History of Wikipedia
- This article covers the history of Wikipedia. For information on page history within Wikipedia, see Help:Page history.
This article covers the history of Wikipedia, a project to produce a free content encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone.
Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001. Initially it was created as a complement and 'feeder' to the expert-written 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 2007, Wikipedia includes several million freely-usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. It is one of the most popular web sites and extensively used reference sites worldwide.
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Overview history
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' 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 1960.
With the development of the web, 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.[1] He described Wikipedia's formation as "exciting news" and his Free Software Foundation encourages people "to visit and contribute to the site".[2] One little-acknowledged predecessor was the Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia.
Formulation of the concept
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project founded by Jimmy Wales[3][4] to produce a free encyclopedia. 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 recruited by Wales,[5] the writing of content was extremely slow with only 12 articles completed during the first year.[6]
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a wiki-based complement came from multiple sources: Wales has claimed that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept. Independently, Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's wiki (the WikiWikiWeb), introduced Sanger to wikis over dinner on January 2, 2001. 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.[7]
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.
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.[citation needed] However, the oldest article still preserved is the article UuU, created on 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.[8]
The project received many new participants after being mentioned three times on the Slashdot website — two minor mentions in March 2001.[9][10] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website Kuro5hin on July 25.[11] 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. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in the New York Times on September 20, 2001.[12]
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.
Internationalization
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally. The first domain reserved for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (on 16 March 2001),[13] followed after some minutes by the Catalan,[14]; for about two months the latter was the only one with articles in a non-English language.[15][16] The first reference of the French Wikipedia is from 23 March[17] and then in May 2001 it followed a wave of new language versions in Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. They were soon joined by Arabic[18] and Hungarian[19][20] In September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia,[21] including roll-out of all major languages, and establishment of core standards and 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.[22]
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004 less than 50% were English, and internationalization has continued to grow, so that as of 2007 around 75% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions.
Development
In March 2002, following 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 #Disagreement between Wales and Sanger regarding early roles.) 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.
Wales, a believer in communal governance and "hands off" executive management, went on to establish self-goverance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Wikipedia. He made clear 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 encouragment 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 (2006), an alternative open encyclopedia which used real names for contributors to reduce disruptive editing, specific recognition of experts, and a system of top-down benevolent management by himself or by agreed editors or committees. He has stated an intent of leaving in a few years, when the project and its management is established.[23]
Organization
The project has grown rapidly in the course of its life to date, at several levels. Individual wikis have grown organically by addition of new articles; new wikis have been added in 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.
To meet this, 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 below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.
- 2001
Nupedia project started with Larry Sanger running the daily operations and formulating much of the initial policies. The Wikipedia.com domain was created January 12, 2001,[24] the Wikipedia.org domain was created January 13, 2001 00:12:14 UTC,[25] and was online Jan 13 according to alexa; project formally opens Jan 15 (''); first international Wikipedias 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 was in August 2001 coincidently by Wales on Sunday.[26]
- 2002
2002 saw 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 Mediawiki software (went live Jan 25). Bots were introduced, James Wales confirmed Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style were launched.
- 2003
Mathematical formulae using TeX were 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.
- 2004
Wikipedia continued 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 moved from California to Florida; Categories and CSS style configuration sheets were introduced; and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred (China, June 2004, duration 2 weeks).
- 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 controversy"). In the wake of this and other concerns,[27] 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 Mediawiki 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 a 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[28];
- 2007
Wikipedia continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts [29]; the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages;[30] the English Wikipedia gains a steady 1,700 articles a day,[31] 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 secondary 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.[32]
History by subject area
Hardware and software
- The software that runs Wikipedia, and the hardware, server farms and other systems upon which Wikipedia relies.
- In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on UseModWiki, written in Perl by Clifford Adams. The server has run on Linux to this day, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the CamelCase convention.
- In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Wikipedia was introduced, replacing the older UseModWiki. Written specifically for the project by Magnus Manske, it included a PHP wiki engine.
- In July 2002, a major rewrite of the software powering Wikipedia went live; dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and became MediaWiki. It was written by Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the increasing demands of the growing project.
- In October 2002, Derek Ramsey 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 initial uniformity and writing style (for example, see this version of an original bot-generated town article, and compare to current version).
- December 2002 - Interlanguage links and Unicode (non-English characters) are enabled.[5]
- In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in TeX was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
- June 9, 2003 - ISBNs in articles now link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page Wikipedia:Book sources. Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the Wikipedia:ISBN page. See the edit that changed this.
- After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Wikipedia users were no longer hard coded, allowing Wikipedia administrators to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users.
- On February 12, 2004, server operations were moved from San Diego, California to Tampa, Florida.[33]
- 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 "categorization" entries appeared. 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.[34]
- After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css.
- Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was created, allowing transclusion of standard texts.[35]
- 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.
Look and feel
- The external face of Wikipedia, its look and feel, and the Wikipedia branding, as presented to users
- On April 4, 2002 Brilliant Prose, since renamed to Featured Articles[36], was moved to the Wikipedia Namespace from the article namespace.
- Around October 15, 2003, the current Wikipedia logo was installed. The logo concept was selected by a voting process,[37] which was followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The final selection was created by David Friedland based on a logo design and concept created by Paul Stansifer.
- On February 22, 2004 DYK made its first Main Page appearance.
- On February 23, 2004 a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared at 19:46 UTC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look.
- On January 10, 2005, the multilingual portal at www.wikipedia.org was set up, replacing a redirect to the English-language Wikipedia.
- On February 5, 2005, the first "portal", the Biology Portal, was created.[38]
- On July 16, 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page.
- On March 19, 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years.
Internal structures
- Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies.
- April 2001, Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view",[39] Wikipedia's core non-negotiable editorial policy,[40] a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Sanger for Nupedia[41] in spring or summer 2000, which covered many of the same core principles.[42]
- In February 2002, concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bormis Inc (Wikipedia's original host) combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, led most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia to break away and establish it independently as the Enciclopedia Libre.[43] Following clarification of Wikipedia's status and non-commercial nature later that year, re-merger talks between Enciclopedia Libre and the re-founded Spanish Wikipedia occasionally took place in 2002 and 2003, but no conclusion was reached. As of July 2007, the two continue to coexist as substantial Spanish language reference sources, with around 36,700 articles (EL) and 248,800 articles (Sp.W) [44] respectively.
- Also in 2002, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the Manual of Style, along with a number of other policies and guidelines.[45]
- November 2002 - new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce are set up, as well as other language mailing lists (eg Polish), to reduce the volume of traffic on mailing lists.[6]
- 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.
- From July 10 to August 30, 2004 the Wikipedia:Browse and Wikipedia:Browse by overview formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On August 27, 2004 the Community Portal was started,[46] 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.
- During September to December 2005 following the Seigenthaler controversy and other similar concerns,[27] several anti-abuse features and policies were added to Wikipedia. These were:
-
-
- The policy for "Checkuser" (a Mediawiki sock puppetry detection tool) was established.[47] Checkuser function had previously existed[48] 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.[49]
- Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who had created a user account.[50]
- 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,[51] allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit.
-
- In May 2006, a new "oversight" feature was introduced on the English Wikipedia, allowing a handful of highly trusted users to permanently erase page revisions containing copyright infringements or libelous or personal information from a page's history. Previous to this, page version deletion was laborious, and also deleted versions remained visible to other administrators and could be un-deleted by them.
- On January 1 2007, the subcommunity named Esperanza was disbanded by communal consent. Esperanza had begun as an effort to promote "wikilove" and a social support network, but had developed its own subculture and private structures.[52][53] Its disbanding was described as the painful but necessary remedy for a project that had allowed editors to "see themselves as Esperanzans first and foremost".[53] A number of Esperanza's subprojects (including coaching and stress alerts) were integrated back into Wikipedia as free-standing projects. When the group was founded in September 2005, there had been concerns expressed that it would eventually be condemned as such.[54]
- In April 2007 the results of 4 months policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia policies into one core policy (See: Wikipedia:Attribution) was polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focussed policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal.
The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures
- Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia Foundation, its executive, and its activities as a foundation.
- In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy 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).
- On June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded.
- Communications committee formed January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Wikipedia via the newly implemented OTRS (a ticket handling system).
- Angela Beesley was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. During this time, she was active in editing content and setting policy, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation.[55]
- On January 10, Wikipedia became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation.[56]
- In July, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.[57]
Projects and landmarks
- Sister projects, and landmarks related to articles, user base, and other statistics.
- In December 2002, the first sister project, Wiktionary, was created; aiming to produce a dictionary and thesaurus of the words in all languages. It uses the same software as Wikipedia.
- On January 22, 2003, the English Wikipedia was again slashdotted after having reached the 100,000 article milestone with the Hastings, New Zealand article. Two days later, the German language Wikipedia, the largest non-English version, passed the 10,000 article mark.
- On June 20, 2003, the same day that the Wikimedia Foundation was founded, "Wikiquote" was created. A month later, "Wikibooks" was launched.
- In January 2004, Wikipedia passed the 200,000 article milestone in English with the article on Neil Warnock, 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.
- On April 20, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 250,000.
- On July 7, 2004, the article count of the English wiki reached 300,000.
- On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia reached one million articles in over 105 languages, and received a flurry of related attention in the press.[58] 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 Wikipedia reached 400,000.
- On March 18, 2005, Wikipedia passed the 500,000 article milestone in English, with Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union being announced in a press release as the landmark article.[59]
- In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company Hitwise, relegating Dictionary.com to second place.
- On September 29, 2005, the English Wikipedia passed the 750,000 article mark.
- On March 1, 2006, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000,000 article mark, with Jordanhill railway station being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article[60]
- On June 8, 2006, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000 featured article mark, with Iranian peoples.[61]
- On November 24, 2006, the English language Wikipedia passed the 1,500,000 article mark, with Kanab ambersnail being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article.[60]
- On April 4, 2007, the first CD selection in English was published as a free download (see 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection).[62]
- On September 9, 2007, the English language Wikipedia passed the 2,000,000 article mark. El Hormiguero, an article which covers a Spanish TV comedy show, is accepted by consensus as the 2,000,000th article.
Funding
- One of the first[citation needed] fundraisers was held from February 18, 2005 to March 1, 2005, raising $94,000, which was $21,000 more than expected.[63]
- On January 6, 2006, the Q4 2005 fundraiser concluded, raising a total of just over $390,000.[64]
- In June 2007 it was announced that the German Wikipedia will be receiving state funding.[65]
External impact
- In 2007, Wikipedia is deemed fit to be used as a major source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in the Formula One trademark case ruling.[66]
- Over time Wikipedia gains recognition amongst other traditional media as a "key source" for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and related tsunami, the biographies of 2008 Presidential election candidates,[67] and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The latter article is accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published local to the shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event." [68]
- On February 21 Noam Cohen of the New York Times publishes A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
- On February 27, An article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University do include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[69]
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.
- November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy
- February 16, 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport because of false information on his biography that he was a terrorist.[70][71]
Controversies
- January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, attempts to promote itself on its Wikipedia page.
- October 2005: Alan Mcilwraith is exposed as a fake war hero with a Wikipedia page.
- November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy causes Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity is ascertained by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch. Following this, the scientific journal Nature undertakes a peer reviewed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in Encyclopedia Britannica, and concludes they are broadly comparable in terms of accuracy.[72][73] Britannica reject their conclusion.[74] Nature refuses to make any apologies, supporting the effectiveness and actuality of its study.[75] (For studies like this, see Reliability of Wikipedia. For traffic impact see Wikipedia history in images)
- Early-to-mid 2006: The congressional aides biography scandals come to public attention, in which several political aides are caught trying to influence the Wikipedia biographies of several politicians to remove undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), add favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replace the article in part or whole by staff authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden, Gil Gutknecht.[76] In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigns after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents.[77] Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006.
- April 2006: Two Wikipedia administators — both professional working adults — leave the project after having their real-life identities revealed.
- July 2006: Joshua Gardner is exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Wikipedia page.
- January 2007: English-language Wikipedians in Qatar were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP address. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar from the site.[78]
- On January 23, 2007, a Microsoft employee offered to pay Rick Jelliffe to review and change certain Wikipedia articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format.[79]
- In February 2007, The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials.[80][81] The editor, Ryan Jordan, became a Wikia employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, and communicated to the original article author. (See: Essjay controversy)
- February 2007: Fuzzy Zoeller sues a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Wikipedia biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network.
- February 16, 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist.
- In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site Wikinews.
Notable forks and derivatives
- A significant number of sites utilize the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia. An interesting early example of a fork of Wikipedia using a different policy on point of view is Wikinfo, developed by prominent Wikipedia editor and arbitrator Fred Bauder. This project advocates a "sympathetic point of view" for its articles rather than Wikipedia's neutral point of view. (Partial list of mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is held.)
- Specialized language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), Baidu Baike (Chinese), and Wikinfo (English). 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, intended to address the absence of an expert-led top-down culture he viewed as a concern in Wikipedia.[82]
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[83] 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.[84] 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.[85]
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.[86] 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.[87][88] 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.[89]
Other notable occurences
Early roles of Wales and Sanger
There is a difference of view between Wales and Sanger as to the precise roles and titles they employed in the early stages of Wikipedia. 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[90] for which both were interviewed. 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."[91] There is no evidence from before January 2004 of Wales disputing Sanger's status as co-founder.[92]
Sanger concedes that it was Wales alone who conceived of an encyclopedia to which non-experts could contribute, i.e. Wikipedia. "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) Sanger maintains that it was he who brought the wiki concept to Wales and suggested it be applied to Nupedia and that, after some initial skepticism, Wales agreed to try it. Wales states that one Jeremy Rosenfeld [citation needed] first suggested the idea of a wiki to him, and also in October 2001 that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software."[93] Sanger has also claimed credit for coining the portmanteau "Wikipedia" as the project name[94] In review, Larry Sanger writes that he conceived of a wiki-based encyclopedia primarily as a strategic solution to Nupedia's inefficiency problems,[95] , although acknowledging that "Jimmy, of course, deserves enormous credit for investing in and guiding Wikipedia".[96] 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 and building up the community. Upon departure (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,[5] 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".[97]
Today, Wales emphasizes this employer-employee relation and the fact that he was therefore the ultimate authority, to assert that this makes him as founder, the "sole founder", and Sanger relies upon evidence from earlier versions of Wikipedia pages and press releases from 2002 - 2004, to assert that media coverage articles from the time of his involvement routinely represent them as co-founders.[98][99]
Blocking of Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities. To date these have related to China (June and September 2004, October 2005), Iran, and Tunisia.
Mainland China (multiple occasions)
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 at least four times in its history.
- June 2 to June 21, 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.[100] (The Chinese Wikipedia also has articles related to Taiwanese independence, written by contributors from Taiwan and elsewhere.) A few days after the initial block of Chinese Wikipedia, all Wikimedia sites were blocked in Mainland China. In response to the blocks, two administrators 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 six to twelve months in order to recover to the levels of May 2004.
- September 23 to September 27, 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. 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.
- October 19, 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.[101][102][103]
- November 17, 2006: Chinese and English Wikipedias re-blocked.[104]
Iran
Access to the Persian Wikipedia was blocked for a few days by some ISPs in Iran.[citation needed]
- Further information: Censorship in Iran
Tunisia
Wikimedia website was blocked for a few days in Tunisia (November 23 - November 27, 2006).
Wikipedia history in images
Traffic, size and growth (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics) |
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Based on the red line in the graph above and the expected value for the 2M article mark:
Date | number |
---|---|
April 2003 | 125,000[105] |
April 2004 | 250,000 |
March 17, 2005 | 500,000[106] |
March 1, 2006 | 1,000,000[107] |
September 9, 2007 | 2,000,000[108] |
See also
References
- ^ The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource.
- ^ The Free Encyclopedia Project.
- ^ Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world, Boston Globe, 12 February 2006.
- ^ The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir - Slashdot, retrieved May 23, 2007. "Jimmy started and broadly authorized it all"
- ^ a b 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."
- ^ The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir - Slashdot
- ^ Larry Sanger. "Let's make a wiki", Nupedia mailing list, January 10, 2001.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
- ^ Nupedia and Project Gutenberg Directors Answer March 5 2001
- ^ Everything2 Hits One Million Nodes March 29 2001
- ^ Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias July 25 2001
- ^ "Fact driven? Collegial? This site wants you", New York Times, September 20, 2001
- ^ Alternative language wikipedias
- ^ History of the Catalan Homepage
- ^ Multilingual monthly statistics
- ^ First edition in the Catalan Wikipedia
- ^ French page where they say it
- ^ HomePage from the Internet Archive
- ^ Wikipedia:Announcements May 2001
- ^ International_Wikipedia
- ^ Wikipedia Announcements September 2001
- ^ International wikipedias statistics
- ^ Anderson, Nate. "Citizendium: building a better Wikipedia", Ars Technica, February 25, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-03-25.
- ^ Network Solutions (2007) WHOIS domain registration information results for wikipedia.com from Network Solutions Accessed July 27, 2007.
- ^ Network Solutions (2007) WHOIS domain registration information results for wikipedia.org from Network Solutions Accessed July 27, 2007.
- ^ 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.")
- ^ a b WP:BLP started 17 December 2005 with narrative "I started this due to the Daniel Brandt situation". [1]
- ^ Similar Search Results: Google Wins January 29, 2007
- ^ See the special page: : 5,078,036 registered user accounts as at 13 August 2007, excluding IP editors who have not created accounts.
- ^ Source: Wikipedia:Size comparisons as at 13 August 2007
- ^ From around Q3 2006 Wikipedia's growth rate has been approximately linear, source: Wikipedia:Statistics - new article count by month 2006-2007.
- ^ E.g., cases such as Crystal Gail Mangum and Daniel Brandt.
- ^ Server swapping soon. Retrieved on 2007-02-10.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Categorization", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Template namespace", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-09-17.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Featured articles", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
- ^ International logo vote/Finalists. Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia. Retrieved on 2006-07-08.
- ^ "Portal:Biology", English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-31.
- ^ NeutralPointOfView
- ^ "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.
- ^ Nupedia.com editorial policy guidelines. Version 3.31 (November 16, 2000). Retrieved 2007-09-07.
- ^ "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." [2]
- ^ 'Why we are here and not in Wikipedia (in Spanish, under GFDL)
- ^ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especial:Statistics
- ^ First substantial edit to Wikipedia:Manual of Style, Wikipedia (August 23, 2002). Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Community Portal", Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
- ^ "CheckUser policy", Meta-Wiki. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
- ^ For example, an Arbitration Committee case against JarlaxleArtemis
- ^ Checkuser proposal
- ^ "Page creation restrictions", Wikipedia Signpost / English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-31.
- ^ "Semi-protection policy", Wikipedia Signpost / English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.
- ^ Esperanza organization disbanded after deletion discussion January 2, 2007
- ^ a b http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MFD/EA
- ^ New group aims to promote Wiki-Love September 19, 2005
- ^ Riehle, Dirk. "How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko", www.riehle.org, 2006.
- ^ Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-16/Trademark registered. Wikipedia (2006-01-16). Retrieved on 2007-01-14.
- ^ "Angela Beesley resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board", Wikimedia Foundation press release, July 7, 2006.
- ^ One million Wikipedia articles
- ^ Wikipedia Publishes 500,000th English Article
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ Wikimedia Foundation: English Wikipedia Announces Thousandth Featured Article
- ^ A Schools Global Citizen Resource from SOS Children
- ^ "Fund drives/2005/Q1", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
- ^ "Fund drives/2005/Q4", Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
- ^ German Wikipedia receives state funding June 26, 2007
- ^ 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."
- ^ On Wikipedia, Debating 2008 Hopefuls' Every Facet, Washington Post, September 17, 2007; Page A01, quote: "...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."
- ^ Source: Wikipedia emerges as key source for Virginia Tech shootings - cyberjournalist.net citing the New York Times [3], 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'."
- ^ Child, Maxwell L.,"Professors Split on Wiki Debate", The Harvard Crimson, by:MAXWELL L. CHILD, Monday, February 26, 2007.
- ^ "Caught in the deadly web of the internet", Robert Fisk, The Independent, 21 April 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
- ^ "A question of authority", by Paul Jay, June 22, 2007, CBC News. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
- ^ Internet encyclopaedias go head to head
- ^ The (Nature) peer review
- ^ Britannica: Fatally Flawed. Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature (PDF)
- ^ Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature (23 March 2006). Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
- ^ See for example: this article on the scandal. The activities documented were:
Politician Editing undertaken Sources Marty Meehan Replacement with staff-written biography http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060130-6079.html 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). Conrad Burns
MontanaRemoval 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 http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060130-6079.html 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) [not in citation given]. Multiple attempts, first using a named account, then an anonymous IP account.
- ^ 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 [4]. See article Morton Brilliant for detailed citations.
- ^ "Wikipedia Founder Refutes Claims That It Banned Qatar" by Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek, January 2, 2007
- ^ Bergstein, Brian (2007-01-23). Microsoft offers cash for Wikipedia edit. MSNBC. Retrieved on 2007-02-01.
- ^ Schiff, Stacy (July 24, 2006). Annals of Information: Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?. The New Yorker. Retrieved on 2007-04-16.
- ^ Finkelstein, Seth (March 8, 2007). Read me first. Technology. The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-04-16.
- ^ Wikipedia founder forks Wikipedia 18 September 2006
- ^ Wikipedia, Die freie Enzyklopädie (German). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ Neue Wikipedia-DVD im Handel und zum Download (German). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ Wikipedia wird noch nicht gedruckt (German). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ SOS Children releases 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection. SOS Children (06/04/2006). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ Wikipedia 0.5 available on a CD-ROM (April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ Wikipedia maakt cd voor internetlozen (Dutch). tweakers.net (25 April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ Encyclopodia site Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod. Sourceforge. Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ Peter Meyers. "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You", The New York Times, 2001-09-20. 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.”
- ^ James Niccolai, Wikipedia taking on the vandals in Germany, , 26 September 2006.
- ^ Bishop, Todd. (January 26, 2004) Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Microsoft Notebook: Wiki pioneer planted the seed and watched it grow. Section: Business; Page D1.
- ^ Wikipedia-l: LinkBacks?
- ^ "I came up with the name 'Wikipedia' ... and the newly independent project was launched at Wikipedia.com on January 15, 2001." The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir - Slashdot, retrieved August 3, 2007.
- ^ The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir Part 1 and Part 2 from Slashdot Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
- ^ The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir - Slashdot, retrieved August 3, 2007.
- ^ Thomson, Iain. "Wikipedia 'broken beyond repair' says co-founder", Information World Review, April 13, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-04-15.
- ^ Bergstein, Brian. "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia", ABC News, Associated Press, March 25, 2007. 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.
- ^ Sanger, Larry. "My role in Wikipedia (links)", larrysanger.org Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
- ^ Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia
- ^ Chart: Wikipedia access in China
- ^ Chinese Wikipedia now fully unblocked?
- ^ Friend in high place unblocks Wikipedia, Fortune Magazine
- ^ Wikipedia blocked again in China, CNN.com, 17 November 2006.
- ^ From Detailed tables and charts of Wikipedia statistics
- ^ Wikipedia reaches milestone with half-million English articles 21 March 2005
- ^ English Wikipedia hits one million articles 6 March 2006
- ^ While Wikipedia did experience 3-year period of exponential growth with a 12 month doubling time, but the doubling time has increased to at least 17 months. Using linear growth as a model, Wikimedia milestones with 50,000 new articles every month, we get 1670 new articles per day. With the datum point: 1,940,000 articles on the start August 9, 2007 (UTC). 60,000/1670 = 36 days until the 2M mark. Actual progress in August was 2000 articles per day. Therefore it is 30 days.
External links
Wikipedia records and archives
- Wikipedia's project files contain a large quantity of reference and archive material. Useful resources on Wikipedia history within Wikipedia are:
- Historical summaries
- Category:Wikipedia years - historical events by year
Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles
History of Wikipedia - from the Wikipedia:Meta
Wikipedia:Historic debates
Wikipedia:Wikipedia records
meta:Wikimedia News - news and milestones index from all Wikipedias
Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots
- Size and statistics
- stats.wikimedia.org - the Mediawiki Foundation's main interface for all project statistics, including the various and combined Wikipedia's.
Wikipedia:Milestones
Wikipedia:Statistics
Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia
- Discussion and debate archives
- Other
- Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia
Nostalgia Wikipedia - a snapshot of Wikipedia from December 20, 2001, running the current version of MediaWiki for security reasons but using a skin that looks like the software of the time.
Larry Sanger about the origins of Wikipedia
Wikipedia:Volunteer Fire Department - handling of major editorial influx. Disbanded when no longer needed (2004)
Wikipedia:Magnus Manske Day - mediawiki software goes live into production
Third party
- Early Wikipedia snapshot--30 March 2001
- Even older Wikipedia snapshot- 28 February 2001
- The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource — Free Software Foundation endorsement of Nupedia (later updated to include Wikipedia) 1999.
- Larry Sanger, The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir and Part II Slashdot (18 April-19 April 2005)
- Giles, Jim, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica, 14 December 2005
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Main articles | Bomis · Nupedia · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Foundation · Wikimania · MediaWiki |
People | Jimmy Wales · Larry Sanger · Tim Shell · Florence Devouard · Angela Beesley · Wikipedia community |
Events and individuals | Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China · Congressional staffer edits to Wikipedia · Essjay controversy · Henryk Batuta hoax · Seigenthaler controversy · WikiScanner |
Related projects and forks | Citizendium · Conservapedia · Enciclopedia Libre · Interpedia · Uncyclopedia · Wikibooks · Wikimedia Commons · Wiktionary · Wikiquote · Wikinews · WikiZnanie · Wikinfo · Wikitruth · Wikiweise · WikiWikiWeb |