Wikipedia Launched
Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 as a free, collaboratively written online encyclopedia. It grew into one of the most visited websites in the world and changed how ordinary people look up information, while also prompting lasting debates about reliability, authority and who gets to decide what counts as knowledge.
The project grew out of an earlier effort called Nupedia, founded in 2000 by Jimmy Wales and edited by Larry Sanger, with funding from Wales's internet company Bomis. Nupedia aimed to produce freely available articles written by experts and passed through a multi-stage review process. That process was careful but slow, and only a small number of articles were finished. Looking for a way to feed material into the system, the team turned to wiki software, a tool first developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s that lets any visitor edit a web page directly.
Wikipedia began as a side project on its own site, open to anyone. Its early growth was rapid, helped by links from search engines and by volunteers who found the idea appealing. The English edition passed tens of thousands of articles within its first couple of years, and editions in other languages soon followed. Content was released under a free license, allowing others to copy and reuse it with attribution. In 2003 Wales created the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation to support the project, and it has relied largely on small donations rather than advertising. Sanger left the project in its early years, and he and Wales have since offered differing accounts of who contributed what to its founding.
Wikipedia's model rests on a few principles: articles should be written from a neutral point of view, claims should be backed by published sources, and disputes are settled through discussion among volunteer editors. Every edit is recorded in a public history, and experienced editors and administrators help enforce the rules. Early critics, including many teachers and librarians, warned that an encyclopedia anyone could edit would be full of errors and vandalism. Studies over the years have produced mixed but often favorable comparisons with traditional references on certain topics, though quality still varies widely between articles.
The site's legacy is considerable. It became a default first stop for quick research, a major source for search engines and digital assistants, and a model for large-scale volunteer collaboration. It also has well-documented shortcomings, including uneven coverage, a contributor base that skews toward certain groups, and ongoing struggles with misinformation and editing disputes. Even so, Wikipedia demonstrated that a vast, freely accessible reference work could be built by a global community, and it remains one of the internet's most distinctive creations.