(June/July) 'Atonality' is believed to be the first Nupedia article officially published.
(Summer 2000) The Nupedia Advisory Board is in place
Jeremy Rosenfeld purportedly introduces Jimmy Wales to wikis.
Ben Kovitz introduces Larry Sanger to wikis, inspiring Sanger to propose to Jimmy Wales that Nupedia have a wiki in order to draft Nupedia articles.
"Instead of preventing error and bias, invite error and bias and make it very easy for people to correct them."
Nupedia's wiki launches.
"It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia", said Sanger.
Larry Sanger coins the name "Wikipedia".
Wikipedia launches at Wikipedia.com, after Nupedia's Advisory Board expresses concern about a Wiki being associated with Nupedia.
Since then, January 15th is known among Wikipedians as "Wikipedia Day".
The Wikipedia-l mailing list is created to remove Wikipedia talk from Nupedia-l.
Wikipedia has ~600 articles.
Formation of
w:NPOV(Neutral point of view) consensus. A policy that all articles must represent all significant views fairly, proportionately, and without bias.
There are approximately 2,000 people on the Nupedia mailing list
Wikipedia has ~1300 articles.
shows a page creation on 2001-01-28, which conflicts with this.
German and Catalan versions of Wikipedia are created
Jimmy Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Larry Sanger for Nupedia.
Larry Sanger is reported to have found content in Wikipedia that he didn't already know.
The quote "Wikipedia is now useful!" has been attributed to Larry Sanger himself, but the source given doesn't support this fact.
"basic topic pages" spring up
Larry Sanger publicly proposes a wiki-based "chalkboard" to the Nupedia community (now that Wikipedia seems to have a life of its own).
A 12-hour marathon by
The Cunctatorand other Wikipedians results in the Sept. 11 page collection. Information is entered almost in real-time from new reports.
First appearance of news entries on Wikipedia's home page, in the form of a "Breaking News" header and a "current events" section, both featuring articles related to the September 11 attacks and the following War in Afghanistan.
Wikipedia has ~13,000 articles.
Larry Sanger announces his decision to "get rid of [subpages]".
- Subpages, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia-l, 2001-11-06.
The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee is created.
(Winter) a proposal for a simpler Nupedia two-step system is proposed, but never implemented
The Spanish Fork: concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bomis, combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, lead most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia to break away and establish it independently as the
w:Enciclopedia Libre.
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
, 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 processwas not yet to be instituted for several years.
This was in the 2002 section; check date.
User "24" is the first to be "banned" (blocked for 2 days).
The URL of Wikipedia is changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across Wikipedia
Pagecount leaps up to 70,000 with the pages for US towns from census data by
rambot. This was controversial and lead to much discussion about the use of bots.
Second anniversary. Shortly thereafter, 100,000 article mark is passed (an article is defined as a file with a comma in it, ruling out redirects or simple lists). 1,000,000 page views also passed about this time.
Page views per month? Or since a particular date?
coverage of
Space Shuttle Columbiadisaster appears in more or less real time, much like the 9/11 editing flood, with facts entered from the news. Background articles on space exploration, national space programs and the like appear. Suggestion that
Wikews(Wiki news) might be viable project.
coverage begins to attempt to comprehensively list reputed impacts and outcomes of the crisis, e.g. credibility of the
UN SC, re-election prospects for
Bushin the
2004 elections, growth in the
peace movementworldwide. This coverage is carefully kept skin-deep to avoid anticipating events or reporting overly speculative predictions. This experiment in issue-tracking without implying credibility or lack thereof is a delicate mix of news and encyclopedia functions, and sets some precedents for handling scheduled and anticipated future events of great political importance.
Future of Wikipediatakes a similar approach to guiding the evolution of the project.
Invasion of the "endless, pointless lists", e.g. album listings and weird lists about songs with certain properties in their titles. Even more silly lists created by people satirizing the creation of silly lists. Of course, what constitutes a "silly list" varied from person to person. Older lists such as
en:List of atheistsand
en:List of fictional catsprovoked protest as well.
Consensus begins to develop on how to deal with claims and thinking regarding
Wikipedia itselfin the text of the Wikipedia. Main issue: how each language version can develop on its own and collaborate on meta, and remain coordinated.
On July 15, Andrew Lih ("
Fuzheado") set 80 Hong Kong University students loose on Wikipedia, with an assignment to write articles on Hong Kong related topics. The students were well received, and quickly found their work being edited and discussed by regular Wikipedians. On August 4, CNN aired a report on the experiment, on their TechWatch segment.
Nupedia goes off-line (server crash) never to return.
In an attempt to take some of the pressure off "benevolent dictator" Jimbo Wales's shoulders, as well as reduce the number of Wikipedia's single points of failure and make Wikipedia more democratic, two committees, the
Mediation committeeand
Arbitration committeeare set up. Members of the mediation committee have the task of helping users find amicable solutions to arising problems. The arbitration committee is equipped with more powers and can make binding decisions, such as to ban users.
The first topical Portal is set up on the German Wikipedia
Late 2003: The non-english Wikipedias are collectively bigger than the English Wikipedia for the first time. The All-Wikipedia total of 350,000 articles is reached before the English Wikipedia total gains the 175,000 mark.
The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee were developed, mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other early Wikipedians.
English Wikipedia hits 200,000 articles, just over a year after hitting 100,000. A further slashdotting occurs, but Wikipedia rides the extra traffic with barely a hint of a slow down. See
Milestones.
500,000 articles across all Wikipedias is reached. Non-English Wikipedias are now growing much more rapidly than English. A world-wide press release is released on February 25 2004 to announce this fact. The response is particularly good in Germany, with features in a major newspaper and TV news programme.
Yahoo! announces that Wikipedia is included in their Public Site Match arm of their Content Acquisition Programme, meaning that Wikipedia content will be indexed more often and featured prominently on Yahoo! pages. Wikipedia features alongside the Library of Congress and National Public Radio archives as a quality provider of free resources in the press release.
Did You Know (DYK) makes its first Main Page appearance on the English Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales announces that he has been approached by a major publisher to create a cut-down print edition of the English Wikipedia. Technical possibilities and difficulties abound. The target date for publication is October 2004.
Birth of infoboxes, briefly called taxoboxes.
"A taxobox is an a table which is present in articles on organisms, giving their classification and other pertinent facts. On Wikipedia, the same word is used to describe similar tables for other subjects." And then "An infobox on Wikipedia is consistently-formatted table which is present in articles with a common subject (An infobox is a generalization of a taxobox (from taxonomy) which summarizes information for an organism or group of organisms)."
The English Wikipedia reaches a quarter of a million articles.
The All-Wikipedia article count surpasses one million articles.
The Wikipedia website
www.wikipedia.org domainchanged from a redirect to the English Wikipedia into a portal showing all Wikipedia languages having over 100 articles
The English Wikipedia main page is locked down after major vandalism
English Wikipedia: half-million English articles
German publishing company Directmedia Publishing donated digital images of some 10,000 works of art to the Wikimedia Commons
Spoken Wikipedia project moves into podcasting
PC World magazine "The 100 Best Products of 2005" included Wikipedia as one of 23 honorees that are available free of charge
London bombings article tracks breaking news with record editing pace
800,000th article created
Wikipedia breaks Alexa Top 40
USA Today published a column by its former editorial page editor, John Seigenthaler Sr., who told of finding his own false biography
Restriction of new article creation to registered users only
Wikipedia's first subject portals were established
Larry Sanger announces Citizendium as a fork of the English Wikipedia
first approved Wikipedia article selection made freely available to download
1.5 Million English articles, 4 million total articles
public launch of Citizendium in favor of emphasizing original articles
Wikipedia growth (as measured by active editors per month, number of edits per month, etc) is no longer exponential. Appears to follow a logistic growth model
The Wikimedia Foundation announces the release of Wikipedia Version 0.5, "a CD collection of articles from the English Wikipedia".
The English Wikipedia gains its two-millionth article
3 million articles in English, approximately 13 million articles on all Wikipedias.
the German Wikipedia is the second edition after the English Wikipedia to exceed one million articles.
Italian Wikipedia blackout
SOPA/PIPA blackout on the English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia reaches 4 million articles