Wikipedia is launched
- Date
- 15 January 2001
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Global
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 15 January 2001 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that anyone could edit.
It grew out of Nupedia, a more conventional expert-written project that had proved slow to produce articles; the addition of wiki software allowed users to draft and revise pages collaboratively and almost instantly. The name combined 'wiki', a Hawaiian word for quick, with 'encyclopedia'. The model proved extraordinarily productive: within months the English edition was joined by German, French, Catalan, Swedish and Italian versions, and the project expanded into hundreds of languages over the following years. Hosted from 2003 by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and funded mainly by donations, Wikipedia grew into one of the most visited websites in the world and a primary reference source for billions of people. Its open, volunteer-driven approach demonstrated the power of mass online collaboration, while also prompting ongoing debate about reliability, bias, vandalism and editorial governance. Wikipedia became a defining example of the early internet's promise of freely shared knowledge.
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Further reading
The wider story
The Story of Art
The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.
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