Wikipedia timeline

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This is a rough and incomplete history of the project. Note, Reagle 19:12, 26 October 2005 (UTC) is doing a big overhaul and this article may contain some editorial todos, please help fix the "??'s" and otherwise make sure everything has a date and source.

See en:History of Wikipedia for a history, and Historical Wikipedia pages for primary sources. See also en:Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people, en:Wikipedia:Historic debates.

Contents

[edit] Prehistory ( - 2001)

[edit] The Launch (2001)

  • January 2001
    • January 2 - Ben Kovitz introduces Larry Sanger to Wikis (see Sanger's memoirs I), inspiring Sanger to propose to Wales that Nupedia have a Wiki in order to draft Nupedia articles
    • January 10 - Nupedia's wiki launches
      • "It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia", said Sanger...
    • January 11 - The name "Wikipedia" is coined
    • January 15 - "Wikipedia Day": Wikipedia launches at Wikipedia.com after Nupedia's Advisory Board expresses concern about a Wiki being associated with Nupedia (see Sanger's memoirs I)
    • January 20 - Wikipedia-L mailing list created to remove Wikipedia talk from Nupedia-L[2]
    • Wikipedia has ~600 articles (see Sanger's memoirs I)
  • formation of w:NPOV consensus (?? what is this? - Reagle)
  • March 2001
    • March 01 - two minor slashdottings of Wikipedia, March 5 [3] and March 29 [4]
    • Wikipedia has ~1300 articles (see Sanger's memoirs I)
  • The syntax for Wikipedia shifts from CamelCase to Free Links
  • Incorporation of 1911 encyclopedia articles in Project Gutenberg initiated by Bryce Harrington with the 'A' articles; see w:Wikipedia_talk:1911_Encyclopedia_Britannica (References: [5] [6] [7])
  • May 2001
  • June 26, 2001
  • July 6, 2001
    • Now that Wikipedia seems to have a life of its own, Sanger publicly proposes a Wiki based "chalkboard" to the Nupedia community, but nothing comes of it (see Sanger)
  • Naming Conventions begins to normalize page names (?? what is this - Reagle)
  • "basic topic pages" spring up (?? this needs reference and date - Reagle)
  • July 2001
    • July 25 - Kuro5hin article brings large traffic.
  • September 2001

[edit] Expansion (2001 - 2002)

  • September 2001
    • September 11 - 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.
    • September 20 - Peter Meyers writes the article Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You for the New York Times, also replublished in International Herald Tribune on the 24th.
    • September 24 - Second Kuro5hin article [9]
  • October 2001
  • December 2001
  • Winter 2001
    • a proposal for a simpler Nupedia two-step system is proposed, but never implemented (see [Sanger's memoirs II])
  • Killing of subpages begins (?? this needs reference and date - Reagle)
  • January 2002
  • February 2002:
  • March 2002
    • March 1 - 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


The main figure of the early history of wikipedia was Larry Sanger. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Nupedia, and self-titled "Main Instigator" of Wikipedia. During the first months, the number of contributors made it possible to resolve all matters by consensus, and Larry's role was mainly to craft guidelines, and write columns about different aspects of Wikipedia. These guidelines form the backbone of what Wikipedia is today, and without Larry its shape would probably be different (and without a paid "instigator" it would have take much more time to take off). Larry Sanger's contribution to Wikipedia in the early days was invaluable. His own work and editing of articles added by others, his guidance and steering of Wikipedia meant quite a lot then. However, his strong opinions and authoritarian style caused conflicts with several Wikipedians. Today we might say he wasn't prepared to be a mediator, maybe a fierce arbitrator.
As time went by, however, some discussions were dragging along without solution: Larry began to make use of his implicit authority, and finally acknowledge that authority. Several recurrent disputes arose, the most bitter of them with The Cunctator, who saw in almost every action of Larry's an abuse of power that did not belong in Wikipedia, and took actions that Larry (justly in many minds) considered harassing. Though Cunc's views were considered extreme by most of the contributors, that didn't tone down the discussion. Some Meta-Wikipedia articles dating from this period (some by Sanger, some by his detractors) are at History of Wikipedia/Articles by and about Larry Sanger.

[edit] Controversy (2002)

Political controversy became a major focus of editorial policy in mid-2002 - Larry Sanger returned after his resignation to wade in to the following:

In March 2002, the user "24" (named after his internet address) began to make a large number of controversial edits. Discussions about these edits became heated, and many people felt that 24, while knowledgable about various topics, was unable to work well with others. After posting what was perceived as a threat against Larry Sanger, Jimbo Wales banned his IP from the site for two days in April 2002 after lengthy debate on the mailing list. Many of his contributions remain in the encyclopedia.

"H.J." was banned from Wikipedia in September 2002. See [10] for details.

[edit] Consolidation (2002)

  • April 4, 2001
    • 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.
  • Summer 2002: Phase III software
  • August 2002
    • Shortly after Jimbo Wales announced that he would never run commercial en:advertisements on Wikipedia, the en:URL of Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org (see: en:.com and en:.org).
  • Standard presentations for chemical elements & biological species (?? what is this - Reagle)
  • Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across wikipedia (?? what is this - Reagle)
  • October 2002:
    • the random page bugs causes everyone to land on unexpected pages
    • pagecount leaps up to 70k with the bot-creation of pages for US towns from census data. This was controversial and lead to much discussion about the use of bots.
  • November 2002:
  • December 2002:
    • December 10: Article count jumps over 100 000 articles due to bugs in the counter; corrected back to 93 301.
    • December 12: Wiktionary, the parallel lexical project to Wikipedia is launched. Wikipedians telling people that "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" now point people to the sister project.

[edit] Reflection (2003)

  • January 2003:
    • Wikipedia3 and Wikipedia4 discussions begin, timelines proposed
    • January 15 - 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 (page views per month? or since a particular date?) also passed about this time.
  • February 2003:
    • February 1 - 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.
    • February 26 - 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.
  • March 2003:
    • 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.
  • June 2003:
    • 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.
    • Jim Wales announces formation of Wikimedia to recruit a board and write a board manual to help them manage an ever-growing Wikipedia with 600 regular contributors, and over 7000 occasionals. He first reveals his commitment to this plan in an article published on Alternet.
  • July 2003:
    • 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.
  • September 2003
    • Nupedia goes off-line (server crash) never to return
  • October/November 2003:
    • 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 are tasked with 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.
    • October 12 - The English Wikipedia switched to the Nohat logo (Logo history)
    • October 28 - The first time a "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in Munich. Since then in a lot of cities worldwide regular meetings of fellow Wikipedians are being held.
  • 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.

[edit] Hitting the big time? (2003 - 2004)

  • Christmas 2003
    • A major computer crash takes wikipedia offline for a week and prompts Jimbo Wales to launch a fund-raising drive. In less than a week more than $30,000 is raised, thanks partly to another healthy dose of publicity on Slashdot. The money allows nine new computers to be purchased. These are brought online during January 2004, and as a result the location of the Wikimedia computers moves from San Diego to Florida, within an hour of Jimbo's home, allowing a better emergency response in the future. The editing and viewing experience is dramatically improved. (Full explanation of new server set-up at Wikimedia servers).
  • January 2004
    • 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.
  • February 2004
    • 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.
  • February 2004
    • Yahoo! announces that Wikipedia is included in their Public Site Match arm of their Content Acquistion 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.
  • February 2004
    • On February 26 2004 Jimbo Wales announces on the mailing list ([11]) 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.
  • February 2004
    • The first full month at the new server location with all nine new machines available sees a massive increase in traffic to the site. Around 660GB of data are served in February from the English Wikipedia alone across 77 million hits. It is very likely that more than 1TB was served across all Wikipedias for the first time. En also now has over 50,000 registered usernames. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/.
  • April 2004
    • The English Wikipedia reaches a quarter of a million articles.

[edit] Rewarded (2004 - 2005)

  • May 12, 2004
    • Wikipedia wins a Webby Award in the category Community.
  • September 20, 2004
    • The All-Wikipedia article count surpasses one million articles.
  • January 2005
    • The first Wikimedia servers installed outside the United States are put in production use near Paris, France. They cache some content for some European countries.
    • 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
  • February 2005
    • The English Wikipedia main page locked down after major vandalism
  • March 2005
    • English Wikipedia: half-million English articles
  • April 2005
    • Wikimedia Foundation tax-exempt charitable organization in the United States
  • May 2005
    • German publishing company Directmedia Publishing donated digital images of some 10,000 works of art to the Wikimedia Commons
  • June 2005
    • Spoken Wikipedia project moves into podcasting
  • July
    • 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
  • September 2005
    • Wikimedia adds second full-time employee
  • November 2005
    • 800,000th article created
    • Wikipedia breaks Alexa Top 40
  • December 2005
    • USA Today published a column by its former editorial page editor, John Seigenthaler Sr., who told of finding his own false biography
  • 2005
    • Wikipedia becomes a top 100 website according to Alexa.

[edit] One Million and beyond (2006 - )

  • December 2006, 1.5 Million English articles, 4 million total articles
  • September 9, 2007 - 2 million articles written in English.
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