sanger cites earlier versions of Wikipedia pages (2004, 2006) and press releases (2002 - 2004), to demonstrate that media coverage articles from the time of his involvement routinely represent them as co-founders.[114][119][122][123]

Blocking of Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities. To date these have related to the People's Republic of China, Iran, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Syria.

Mainland China (multiple occasions)
Main article: Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China

The People's Republic of China and internet service providers in Mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking contentious Web sites in mainland China, and Wikimedia sites have been blocked multiple times in its history, sometimes all articles, and sometimes selectively by topic, region, language version, or ISP. Notable blocks include:

  1. June 2004: Access to the Chinese Wikipedia from Beijing blocked on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Possibly related to this, on May 31 an article from the IDG News Service was published, discussing the Chinese Wikipedia's treatment of the protests.[124]
  2. September 2004: A second and less serious outage. Access to Wikipedia was erratic or unavailable to some users in mainland China — this block was not comprehensive and some users in mainland China were never affected. The exact reason for the block is unknown, but it may have been linked with the closing down of YTHT BBS, a popular Peking University-based BBS that was shut down a few weeks earlier for hosting overtly radical political discussions.
  3. October 2005 to around mid October 2006: For the first few days the English Wikipedia seems to have been unblocked in most provinces in China, while users were still unable to access the Chinese version in certain provinces, varying by ISP. By November, both versions seemed to be accessible in all provinces and by all ISPs. The end of the block coincided with the Chinese Wikipedia's 100,000th article milestone.[125][126][127]

The first block had an effect on the vitality of Chinese Wikipedia, which suffered sharp dips in various indicators such as the number of new users, the number of new articles, and the number of edits. In some cases, it took anywhere from six to twelve months in order to recover to the levels of May 2004.

On July 31, 2008, the BBC reported that the Chinese Wikipedia had been unblocked that day in China; it had still been blocked the previous day. This came within the context of foreign journalists arriving in Beijing to report on the upcoming Olympic Games, and websites such as the Chinese edition of the BBC were being unblocked following talks between the International Olympic Committee and the Games' Chinese organisers.[128]

Iran
The main page of the Persian Wikipedia accessed in Iran. The text reads: "Dear subscriber, Access to this website is not possible"

Access to the Persian Wikipedia was blocked for a few days by some ISPs in Iran. Keyword-based censorship of URLs however continually affects Wikipedia and many other websites.

Further information: Internet censorship in Iran
Tunisia

Wikimedia website was blocked for a few days in Tunisia (November 23 - November 27, 2006).

Uzbekistan

Access to Uzbek Wikipedia was blocked in Uzbekistan on January 10, 2008[129]; the block was lifted 5 March, 2008. This was the second time Wikipedia had been blocked in Uzbekistan; the first case was in 2007.

Syria

Access to Arabic Wikipedia has been blocked since 30 April 2008 and has not been lifted yet. (Other languages are accessible).

Wikipedia history in images

Traffic, size and growth
(See also: Wikipedia:Statistics)
Size of Wikipedia, until September 2002.
Wikipedia growth rate, until September 2002.
Wikipedia traffic rate, August/September 2002.
Growth of the eight largest Wikipedias, July 2001 to November 2007.
Growth of Wikipedia through September 2007
English article count milestones
Date number
April 2003 125,000[130]
April 2004 250,000
March 17, 2005 500,000[131]
March 1, 2006 1,000,000[132]
September 10, 2007 2,000,000[133]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource".
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ "The Free Encyclopedia Project".
  4. ↑ Poe, Marshall. "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. "Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The initial purpose was to get the public to add entries that would then be “fed into the Nupedia process” of authorization. Most of Nupedia’s expert volunteers, however, wanted nothing to do with this, so Sanger decided to launch a separate site called “Wikipedia.” Neither Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark. This is evident in Sanger’s flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he wrote. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” And, to Sanger’s surprise, go they did. Within a few days, Wikipedia outstripped Nupedia in terms of quantity, if not quality, and a small community developed. In late January, Sanger created a Wikipedia discussion list (Wikipedia-L) to facilitate discussion of the project." 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sidener, Jonathan (December 6, 2004). "Everyone's Encyclopedia", The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir - Part I" and "Part II", Slashdot, April 2005. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. "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.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 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."
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Ben kovitz", WikiWikiWeb. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. -- Ben Kovitz wrote on his Wikipedia user page about his conversation in Pacific Beach, San Diego at the taco stand with Larry Sanger that led to the creation of Wikipedia, stating in part: "I suggested that he run Nupedia as a wiki: completely reverse the prior policy of careful review by credentialed experts before letting an article go live. I said, instead of trying to prevent error and bias, to openly invite error and bias and make it very easy for people to correct them. It's a rare thing to tell someone to do something exactly the opposite of what he's been doing and get a fair hearing. It almost never happens that someone actually takes the suggestion. But Larry is different. Larry listened to what I had to say, let his imagination engage, and ran with it. Back then, wikis were a very hard concept to "get," but Larry's mind began percolating immediately, and he got things started that very night."
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Moody, Glyn (July 13, 2006). "This time, it'll be a Wikipedia written by experts", The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. -- While casting around for a way to speed up article production, Sanger met with Ben 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 [to Wales] that 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."
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Sidener, Jonathan (September 23, 2006). "Wikipedia co-founder looks to add accountability, end anarchy", The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. "The origins of Wikipedia date to 2000, when Sanger was finishing his doctoral thesis in philosophy and had an idea for a Web site." 
  11. ↑ Poe, Marshall. "The Hive", The Atlantic Monthly, p. 3. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. -- 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.”
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Wales, Jimmy (October 30, 2001). "LinkBacks?" (Email), wikipedia-l archives, Bomis. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  13. ↑ "Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness", Wired News (May 3, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-11-01. Wired.com states: "Wales offered the following on-the-record comment in an e-mail to NewAssignment.net editor [and NYU Professor] Jay Rosen ...'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'."
  14. ↑ Rogers Cadenhead. "Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1". Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
  15. ↑ Also stated on Wikipedia, on December 2, 2005 permanent reference
  16. ↑ Larry Sanger (January 10 2001). "Let's make a wiki", Nupedia mailing list. 
  17. ↑ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
  18. ↑ Nupedia and Project Gutenberg Directors Answer March 5 2001
  19. ↑ Everything2 Hits One Million Nodes March 29 2001
  20. ↑ Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias July 25 2001
  21. ↑ "Fact driven? Collegial? This site wants you", New York Times, September 20, 2001
  22. ↑ Alternative language wikipedias
  23. ↑ History of the Catalan Homepage
  24. ↑ The Wayback Machine: An early Japanese Wikipedia HomePage (revision #3), dated 2001-03-20 23:00. Accessed 2008-11-04.
  25. ↑ An Internet Archive's snapshot of English Wikipedia HomePage, dated 2001-03-30, showing links to the three first sister projects, "Deutsch (German)", "Catalan", and "Nihongo (Japanese)".
  26. ↑ Multilingual monthly statistics
  27. ↑ First edition in the Catalan Wikipedia
  28. ↑ This table, for instance, misses Japanese and German articles such as this one and this one, both dated 2001-04-06.
  29. ↑ The Documentation on the French Wikipedia mentions the date of March 23, 2001, but this date is not supported by Wikipedia snapshots on the Internet Archive, nor by Jason Richney's letter, which was dated May 11, 2001 (see below).
  30. ↑ Letter of Jason Richey to wikipedia-l mailing list 11 May 2001
  31. ↑ HomePage from the Internet Archive
  32. ↑ Wikipedia:Announcements May 2001
  33. ↑ International_Wikipedia
  34. ↑ Wikipedia: Announcements 2001
  35. ↑ International wikipedias statistics
  36. ↑ Anderson, Nate (February 25, 2007). "Citizendium: building a better Wikipedia", Ars Technica. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  37. ↑ Network Solutions (2007) WHOIS domain registration information results for wikipedia.com from Network Solutions Accessed July 27, 2007.
  38. ↑ Network Solutions (2007) WHOIS domain registration information results for wikipedia.org from Network Solutions Accessed July 27, 2007.
  39. ↑ Wales on Sunday (August 26, 2001) Knowledge at your fingertips. Game On : Internet Chat.(writing, "Both Encarta and Britannica are official publications with well-deserved reputations. But there are other options, such as the homemade encyclopaedias. One is Wikipedia (www. wikipedia. com) which uses clever software to build an encyclopaedia from scratch. Wiki is software installed on a web server that allows anyone to edit any of the pages. At the Wikipedia, anyone can write about any subject they know about. The idea is that over time, enough experts will offer their knowledge for free and build up the world's ultimate hand-built database of knowledge. The disadvantage is that it's still an ongoing project. So far about 8,000 articles have been written and the editors are aiming for 100,000.")
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 WP:BLP started 17 December 2005 with narrative "I started this due to the Daniel Brandt situation". [2]
  41. ↑ Similar Search Results: Google Wins January 29, 2007
  42. ↑ See the special page: Special:Statistics: 5,078,036 registered user accounts as at 13 August 2007, excluding anonymous editors who have not created accounts.
  43. ↑ Source: Wikipedia:Size comparisons as at 13 August 2007
  44. ↑ From around Q3 2006 Wikipedia's growth rate has been approximately linear, source: Wikipedia:Statistics - new article count by month 2006-2007.
  45. ↑ E.g., cases such as Crystal Gail Mangum and Daniel Brandt.
  46. ↑ "Server swapping soon". Retrieved on 2007-02-10.
  47. ↑ "Wikipedia:Categorization", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
  48. ↑ "Wikipedia:Template namespace", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-09-17.
  49. ↑ "Wikipedia:Featured articles", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
  50. ↑ "International logo vote/Finalists". Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia. Retrieved on 2006-07-08.
  51. ↑ "Portal:Biology", English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-31.
  52. ↑ Portals on German Wikipedia ordered by date of creation.
  53. ↑ NeutralPointOfView
  54. ↑ "A few things are absolute and non-negotiable, though. NPOV for example." in statement by Jimbo Wales in November 2003 and, in this thread reconfirmed by Jimbo Wales in April 2006 in the context of lawsuits.
  55. ↑ Nupedia.com editorial policy guidelines. Version 3.31 (November 16, 2000). Retrieved 2007-09-07.
  56. ↑ "Nupedia articles are, in terms of their content, to be unbiased. There may be respectable reference works that permit authors to take recognizable stands on controversial issues, but this is not one of them ... "On every issue ... is it very difficult or impossible for the reader to determine what the view is to which the author adheres?" ... for each controversial view discussed, the author of an article (at a bare minimum) mention various opposing views that are taken seriously by any significant minority of experts (or concerned parties) on the subject ... In a final version of the article, every party to the controversy in question must be able to judge that its views have been fairly presented, or as fairly as is possible in a context in which other, opposing views must also be presented as fairly as possible." [3]
  57. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_proposal
  58. ↑ 'Why we are here and not in Wikipedia (in Spanish, under GFDL)
  59. ↑ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especial:Statistics
  60. ↑ First substantial edit to Wikipedia:Manual of Style, Wikipedia (August 23, 2002). Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
  61. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Autobiography&oldid=1220207
  62. ↑ "Wikipedia:Community Portal", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
  63. ↑ "CheckUser policy", Meta-Wiki. Retrieved on 2007-01-25. Checkuser function had previously existed, but was known as Espionage -- for example, in the Arbitration Committee case of JarlaxleArtemis.
  64. ↑ Checkuser proposal
  65. ↑ "Page creation restrictions", Wikipedia Signpost / English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-31.
  66. ↑ "Semi-protection policy", Wikipedia Signpost / English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
  67. ↑ Esperanza organization disbanded after deletion discussion January 2, 2007
  68. ↑ 68.0 68.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MFD/EA
  69. ↑ New group aims to promote Wiki-Love September 19, 2005
  70. ↑ Riehle, Dirk. "How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko", www.riehle.org, 2006.
  71. ↑ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-16/Trademark registered". Wikipedia (2006-01-16). Retrieved on 2007-01-14.
  72. ↑ "Angela Beesley resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board", Wikimedia Foundation press release, July 7 2006.
  73. ↑ One million Wikipedia articles
  74. ↑ Wikipedia Publishes 500,000th English Article
  75. ↑ 75.0 75.1 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.
  76. ↑ Wikimedia Foundation: English Wikipedia Announces Thousandth Featured Article
  77. ↑ Welcome speech, Jimbo Wales, Wikimania 2006 (audio)
  78. ↑ A Schools Global Citizen Resource from SOS Children
  79. ↑ "Fund drives/2005/Q1", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
  80. ↑ "Fund drives/2005/Q4", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
  81. ↑ German Wikipedia receives state funding June 26, 2007
  82. ↑ In deciding the trademark of F1 racing, the UK Intellectual Property Office considered both the reliability of Wikipedia, and its usefulness as a reliable source of evidence:
    "Wikipedia has sometimes suffered from the self-editing that is intrinsic to it, giving rise at times to potentially libellous statements. However, inherently, I cannot see that what is in Wikipedia is any less likely to be true than what is published in a book or on the websites of news organisations. [Formula One's lawyer] did not express any concerns about the Wikipedia evidence [presented by the plaintiff]. I consider that the evidence from Wikipedia can be taken at face value."
    The case turned substantively upon evidence cited from Wikipedia in 2006 as to the usage and interpretation of the term "F1".
  83. ↑ On Wikipedia, Debating 2008 Hopefuls' Every Facet, Washington Post, September 17, 2007; Page A01 -- "...at the same time, it's hard to find a more up-to-date, detailed, thorough article on Obama than Wikipedia's. As of Friday, Obama's article -- more than 22 pages long, with 15 sections covering his personal and professional life -- had a reference list of 167 sources."
  84. ↑ Source: Wikipedia emerges as key source for Virginia Tech shootings - cyberjournalist.net citing the New York Times [4], stating: "Even The Roanoke Times, which is published near Blacksburg, Va., where the university is located, noted on Thursday that Wikipedia 'has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event'."
  85. ↑ Child, Maxwell L.,"Professors Split on Wiki Debate", The Harvard Crimson, by:MAXWELL L. CHILD, Monday, February 26, 2007.
  86. ↑ "Atze muss zahlen", Klemperts blog "recent changes" on June 27, 2007: http://recentchanges.de/blog/2007/06/atze-muss-zahlen/.
  87. ↑ "Caught in the deadly web of the internet", Robert Fisk, The Independent, 21 April 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
  88. ↑ "A question of authority", by Paul Jay, June 22, 2007, CBC News. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
  89. ↑ Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
  90. ↑ The (Nature) peer review
  91. ↑ Britannica: Fatally Flawed. Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature (PDF)
  92. ↑ Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature (23 March 2006). Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
  93. ↑ See for example: this article on the scandal. The activities documented were:
    Politician Editing undertaken Sources
    Marty Meehan Replacement with staff-written biography Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Wikipedia
    Norm Coleman Rewrite to make more favorable, claimed to be "correcting errors") "Web site's entry on Coleman revised Aide confirms his staff edited biography, questions Wikipedia's accuracy". St. Paul Pioneer Press(Associated Press). http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/local/13750990.htm. 
    Conrad Burns
    Montana    		 Removal of quoted pejorative statements the Senator had made, and replacing them with "glowing tributes" as "the voice of the farmer") Williams, Walt (2007-01-01). "Burns' office may have tampered with Wikipedia entry". Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved on 2007-02-13.
    Joe Biden Removal of unfavorable information Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Wikipedia
    Gil Gutknecht Staff rewrite and removal of information evidencing broken campaign promise.

    (Multiple attempts)

    		 On August 16 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reported that the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht tried twice — on July 24 and August 14 2006 — to remove a 128-word section in the Wikipedia article on him, replacing it with a more flattering 315-word entry taken from his official congressional biography. Most of the removed text was about the 12-year term-limit Gutknecht imposed on himself in 1995 (Gutknecht ran for re-election in 2006, breaking his promise). A spokesman for Gutknecht did not dispute that his office tried to change his Wikipedia entry, but questioned the reliability of the encyclopedia. ("Gutknecht joins Wikipedia tweakers", Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, August 16, 2006, accessed August 17, 2006) .

    Multiple attempts, first using a named account, then an anonymous IP account.
  94. ↑ Information included the mention of an opponent's son's arrest in a fatal drunk driving accident, and the allegation of questionable business practices of another [5]. See article Morton Brilliant for detailed citations.
  95. ↑ "Wikipedia Founder Refutes Claims That It Banned Qatar" by Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek, January 2, 2007
  96. ↑ Bergstein, Brian (2007-01-23). "Microsoft offers cash for Wikipedia edit". MSNBC. Retrieved on 2007-02-01.
  97. ↑ Schiff, Stacy (July 24 2006). "Annals of Information: Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?". The New Yorker. Retrieved on 2007-04-16.
  98. ↑ Finkelstein, Seth (March 8, 2007). "Read me first". Technology. The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-04-16.
  99. ↑ Braindead obituarists hoaxed by Wikipedia Andrew Orlowski, The Register 3 October 2007
  100. ↑ Bauer v. Wikimedia et al | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  101. ↑ EFF and Sheppard Mullin Defend Wikipedia in Defamation Case | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  102. ↑ http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/wikimedia/motiontoquashmemo-wikimedia.pdf
  103. ↑ http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/bauer-v-wikimedia
  104. ↑ Wikipedia founder forks Wikipedia 18 September 2006
  105. ↑ "Wikipedia, Die freie Enzyklopädie" (in German). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  106. ↑ "Neue Wikipedia-DVD im Handel und zum Download" (in German). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  107. ↑ "Wikipedia wird noch nicht gedruckt" (in German). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  108. ↑ Titelinformationen, Bertelsmann site. Last seen 2008-10-07.
  109. ↑ "SOS Children releases 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection". SOS Children (06/04/2006). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  110. ↑ "Wikipedia 0.5 available on a CD-ROM" (April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  111. ↑ "Wikipedia maakt cd voor internetlozen" (in Dutch). tweakers.net (25 April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  112. ↑ "Encyclopodia site Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod". Sourceforge. Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
  113. ↑ Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-11-05/French lawsuit 5 November 2007
  114. ↑ 114.0 114.1 114.2 114.3 Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia", msnbc.com, Associated Press. Retrieved on 2007-03-28. "The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial - Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it."  — Brian Bergstein.
  115. ↑ "Rules To Consider", Ignore all rules, Internet Archive. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  116. ↑ Schiff, Stacy (July 24, 2006). "Know It All", Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?, The New Yorker. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  117. ↑ Thomson, Iain (April 13, 2007). "Wikipedia 'broken beyond repair' says co-founder", Information World Review. Retrieved on 2007-04-15. 
  118. ↑ Mitchell, Dan (December 24, 2005). "Insider Editing at Wikipedia", The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  119. ↑ 119.0 119.1 Peter Meyers (2001-09-20). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", The New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-04-18. "It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project. "There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things." Instead, he said, "there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like." 
  120. ↑ James Niccolai, Wikipedia taking on the vandals in Germany, PC Advisor, 26 September 2006.
  121. ↑ Bishop, Todd. (January 26, 2004) Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Microsoft Notebook: Wiki pioneer planted the seed and watched it grow. Section: Business; Page D1.
  122. ↑ Heim, Judy (September 4, 2001). "Free the Encyclopedias!", Technology Review. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
  123. ↑ Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia
  124. ↑ Chart: Wikipedia access in China
  125. ↑ Chinese Wikipedia now fully unblocked?
  126. ↑ Friend in high place unblocks Wikipedia, Fortune Magazine
  127. ↑ "Beijing unblocks BBC Chinese site", BBC, July 31, 2008
  128. ↑ Oʻzbekcha wikipedia yana yopildimi?(Uzbek)
  129. ↑ From Detailed tables and charts of Wikipedia statistics
  130. ↑ Wikipedia reaches milestone with half-million English articles 21 March 2005
  131. ↑ English Wikipedia hits one million articles 6 March 2006
  132. ↑ Michael Arrington, "Wikipedia: 2 Million Article Milestone", TechCrunch.com, September 12, 2007, retrieved January 4, 2008

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