Wikipedia timeline

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger found Nupedia, funded by Bomis.

• Building the World's Biggest Encyclopedia , Liane Gouthro, PCWorld, 2000年03月10日.
• The Hive, Marshall Poe, The Atlantic, 2006-09.

en:GNU Free Documentation License version 1.1 released. Early discussions with en:Richard Stallman about a GNU FDL library for free universities

(June/July) 'Atonality' is believed to be the first Nupedia article officially published.

• Sanger's memoirs I

(Summer 2000) The Nupedia Advisory Board is in place

• Sanger's memoirs I

Jeremy Rosenfeld purportedly introduces Jimmy Wales to wikis.

• Re: Sanger's memoirs , Jimmy Wales, wikipedia-l, 2005年04月20日.

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.

• Sanger's memoirs I
• "The conversation at the taco stand", Ben Kovitz's user page

"Instead of preventing error and bias, invite error and bias and make it very easy for people to correct them."

Nupedia's wiki launches.

• Let's make a wiki , Larry Sanger, Nupedia-l, 2001年01月10日.
• Nupedia's wiki: try it out , Larry Sanger, Nupedia-l, 2001年01月10日.

"It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia", said Sanger.

Larry Sanger coins the name "Wikipedia".

• The wiki... , Larry Sanger, Nupedia-l, 2001年01月11日.

Wikipedia launches at Wikipedia.com, after Nupedia's Advisory Board expresses concern about a Wiki being associated with Nupedia.

• Sanger's memoirs I.

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-l: hopefully the last you'll hear of this! , Larry Sanger, Nupedia-l, 2001年01月20日.

Wikipedia has ~600 articles.

• Sanger's memoirs I.

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

• Sanger's memoirs I

There is confusion about Stallman's GNUpedia proposal when announced on en:Slashdot [1], as Wales had been talking to him about Nupedia before this, (see Stallman's explanation).

Wikipedia has ~1300 articles.

• Sanger's memoirs I.

Incorporation of 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica articles in Project Gutenberg initiated by Bryce Harrington with the 'A' articles.

• BritannicaPublicDomain , Wikipedia, as of 2001年08月05日.
• Proposal for an Encyclopedian Recycling Endeavor , BryceHarrington, meta-wiki, 2001年08月26日.

AbbevilleFrance shows a page creation on 2001年01月28日, which conflicts with this.

German and Catalan versions of Wikipedia are created

• Alternative language wikipedias , Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia-l, 2001年03月16日.
• Catalan Wikipedia: History of HomePage , Internet Archive.

Jimmy Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Larry Sanger for Nupedia.

• http://web.archive.org/web/20010416035757/http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/NeutralPointOfView
• Nupedia.com editorial policy guidelines. Version 3.31 (16 November 2000)

Larry Sanger is reported to have found content in Wikipedia that he didn't already know.

• Wojtek Pobratyn, Wikipedia, 2001年07月04日. Page deleted on 2007年02月12日 when 2001 announcements were merged into a yearly archive.

The quote "Wikipedia is now useful!" has been attributed to Larry Sanger himself, but the source given doesn't support this fact.

w:Naming conventions begins to normalize page names

"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).

• Important: status of the wiki proposal , Larry Sanger, Nupedia-l, 2001年07月06日.

In response to "What is an encyclopedia", Wikipedia defines what it is not though related discussions continue.

A 12-hour marathon by The Cunctator and 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: HomePage, Internet Archive, Snapshot from 2001年10月10日.

Collaboration by subject matter in WikiProjects is introduced.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_proposal

Wikipedia has ~13,000 articles.

• Sanger's memoirs I

Larry Sanger announces his decision to "get rid of [subpages]".

• Subpages , Larry Sanger, Wikipedia-l, 2001年11月06日.

See also w:Wikipedia:Subpages#History of subpages.

The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee is created.

• Sanger's memoirs II

(Winter) a proposal for a simpler Nupedia two-step system is proposed, but never implemented

• [Sanger's memoirs II]

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 .

• Por qué estamos aquí y no en es.wikipedia.org

Larry Sanger resigns. See My resignation--Larry Sanger.

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

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.

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

• First substantial edit to Wikipedia:Manual of Style

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.

Sanger proposes and Wales concedes to nonnegotiable policies

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 Columbia disaster 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.

Iraq crisis 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 Bush in the 2004 elections, growth in the peace movement worldwide. 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 Wikipedia takes 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 atheists and en:List of fictional cats provoked protest as well.

Seeding of other projects: The wikipedia phase 3 software is used for several other projects including Internet Encyclopedia (a non-NPOV alternative). Disinfopedia, Consumerium are not forks, but a widening of the ground covered - Disinfopedia is concerned with exposing propaganda, and Consumerium with enabling moral purchasing. None competes directly with Wikipedia.

Iraq war causes news capacity to develop. Wikipedia becomes an important point of consolidation of information from alternative news and little-read-but-reliable sources. Predicted effects of invading Iraq are compiled in advance of the invasion, enabling later comparison with the en:alleged effects of invading Iraq.

Consensus begins to develop on how to deal with claims and thinking regarding Wikipedia itself in 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 committee and Arbitration committee are 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

• w:de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt Portale/2003

The English Wikipedia switches to the Nohat logo (Logo history)

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.

• Yahoo!'s press release

Did You Know (DYK) makes its first Main Page appearance on the English Wikipedia.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Did_you_know&oldid=2500457

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.

• [2]

Birth of infoboxes, briefly called taxoboxes.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Infobox&oldid=2293795
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Infobox&diff=2323009&oldid=2322962

"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.

Wikipedia wins a Prix Ars Electronica in the category Digital Communities.

Wikipedia wins a Webby Award in the category Community.

First international meetup(?) and first meetup that Jimmy Wales attends, in London.

The All-Wikipedia article count surpasses one million articles.

The Wikipedia website www.wikipedia.org domain changed 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

• w:Wikipedia biography controversy

Restriction of new article creation to registered users only

• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/033880.html
• Growing pains for Wikipedia , Daniel Terdiman, CNET News , 2005年12月05日
• w:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-12-05/Page creation restrictions

Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons page is started. It will become a guideline in January 2006 and a policy in July 2006.

• [3]

[4] [5]

Wikipedia's first subject portals were established

The English Wikipedia gains its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station.

• foundation:Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article

Larry Sanger announces Citizendium as a fork of the English Wikipedia

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/18/sanger_forks_wikipedia/

first approved Wikipedia article selection made freely available to download

call for 100,000 feature-quality articles

1.5 Million English articles, 4 million total articles

public launch of Citizendium in favor of emphasizing original articles

• http://web.archive.org/web/20091021120204/http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/01/18/bye-bye-to-wikipedia-articles-hello-to-our-own-work/

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

• [6]

The Wikimedia Foundation announces the release of Wikipedia Version 0.5, "a CD collection of articles from the English Wikipedia".

• foundation:Press releases/Version .5

The English Wikipedia gains its two-millionth article

• foundation:Press releases/Wikipedia Reaches 2 Million Articles

Essjay controversy

Scientology arbitration and ban

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/5408761/Church-of-Scientology-members-banned-from-editing-Wikipedia.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/29/wikipedia-bans-scientolog_n_208967.html
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/wikipedia_bans_scientology/

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.

Licensing update

• foundation:Resolution:Licensing update approval
• foundation:Press releases/Dual license vote May 2009

Italian Wikipedia blackout

• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394150,00.asp#fbid=pWeBqlxi4Fc

SOPA/PIPA blackout on the English Wikipedia

• w:Protests against SOPA and PIPA#Wikimedia community
• w:Wikipedia:SOPA initiative
• foundation:Press releases/English Wikipedia to go dark

English Wikipedia reaches 4 million articles

• https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/13/english-wikipedia-crosses-4-million-article-milestone/