History of Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikipedia, a project to produce a free content encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone, formally began on 15 January 2001 as a complement to the similar, but expert-written, Nupedia project.

1 Antecedents
2 Formulation of the idea
3 Project beginnings
4 International expansion
5 Continuing growth
- 5.1 2002
- 5.2 2003
- 5.3 2004
- 5.4 2005
6 Viability
7 Access in Mainland China
8 External links

[edit]

Antecedents

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 H. G. Wells' short story 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 1960.

With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. He described Wikipedia's formation as "exciting news" and his Free Software Foundation encourages people "to visit and contribute to the site". One never-realized predecessor was the Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia.

[edit]

Formulation of the idea

Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was seen as very slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed various ways to supplement Nupedia with a more open, complementary project.

In mid-December 2000, Wales had a conversation with employee Jeremy Rosenfeld, the first person to ever suggest that the software which could implement Wales' vision of a freely editable encyclopedia could be seen in WikiWikiWeb.

On the evening of January 2, 2001, Sanger had a conversation over dinner with Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer, in San Diego, California. Kovitz, who was a regular on "Ward's Wiki" (the WikiWikiWeb), explained the wiki concept to Sanger. Sanger saw that a wiki would be an excellent format whereby a more open, less formal encyclopedia project could be pursued. Sanger easily persuaded Wales, who had been introduced to the wiki concept previously, to set up a wiki for Nupedia, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10.

[edit]

Project beginnings

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, however, so the new project was given the name "Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now humorously called "Wikipedia Day" by some users). The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have done some work on the encyclopedia include Tim Shell, one of the co-founders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey.

The UuU edit that is known to all as the first edit that is still on Wikipedia to this day as it appears today, using the Nostalgia skin.

While the first edit on Wikipedia ever made is believed to be a test edit by Wales, the oldest article still preserved is, as documented at Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles, the article UuU. It was created by the user Eiffel.demon.co.uk on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC. This was on the second day after the start of Wikipedia.

The project received large numbers of participants after being mentioned three times on the tech website Slashdot — two minor mentions on March 5 [1] and March 29 [2], 2001, and then a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website Kuro5hin on July 25 [3]. Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there has been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day.

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 some software-induced slow-downs.

[edit]

International expansion

The international expansion of the project also took place during this period. In May 2001, the first wave of non-English Wikipedias were launched (in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, German, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian [4], [5]). In September, [6] a further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbocroatian versions were announced. [7]

[edit]

Continuing growth

[edit]

2002

Until January 2002, Sanger was employed by Bomis as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and the unofficial leader of Wikipedia. Funding ran out, however, and Sanger resigned from both positions in March 2002.
In February 2002, most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia broke away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre. The project is occasionally visited by "vandals" who remove valid articles or post inappropriate content. While such vandalism is generally quickly reverted, the project's main page was, for a time, subjected to repeated vandalism. This led to the protection of the page so that it could only be changed by administrators.
On April 4, 2002 Brilliant Prose, since renamed to Wikipedia:Featured Articles, was moved to the Wikipedia Namespace from the article namespace. At that time, selection was informal; the Featured Articles Candidacy process was not yet to be instituted for several years.
In August 2002, shortly after Jimbo Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org (see: .com and .org).
In the same summer, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the Manual of Style, along with a number of other policies and guidelines.
In October 2002, Derek Ramsey ("Ram-Man") started to use a "bot", or program, to add a large number of articles about United States towns; these articles were automatically generated from U.S. census data. Occasionally, similar bots had been used before for other topics. These articles were generally well received, but some users criticized them for their uniformity and generally machine-like writing style (for example, see this version of a town article).
In December 2002, the sister project Wiktionary was created; it aims to produce a dictionary and thesaurus of the words in all languages. It uses the same software as Wikipedia.

[edit]

2003

In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
On January 22, 2003, the English Wikipedia was again slashdotted after having reached the 100,000 article milestone. Two days later, the German language Wikipedia, the largest non-English version, passed the 10,000 article mark.
In June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded. On the same day "Wikiquote" was created. A month later, "Wikibooks" was launched.
On October 28, 2003 the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in Munich. Many cities followed suit, and soon a number of regular Wikipedian get-togethers were established around the world. Several Internet communities, including one on the popular blog website LiveJournal, have also sprung up since.

[edit]

2004

In January 2004, Wikipedia passed the 200,000 article milestone in English and reached 450,000 articles for both English and non-English wikis. The next month, the combined article count of the English and non-English wikis reached 500,000.
In late February 2004 a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared. On February 25, the listing of important overview articles, was replaced by a single link to Template:WikipediaTOC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look. On February 26, 2004, User:maveric149 (Daniel Mayer) implemented the first entries of an automated archive for the Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries which appear on the Main Page. This feature updates daily on the Main Page of the English Wikipedia.
On April 20, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 250,000.
On May 29, 2004, all the various Wikiprojects were updated to a new version of MediaWiki, the software that runs the various Wikiprojects.
On May 30, 2004, the first instances of Wikipedia:Categorization entries appeared: Category:Mathematics and Category:World War II. Category Schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed from the founding of Wikipedia. However Larry Sanger had viewed the Schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles, whereas the Categorization effort centered on individual categorization entries in each article of the encyclopedia, as part of a larger automatic categorization of the articles of the encyclopedia.
On June 3, 2004, the People's Republic of China blocked access to the Chinese Wikipedia in mainland China. A few days later, all language Wikipedias were blocked. The ban was lifted on June 17.
On July 7, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 300,000.
From July 10 to August 30 , 2004 the categories and major articles formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On August 27 , 2004 the Wikipedia:Community Portal was started, to serve as a focus for community efforts. These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad-hoc collaborations between like-minded editors.
- As an illustration of the power of collaborative community efforts, on August 31, 2004, User:Eloquence created the catmore template to support the use of the Categories. Briefly, catmore expanded into an explanation which is customized to the page into which it is inserted. Editors could then simply enter the {{catmore}} template onto a category page to produce a customized message which relates a category to its main article. In one year, 9 users have collaborated to improve the usability of {{catmore}}, in dozens of edits to this small macro. Now multiply this small example by the thousands of editors who understand its use, and Wikipedia is the result.
On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia reached one million articles [8] in over 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press. The one millionth article was published in the Hebrew language Wikipedia, and discusses the flag of Kazakhstan.
On November 20, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 400,000.

[edit]

2005

On February 5, 2005, the first Wikipedia:Wikiportal, since renamed to Portal:Biology was created.
On March 17, 2005, Wikipedia finally passed the 500,000 article milestone in English.
On 7 June 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time the bulk of the Wikimedia servers were moved to a new facility across the street. All Wikimedia projects were down during this time.
On June 19, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 600,000 article mark.
On July 16, 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's featured picture on the main page, in the space until then occupied by the "Did you know" section. The featured picture of the day now occupies the slot on weekends, with "Did you know" resuming its usual position there on weekdays.
On August 25, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 700,000 article mark.
On September 29, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 750,000 article mark.
As of Saturday, October 15, 2005, there have been over 500,000 accounts registered on English Wikipedia.
On October 20, 2005, direct access to all the Wikipedia sites was blocked in most areas of mainland China.
On November 1, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 800,000 article mark.

[edit]

Viability

The German Wikipedia's issue on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM helped prove a market for Wikimedia products. Within the first ten days, it presold 10,000 copies, 8,000 of which were on Amazon.de. Sales of the product, issued by Directmedia Publishing GmbH of Berlin, were certainly helped by the €9.90 price for the product.

[edit]

Access in Mainland China

Main article: Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China

This article documents a current event.
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

The People's Republic of China and internet service providers in Mainland China have adopted a practice of blocking contentious Internet sites in mainland China, and Wikimedia sites have been blocked at least three times in its history. Currently, Wikimedia appears to be undergoing the third block in its history.

The first and so far most significant block lasted between June 2 and June 21, 2004. It began when access to the Chinese Wikipedia from Beijing was blocked on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Possibly related to this, on May 31 an article from the IDG News Service was published [9], discussing the Chinese Wikipedia's treatment of the protests. The Chinese Wikipedia also has articles related to Taiwanese independence, written by contributors from Taiwan and elsewhere [10]. A few days after the initial block of Chinese Wikipedia, all Wikimedia sites were blocked in Mainland China. In response to the blocks, two sysops prepared an appeal to lift the block and asked their regional internet service provider to submit it. All Wikimedia sites were unblocked between June 17 and June 21, 2004.

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 6 to 12 months in order to regain the stats from May 2004.

The second and less serious outage lasted between September 23 and September 27, 2004. During this 4-day period, 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 a mystery, 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. Refugees from the BBS had arrived en masse on Chinese Wikipedia. Chinese Wikipedians once again prepared a written appeal to regional ISPs, but the block was lifted before the appeal was actually sent out; the reasons of which are, once again, a mystery.

The third block began on October 19, 2005, and once again there is no indication as to whether this block is temporary or permanent, or what the reasons or causes for this block are. According to the status page currently maintained on the Chinese Wikipedia, the Florida and Korea servers are blocked, while the Paris and Amsterdam servers are not. Dozens of editors from across Mainland China have reported that they can only access Wikipedia using proxy servers.

[edit]