History of Wikipedia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article provides a chronological outline of the development and history of Wikipedia .

Nupedia (January 2000 to the turn of the year 2000/2001)

Nupedia was an online encyclopedia published by the web company Bomis . Bomis itself was a web directory founded by three people in 1996 , where users created web rings on hundreds of topics. The company had its headquarters in San Diego , California, where ten people were temporarily to be found. There were three people who were only employed as programmers, and others were able to do IT tasks when needed, such as Jimmy Wales , the main owner of Bomis.

Nupedia went online in March 2000 and on March 15, 2000 Larry Sanger was able to report on the nupedia-l mailing list that Nupedia had 602 members, of which around 140 people had created a profile.

Nupedia had an advisory board (English: Advisory Board ), were the authors and reviewers.

Nupedia had a major competitor with the Encyclopædia Britannica . From 1994 there was a CD-ROM edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, publisher was Britannica.com Inc., the online version of which has been offered free of charge since October 1999. The offer did not end until 2001 when a new version of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published and the losses became intolerable. Since then only a few sentences have been viewed free of charge.

Larry Sanger joined Bomis in February 2000 . At the time, it was believed that Nupedia only had the intention of Jimmy Wales to create an online encyclopedia. Sanger discussed with Wales and Tim Shell, another co-owner of Bomis, how Nupedia could be structured. According to Sanger, the standard from Wales for Nupedia was: Nupedia should be “open to everyone to develop”, “just as open source software”. The concept developed by Sanger was: "if the project is open to all, it would require both management by experts and an unusually rigorous process".

In the 4th version of the Editorial Policy Guidelines from May 2000, the elaborate peer review process was described.

“A writer (often, and as appropriate, an expert on the topic) asks the editor to be assigned a given topic, or an editor asks someone to write on it. The topic is assigned (step one, assignment) and the writer goes to work. The article is also assigned a 'lead reviewer' (step two, finding a lead reviewer) and there is a 'blind review' exchange between this initial, lead reviewer and the writer (step three, lead review). The resulting draft article is posted on the relevant review group (or, in some cases, groups); peer reviewers suggest revisions (step four, open review). When approved by the peer reviewers and subject editor, the article is then forwarded for copyediting by two copyeditors who are assigned by the author (step five, lead copyediting). After the article has been checked and revised for good grammar, usage, etc., the completed article is posted publicly for a final, 'open' copyediting by anyone interested (step six, open copyediting). The final product is then approved by the relevant area editor and the article is marked-up so that it is properly presented on the website (step seven, final approval and markup). Then the article is made "live," ie, posted as a completed article on the website. "

In addition, the name and e-mail address of new authors and reviewers was compared with a website, often an academic website.

The authors wrote their text with any software and then emailed the text to Bomis. Communication between the authors and between reviewers and authors took place via email.

Larry Sanger explained his thoughts in June 2000 on how Nupedia should enable the authors to format certain words, for example in italics, and also to create links between different texts.

“When I put asterisks around something, * like this, * I am asking the XML people (whoever they turn out to be ...) to italicize the words 'like this' and the comma that follows them. By contrast, when I put underscores around something, _exactly like this_, I mean that the text 'exactly like this' will link to an article related in some way to the topic mentioned between the underscores. "

The software NupeCode developed by Bomis (see also: en: NupeCode ) was under the GNU General Public License . The articles were initially subject to their own Nupedia Open Content License ( s: en: Nupedia Open Content License ). On December 27, 2000, Jimmy Wales informed the Nupedia mailing list of the intended change from the license to the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and added Richard Stallman's concerns . The change then took place in January 2001. Richard Stallman started the GNUPedia project at the same time , which aroused fears of possible competition between the two projects.

Nupedia and Wikipedia (turn of the year 2000/2001 to September 2003)

In 2001 Jimmy Wales started the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia was originally only intended as a preliminary stage for Nupedia articles, but attracted many players and developed a great deal of momentum. The success not only led to the termination of the GNUPedia project, but also of Nupedia. Bomis ended his sponsorship in February 2002 and Larry Sanger was fired from both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects shortly thereafter. In the period that followed, only a few articles were completed. In September 2003, Nupedia was then completely discontinued. Since January 2010, Nupedia has been back on Wikia.com.

Larry Sanger was "chief organizer at Wikipedia".

Wikipedia

Wikipedia - from the idea to the start

On November 30, 2000, Larry Sanger informed the tools-l mailing list of Nupedia about a new Nupedia project:

“(...) Bomis principals and I are pretty much decided that we should move forward with it, but we would like your suggestions, objections, observations, adulations, rants, raves, etc. (...) I and others would find websites that already contain encyclopedia-type articles (or articles that can be adapted for use) similar in quality to Nupedia articles. We would then try to persuade the webmasters to release that material on an open content basis.

We would make it as easy as humanly possible for the webmasters to include their content in Nupedia; this would probably involve me, and perhaps others, simply getting permission from them and then cutting and pasting text (and nontext files) into web-based forms, and finally marking up the text so that it's usable by our system. We would include prominent , direct links to the original source of the material, we would give the author (s) prominent credit, and we would * make sure * that the material was in fact released under a legitimate open content license. The material would be displayed in a fashion similar to the way Nupedia articles are displayed, but it would be clearly marked as content * not * generated by Nupedia's editorial process. "

On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger informed the Nupedia mailing list nupedia-l about the idea of ​​running a wiki parallel to Nupedia. The wiki was online just a few hours later. On January 15th the new project Wikipedia was named and started under the web address www.wikipedia.com. On the tools-l mailing list, Larry Sanger wrote on January 17, 2001:

“Www.wikipedia.com/
Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes. "

Wikipedia - the new wiki software

  • On August 24, 2001, Magnus Manske wrote on the wikipedia-l mailing list:

“Hi all,
as a few of you might know, I just wrote a complete (well, almost) Wikipedia software as a PHP script!

It has all essential wiki features like article editing, version management, user management, subpages, etc. Additionally, its data storage is completely MySQL (fast!), It has a file upload tool, some other goodies soon. Maybe best of all, script and database are prepared to support some kind of editor / superuser functionality for 'locking' pages, as it is currently discussed.

Now to the bad sides (yes, there are some ...)
- I don't have a server to host it yet. Maybe I can run it on the Nupedia server sometimes. So, no trying yet, sorry.
- The parser (to convert the source text into readable stuff) is very basic. I copied the HomePage and the SandBox from wikipedia, and they look about the same, but this is wherte the bugs will be.
- Currently, I don't have a means to convert wikipedia to MySQL automatically, which is what would have to be done if (IF!) This script ever gets used.

Just letting you know there's an early but working alternative ready…
Magnus ”

In the English Wikipedia one could read from August 24, 2001: “The plan now is to make it as easy as possible for Wikipedian programmers to be able to work on this new code, so that we ourselves can create the new features that we want! ” For this purpose, the project was registered on August 25, 2001 on SourceForge . On August 31, 2001, Mike Dill ( en: User: Mike Dill ) wrote on SourceForge:

“Welcome to Wikipedia
Wikipedia is transitioning to PHP / MySQL, and has a number of small bugs that with enough eyeballs, will be simple to track down. There are also some features not implimented, and people who have worked on PHP and MySQL are needed to look at what exists and provide implementations. see it at wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml

On the project homepage there is also a need for regular people to look at the data, and edit it for grammar and content. "

On September 29, 2001 the Wikipedians were informed in the en: WP that test articles could now be created: “Magnus Manske has just loaded some test software at [1] If you are the type that likes to see the things that are currently broken in the newest code revision then take a look. It is NOT ready for more that test articles, but with a few eyeballs ... ”.

There was a lively discussion on the wikipedia-1 mailing list about how the new rights management could be used. Jimmy Wales' proposal was reminiscent of the old Nupedia system. With increasing quality, articles should move from the normal namespace to an "approved" namespace and further into the "stable" namespace. A namespace would be defined by the authors who are allowed to edit there.

Jimmy Wales announced on October 19 to the wikipedia-1 mailing list that he had increased the number of days available in Wikipedia's version history from 14 to 28.

In the weeks that followed, other bugs were fixed in the software. The de: WP and the en: WP were successfully imported into the test installation and some new features (interwiklinks, categories) were incorporated into the software. The switch to the new Wikipedia software then took place on January 25, 2002 and Jimmy Wales wrote on the wikipedia-l mailing list:

“I hereby decree, in my usual authoritarian and bossy manner, that today shall forever be known as Magnus Manske day. Wikipedians of the distant future will marvel at the day when the new software era dawned upon us.
Tonight at dinner, every Wikipedian should say a toast to Magnus and his many inventions.
--Jimbo ”

Wikipedia - the third generation of the software

The English Wikipedia switched to this new software in July 2002, the German version on August 28 and the Dutch version on October 5.

Nupedia

On January 25, 2001, Larry wrote:

“The German news agency DPA released an article about Nupedia, which was picked up by a bunch of other German sources online. We are receiving a huge amount of (German-speaking) traffic as a result. Too bad we don't have a German translation of the front page. Would anyone like to write one for us quickly? (HTML preferred!) "

futurezone.orf.at ( Memento from May 16, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) as an example

In March 2001 a discussion arose on the mailing list about "bottlenecks". Larry Sanger said on March 23 that "Even if we get 100 times the number of people we have now (ie, 400,000 people), the rate of article production, under this present system, will not be much more than 100 times of the present rate: about 1,200 per year. That's not enough to create the world's largest and finest encyclopedia. Wikipedia has already created over 1,200 articles, in less than three months. In fact, it's nearing 2,000. "

Nupedia Chalkboard

On July 6, 2001, Larry Sanger published a proposal on nupedia-l “(to) set up a Nupedia wiki to help develop Nupedia articles”. This related to the March 2001 discussion on the nupedia-l mailing list.

On July 11, 2001, Larry Sanger announced on nupedia-l that the wiki would be installed. He suggested opening it on wiki.nupedia.com and closing the old wiki from the beginning of 2000. It was then installed on chalkboard.nupedia.com/ ( Memento from April 1, 2003 in the Internet Archive ), as in the post from July 19 http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-July/ 000936.html ( Memento of May 18, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) . In October there was another discussion and Jimmy Wales wrote on October 4th: “How about the chalkboard? Can people be somehow usefully encouraged to utilize it more? “ Http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-October/000954.html ( Memento of May 18, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) See also: meta : Introducing the Nupedia Chalkboard

Nunupedia

On February 24, 2002, Magnus Manske announced that he:

“(...) a new SourceForge project (created on), using 'nunupedia' as a working title (the encyclopedia title will remain 'Nupedia'!). Both Jimbo and Larry agreed that this can eventually become the official Nupedia software. You can see a demo at nunupedia.sourceforge.net Only some parts of it do currently work. (...) Remember, Nupedia will most likely become a 'stable version' of wikipedia;) ”

technology

Phase I software

The software Usemod was used . They were Perl scripts on an Apache HTTP server .

There were discussion pages for each article, for example “The purpose of government / Talk”.

Phase II software

In the middle of 2001 Magnus Manske began to write a new wiki software that used the PHP scripting language and stored all information in a MySQL database.

List of new features: Wikipedia: PHP script new features (from January 27, 2002)

Phase III software

Lee Daniel Crocker was the original lead author of Phase III software, later called MediaWiki :

“(...) In 2001, I became an early user of Nupedia, and then Wikipedia, initially creating many of the articles related to Poker, my primary hobby at the time. When the rapid increase in popularity led to scalability problems with the software being used for the site (written by German student Magnus Manske), I redesigned the database schema and wrote a new PHP codebase from scratch to be more efficient, though I copied the visual design and many ideas from Magnus's code. I added many new features such as a new media system for images and sounds, user emails, and a simplified language-translation system. After the software had been running on my piclab.com server for a while and tested by the community, I installed the software on what was then Wikipedia's single server, named 'pliny' after Pliny the elder. (...) ”

history

Nunupedia

nunupedia was a software project by Magnus Manske, registered with SourceForge on February 13, 2002. "The second software generation for Nupedia, the free encyclopedia. Smarter, easier, cooler, better! All while keeping the proven look-and-feel and usability of the original! "

See also: en: NupeCode

Wikipedia (since September 2003)

Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / Fall Essjay , Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / WikiScanner , Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / Semapedia , Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / OmegaWiki , Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / Magnus Manske , Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / Hans Bug , Wikipedia: Enzyklopädie / WikiCon

The name "Wikimedia" was invented by Sheldon Rampton , American author and operator of SourceWatch (formerly Disinfopedia ).

Wikimedia Foundation

The official announcement of the founding of the Wikimedia Foundation by Jimmy Wales took place on June 20, 2003. The Foundation received all rights in connection with Nupedia and Wikipedia or their sister projects to names, newspaper articles, software and domains as well as the servers acquired to date.

Wikimedia moved from California to Tampa, Florida in 2004.

Wales has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees since it was formed and was its official chairman from 2003 through 2006. [59] Since 2006 he has been accorded the honorary title of Chairman Emeritus and holds the board-appointed "community founder" seat.

technology

SourceForge

Project administrators were: eloquence, magnus_manske, timstarling and vibber. There were a total of 65 members.

Wikipedia was Project of the Month in October 2005.

Alternatives to Wikipedia

Citizendium

In December 2004, Larry Sanger suggested in an article on the kuro5hin website that Wikipedia should prioritize the work and opinions of professionals over those of laypeople.

Sanger published a two-part longer article on Slashdot in April 2005: "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". In it he writes, among other things:

“When the more free-wheeling Wikipedia took off, Nupedia was left to wither. It might appear to have died of its own weight and complexity. But, as I will explain, it could have been redesigned and adapted - it could have, as it were, "learned from its mistakes" and from Wikipedia's successes. Thousands of people who had signed up and who wanted to contribute to the Nupedia system were left disappointed. I believe this was unfortunate and unnecessary; I always wanted Nupedia and Wikipedia working together to be not only the world's largest but also the world's most reliable encyclopedia. ”

From autumn 2005 he worked for the entrepreneur Joe Firmage at the Digital Universe Foundation, which was supposed to create an online encyclopedia called "Digital Universe". It should be supplemented by the Open Collaboration Project , a platform accessible to all. In January 2006, Digital Universe went online with around 50 "portals".

On September 15, 2006, Sanger made the official announcement of the project start for Citizendium at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin . Citizendium (abbreviation of: The citizens' compendium, i.e. compendium for citizens) is a MediaWiki -based web presence for the development of an English-language reference work. In contrast to Wikipedia, Citizendium does not allow anonymous contributions, the quality should be guaranteed by specialist editors. Citizendium was opened to readers on March 25, 2007.

German-language wikis

timeline

prehistory

See also: History and Development of the Encyclopedia

  • The idea of ​​an Internet encyclopedia can be found early on in newsgroups, at the same time as concrete thoughts on digitizing works in the public domain. The existence of commercial encyclopedic services is also mentioned.
  • October 22, 1993: Rick Gates publishes an article in the newsgroup alt.internet.services

"Wow! To Internet Encyclopedia !
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that such a resource, containing general, encyclopedic knowledge for the layman, would be an important tool for some types of research, and for the Net.Citizenry in general.
Ahh .. but what about contributors ... where will you find authors to write the short articles you need? Well, I'd first have to start out by finding some way of communicating with an extremely diverse set of people ... everyone from linguists, to molecular biologists, from animal rights activists to zymurgists, and from geographers to gas chromatographers. Guess what? :-) The Net provides just such an arena! So I thought about it some more ...
... and came to the conclusion that this is a good idea! "

"Wow! An internet encyclopedia!
The more I thought about it, the more I became certain that such a source of general, encyclopedic knowledge for the layperson would be an important resource for some types of research and for Net Citizenship in general.
Ahh ... but what about the staff ... where will you find writers who will write the short articles you need? Well, first I would start by finding a way to communicate with extremely diverse people ... including linguists, molecular biologists, animal rights activists as well as zymurgists, geographers and chemists. Guess? :-) The internet provides exactly this field! So I kept thinking about it ... '
... and came to the conclusion that this is a good idea! "

- Rick Gates : alt.internet.services, October 22, 1993
    • The term interpedia was suggested by RL Samuell, one of the earliest participants in the discussion.
    • Soon a project called Interpedia was discussed on a mailing list and later on the Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.interpedia. It was planned as an encyclopedia to be distributed over the Internet that would enable anyone to contribute articles in the form of web pages to a central catalog. However, there were differences over formats and specifications for retransmission. The project remained in the planning stage and eventually came to an end. Other web projects (such as search engines etc.) took its place.
  • 1994: Ward Cunningham developed the idea of ​​the "simplest online database that could possibly work" , which he developed into WikiWiki by combining it with hypertext elements . The verb Wikiwiki is Hawaiian and means "hurry up", "do quickly", "hurry". He uses his wiki software to set up the Portland Pattern Repository (PPR). a. busy with extreme programming . The Encyclopædia Britannica appears for the first time on CD-ROM.
  • 1996: The Microsoft Encarta first appears in German on CD-ROM. It contains around 50,000 articles with a total of 19.1 million words and over 25,000 media elements. Even the Brockhaus multimedia first appears; it contains around 17 million words, 240,000 articles and 315,000 keywords, including 120,000 dictionary entries, around 18 hours of sound and more than 300 videos and animations.
  • From 1996 (until 1999): Brockhaus. The encyclopedia in 24 volumes is published in the 20th edition with around 260,000 keywords on 17,000 pages, which are supplemented by around 35,000 illustrations, maps and tables. The Swiss investor Edmond Safra takes over the publishing house of the Encyclopædia Britannica for a purchase price of around 130 million US dollars.
  • 1998: The Distributed Encyclopedia - attempt by today's Wikiweise employee Ulrich Fuchs to set up a free encyclopedia on the Internet. However, the project never got beyond articles on Sauna , Sherry and Linux and was discontinued around 1999. Essential parts of the first two articles can be found today in the English Wikipedia. Creation of Everything2 .
  • July 1999: Announcement that there will be no new printed edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica ; the encyclopedia should in future be offered exclusively online and on CD-ROM. The last edition of the Britannica appeared in 32 volumes and cost the equivalent of around 2,700 marks; in contrast, in Europe alone around 150,000 CD-ROMs were sold annually for around DM 140 each.
  • October 1999: At the Frankfurt Book Fair , board member Florian Langenscheidt declares that the large twenty-four volume Brockhaus encyclopedia will never appear on CD-ROM; In the fall of 2002, however, the product will be launched on the market - at a proud price of around one thousand euros. At the same time, the Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus AG, together with the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group, announce the establishment of the commercial knowledge portal Xipolis.net on the web.
  • 2000: Ward Cunningham's original wiki grows to around 13,000 pages with an average growth of 500 pages per month.
  • January 10, 2000: The Nupedia goes online. Founded by Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales and Larry Sanger , content licensed under the GNU FDL . The editorial system was essential, which was supposed to guarantee only a few, but high-quality articles.
  • September 1, 2000: Microsoft Germany announces that it will put a slimmed-down version of the Encarta encyclopedia on the web and market it via the MSN portal. Access to around 16,500 articles should be possible free of charge, which corresponds to around 40 percent of the size of the CD-ROM standard version.
  • November 10, 2000: The digital library NRW , an amalgamation of 15 university libraries, enables libraries, university employees and students in North Rhine-Westphalia free online access to the Große Brockhaus . The offer was developed in cooperation with Xipolis.net ; there, calling up an article from the Großer Brockhaus costs between € 0.25 and € 0.75.

2001: Founding of Wikipedia

  • January 2: Wikipedia originated in a conversation between two old Internet friends, Larry Sanger , former editor-in-chief of Nupedia , and Ben Kovitz , a computer programmer and polymath, in San Diego , California . Kovitz is (or was) a WardsWiki member. When Kovitz explained to Sanger the basic concept of the wiki software over dinner , Sanger realized immediately that it would also be an ideal format for a more open and less formal encyclopedia . A few months earlier, Sanger and his boss, Jimmy Wales , President of Bomis, Inc. , had discussed various ways in which Nupedia could be supplemented with a more open, complementary project. So it didn't take much for Sanger to convince Wales to set up a wiki for Nupedia.
  • January 10th: Nupedia's first Wiki goes online; like the articles in Nupedia, those in the new wiki are also under the GNU FDL license. However, there was considerable opposition from Nupedia participants to such an open system as the wiki.
  • January 15 - Wikipedia Day: The new project is named Wikipedia and started under its own web address wikipedia.com (since August 2002 //www.wikipedia.org/ ). The Perl -based UseModWiki is used as software ; This software is called Wikipedia software Phase I referred.
  • January 18: Announcement of GNUPedia as "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" by Richard Stallman . However, the project is not specified and Stallman later suggests his support for Wikipedia.
  • January 21: Creation of the central mailing list Wikipedia-L .
  • February 12: The English language Wikipedia has about 1,000 pages. Jimmy Wales estimates that the goal of 100,000 pages can be achieved in eight years, which would represent linear growth. When measuring the scope of Wikipedia, pages are only spoken of, but in the coming months the count will be more precise and a distinction between pages and articles as well as the comma count will be introduced. The search engines have not yet started to index Wikipedia.
  • February 19th: Change of the Wikipedia software to version 0.91 of UseModWiki ; Free links are possible for the first time . Google starts indexing Wikipedia.
  • February 28: Slashdot interviews Jimmy Wales - Questions and Answers .
  • March 7th: The English language Wikipedia crosses the mark of 2,000 pages, of which 1,323 articles according to Comma Count.

First editions in other languages

Screenshot from Wikipedia from December 17, 2001 (via Archive.org)
Chinese Wikipedia logo (March 2004)
New Wikipedia logo, in use from December 6, 2001 to September 25, 2003
  • March 23: Nupedia officially introduces Wikipedia. Foundation of the French-language Wikipedia ( http://fr.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • March 30th: The English language Wikipedia clearly exceeds the mark of 2,000 articles (2,221 articles according to Comma Count).
  • April 1st: Google has indexed a large part of Wikipedia and directs a growing stream of readers to the articles of the project.
  • April 27th: The English language Wikipedia comprises a total of 5,041 pages, 3,281 of which are comma count and 912 redirects .
  • May 2nd: Migration of Wikipedia to newer servers by Bomis employee Jason Richey.
  • May 12th: Oldest surviving article version of the German language Wikipedia.
  • May 20: Founding of several non-English-speaking Wikipedias, including Chinese ( http://zh.wikipedia.org/ ), Spanish ( http://es.wikipedia.org/ ) and German ( http: // de .wikipedia.org / ); however, the main page of the Chinese Wikipedia will not be set up until November 16, 2002.
  • June 3: Foundation of the Swedish Wikipedia ( http://sv.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • June 28th: Anniversary - 250 years ago the first volume of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers , one of the models of Wikipedia was published.
  • July 8: The English language Wikipedia comprises a total of 10,000 pages, 6,000 of which are articles. The metasearch function of C | Net now also searches Wikipedia.
  • July 18: Announcement of the conversion of Britannica.com to a paid web offering after financial difficulties in 2000; full text access to the encyclopedia was previously possible free of charge.
  • July 25: Mention of Wikipedia in a Kuro5hin post .
  • JULY 26: mention of Wikipedia in a Slashdot - contribution .
  • August 15th: For the first time, Wikipedia offers the complete database and the associated software for free download.
  • August 19: The German-language Wikipedia exceeds the limit of 1,000 articles.
  • September 4: An article by Judy Heim about Wikipedia appears in MIT's Technology Review .
  • September 7th: The English language Wikipedia exceeds the limit of 10,000 articles. Since the beginning of the project, the number of pages and participants has grown almost exponentially. Wikipedia owes a large number of participants to the news site Slashdot , which reported three times on Wikipedia.
  • September 20: An article about Wikipedia appears in the New York Times .
  • September 28: Founding of the Danish ( http://dk.wikipedia.org/ ) and the Polish ( http://pl.wikipedia.org/ ) Wikipedias.
  • October 1st: Creation of the Intlwiki-L mailing list for non-English speaking Wikipedias.
  • October 15: The English language Wikipedia exceeds 15,000 articles (or 17,307 according to the Comma Count).
  • November 15th: Esperanto Wikipedia ( http://eo.wikipedia.org/ ) is founded.
  • November 26th: Foundation of the Norwegian Wikipedia ( http://no.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • December 6th: Wikipedia receives a new logo designed by The Cunctator , which bears the words Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia ( overview of the proposals ). The logo will remain in use until September 25, 2003. The text shown there is from Thomas Hobbes and reads:
    • “ Man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but by this singular passion from other animals, which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure. ”
  • December 8th: Erik Moeller sets up the IRC channel #wikipedia on irc.openprojects.net.
  • December 9: Mention of Wikipedia in the Shift List of Shift Magazine as "one of the best known Internet culture magazines" . Mention of Wikipedia in the New York Times under The Year of Ideas . as "[t] he most ambitious Wiki project to date" .
  • December 25th: A story by Anick Jesdanun via AP mentions “Wales' Wikipedia encyclopedia” .

2002

Screenshot from Wikipedia from May 25, 2002 (via Archive.org)
English Wiktionary logo
  • January: Larry Sanger, employed by Bomis as chief editor of Nupedia, who unofficially led the Wikipedia project, ends his job because the funding ended.
  • January 9th: Wikipedia officially reaches the 20,000 mark. Items. Previously there had been problems with the calculation of the current article count .
  • January 15th: The first press release is published ( copy ) for Wikipedia's first birthday .
  • January 25th: Change of the Wikipedia software from the UseModWiki version to a PHP -based, new system , which was programmed by Magnus Manske and is referred to as Wikipedia software Phase II .
  • January 31: Mention of Wikipedia in the New Scientist .
  • February 22nd: Wikipedia has to accept a first split: the Enciclopedia Libre splits off from the Spanish-language sub-project .
  • March: Larry Sanger resigns from both the positions of Nupedia editor-in-chief and Wikipedia editor-in-chief ( letter of resignation ).
  • April 12: Mention of Wikipedia in an article on Salon.com .
  • April 25th: Wikipedia is mentioned in the Dutch weekly magazine Intermediair in an article about open source and open content by Herbert Blankensteijn. A domain grabber, Thomas Promny, registers the domain wikipedia.de , but hands it over to the Wikipedia team voluntarily (see groups.google.com ).
  • May 22nd: Foundation of the Latin Wikipedia ( http://la.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • August: Wikipedia is now available at http://www.wikipedia.org/ .
  • August 10: David A. Wheeler publishes the tool html2wikipedia . with which HTML can be converted into Wikipedia's Wiki format.
  • August 28: Changeover of the German language Wikipedia to a new and much more comfortable software . At that time it contained over 4,300 articles (and well over 7,000 pages).
  • Autumn: The Brockhaus Encyclopedia appears for the first time digitally on two CD-ROMs. The text substance comprises 260,000 articles with 26 million words and 330,000 keywords as well as around 14,500 photos, illustrations and graphics and costs almost a thousand euros; a media package that can be purchased separately offers around 250 videos, 13 hours of sound, interactive applications and a digital atlas.
  • September 20: Second conversion of the Wikipedia software; the Wikipedia software phase III is still based on a LAMP system, but is programmed more efficiently. The software is released as MediaWiki under the GNU GPL and further developed on SourceForge . The name MediaWiki was coined by Daniel Mayer as a play on words with Wikimedia .
  • September 30th: The English language Wikipedia reaches 50,000 articles; According to critical estimates, these are 25,000 to 30,000 full-fledged encyclopedic entries.
  • October 26: The so-called rambot completes the automated mass entry of around 30,000 articles for US cities.
  • October 29th: sep11.wikipedia.org ( In Memoriam ( Memento of December 23, 2003 in the Internet Archive )) is set up as a spin-off to permanently house the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack memorial pages .
  • November 9th: The main page of the Chinese-language Wikipedia ( http://zh.wikipedia.org/ ) is set up after the wiki was set up in May 2001. The Chinese Wikipedia project works with both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.
  • December: Wikipedia beats Kuro5hin.org, Linux.com, Linux.org, Pepsi.com and OpenOffice.org, Debian.org, Nupedia.org and Oreilly.com in the traffic ranking of Alexa.com .
  • December 1st: Founding of the Greek Wikipedia ( http://el.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • December 2nd: Foundation of the Turkish Wikipedia ( http://tr.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • December 12th: The English-language Wiktionary project starts; it forms the lexical partner of Wikipedia. The aim is to create a freely accessible and complete multilingual dictionary and a corresponding thesaurus in each language.
  • December 26th: The Wiktionary project can be reached under its own URL: http://wiktionary.org/ .

2003: Phase of the first consolidation and internationalization

Advertisement for Esperanto Wikipedia, published on February 3, 2003 in Pasporta Servo 2003
Screenshot of the main page in the "Cologne Blue" skin with exactly 19,000 articles on June 20, 2003
New Wikipedia logo, in use from September 25, 2003

See also: Wikipedia: List of Wikipedias in other languages

  • January 9: An article about Open Source Programming appears in First Monday , in which Wikipedia is treated as an example ( The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming ) . Lars Aronsson presents the wiki concept in a presentation on electronic publishing using the example of susning.nu (at that time still the second largest wiki in the world) and Wikipedia.
  • January 15th: On its second birthday, Wikipedia has 130,000 articles in 28 languages, making it the largest wiki in the world and the largest open content encyclopedia.
  • January 21: The English language Wikipedia crosses the mark of 100,000 articles ( press release ). Another of the original goals has thus been achieved; For the achievement of this quantitative dimension, in which larger commercial encyclopedias move, estimates from the beginning put about five years.
  • January 22nd: Wikipedia is being slashdotted .
  • January 24th: The German language Wikipedia celebrates its 10,000th article. These events are reported on Heise online (see heise.de ), Slashdot and other news sites, which in turn leads to a large number of new authors ( see also: press release ).
  • January 28th: Wired reports on Wikipedia .
  • January 30th: The Guardian reports on Wikipedia ( Common Knowledge ) .
  • February 3: On the back of the most famous Esperanto yearbook , the Pasporta Servo 2003 , an advertisement of 1/8 page appears. The advertisement was financed by a specific private donation.
  • February 27: Wikipedia is used for the first time to justify a published official decision. In the decision in the Polk ./. Slob-Trot Software Oy Ab (Az. 493/2003) (PDF), the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market relies on the English article Computer program .
  • March: Wikipedia beats GNU.org and Freshmeat.net as well as StarTrek.com in the traffic ranking of Alexa.com , even before CocaCola.com. As a spin-off project, Disinfopedia is founded by the Center for Media & Democracy as the “Lexicon of Propaganda”.
  • April: Wikipedia beats Encyclopedia.com in the Alexa.com traffic ranking . The pool of administrators in the German-language Wikipedia is increased from seven to 20.
  • April 7th: The quantitative competition with the Britannica moves into the interest of the English-speaking Wikipedians. A rough estimate results in 72,000 full-fledged encyclopedic articles with an average length of 332 words. The total size of the English-language Wikipedia is around 23.9 million words, which is about half the size of the Encyclopædia Britannica in its 2002 edition.
  • April 14: The English language Wikipedia crosses the 200,000 page mark for the first time; however only in their entirety, i.e. including user, help and discussion pages; According to the current counting procedure, 114,744 “real” articles are involved, so the English Wikipedia has a ratio of articles to pages of around 57.36 percent.
  • April 17th: Erik Zachte provides offline versions of the English, German and Dutch Wikipedia; the Wikipedia database can now be used in the TomeRaider format on portable devices such as Pocket PC, Palm, EPOC and non-networked Windows PCs (see TomeRaider database ); however , it is not possible to edit articles , it is a pure Wikipedia browser .
  • May: Another boost to readers and editors for the German language Wikipedia through a series of articles in the online magazine Telepolis ; sometimes more than 150 new articles were created per day.
  • May 16: The French Wikipedia reaches the 10,000th article.
  • May 22nd: The Polish Wikipedia reaches the 10,000th article.
  • May 28: Wikipedia reaches position 2000 in the traffic ranking of Alexa.com , beating Britannica.com ; Wikipedia has achieved one of its stated goals.
  • June: Wikipedia beats Heise online and Penthouse.com in the traffic ranking of Alexa.com .
  • June 1st: Wikipedia reaches 130,000 articles; the condition that an article valid for counting must contain at least one internal link is introduced as a new counting criterion.
  • June 19th: Wikipedia updates the GNU FDL license used to "version 1.2 or later" .
  • June 20: Official announcement of the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation by Jimmy Wales . The German-language Wikipedia reaches the 19,000th article.
  • July: Wikipedia beats RedHat.com, WhiteHouse.gov in the traffic ranking of Alexa.com . Idea to go beyond an encyclopedia and create free textbooks: The Wikibooks project ( Wikimedia Free Textbook Project , //wikibooks.org/ ) was started for this purpose.
  • July 4th: 20,000th article in the German language Wikipedia; It took Wikipedians a good five months to double the number of articles from 10,000 to 20,000.
  • July 10th: Further complementary WikiMedia projects separate: Wikipedia Textbook , Wikibooks, the free textbook project ( //wikibooks.org/ ) and Wikiquote ( http://quote.wikipedia.org/ ).
  • July 29th: The first negative effects of the rapid growth of Wikipedia are evident: The internal search function has to be deactivated for performance reasons. With further load-reducing measures, operations can be maintained until the end of the year, when the limits of growth are reached and the hardware must be expanded.
  • August 3rd: The Dutch Wikipedia reaches 10,000 articles.
  • August 4th: CNN mentions Wikipedia ( Wikipedia: The know-it-all Web site ) , which is still operated on two standard PCs - a web and a database server - and exclusively with open source software and is now for the first time reached a larger audience outside of the internet communities.
  • August 12: The Time Magazine mentions the Wikipedia ( online version ).
  • August 17th: Erik Zachte develops new Wikipedia statistics .
  • August 19: The English language Wikipedia reaches 150,000 articles.
  • August 30: Wikipedia becomes one of the top 1000 sites on the web for the first time, according to Alexa.com . In the traffic ranking it beats TomsHardware.com, Bomis.com, TheRegister.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Sex.com, Palm.com and Kodak.com.
  • September 9: The Japanese Wikipedia reaches the 10,000th article.
  • September 16: 30,000th article in the German language Wikipedia.
  • September 25: Wikipedia receives a new logo, which replaces the version from December 6, 2001 (see Results ).
  • October 23: The portal: Law is founded. Several themed portals will soon follow this pattern .
  • October 28: The first meeting of the Munich parliamentary group of Wikipedians takes place; it is probably the world's first meeting of Wikipedia users in real life (see Wikipedia: Meeting of the Wikipedians / Archive ).
  • November 4th: The Spanish Wikipedia reaches the 10,000th article.
  • November 22nd: The French Wikipedia reaches the 20,000th article.
  • December: Wikipedia beats the Library of Congress in Alexa.com's traffic ranking , earlier than Time.com.
  • December 5th: Esperanto Wikipedia reaches its 10,000th article.
  • December 7th: The German-language Wikipedia reaches its 40,000th article with an article about Marina Tsvetaeva and thus had an average growth of more than 250 articles per day; it only took the German-language Wikipedia six months to double the number of articles from 20,000 to 40,000. The English Wikipedia is growing only a little faster.
  • December 27-29 : Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin with a small meeting of some Wikipedians.
  • December 28: Jimmy Wales appeals for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation . The money is to be used to upgrade the hardware and secure it against failures. Reports appear on Slashdot and the Heise news ticker . In less than 24 hours a total of US $ 20,000 comes together; at the turn of the year the donation increases to 30,000 US dollars.

2004

Front page of the first edition of WikiReader
Redesigned main page in Opera 7.23 under Windows XP
  • January: Articles about Wikipedia appear in the print and online editions of Süddeutsche as well as online in Heise.
  • January 14: The Catalan Wikipedia reaches the 5,000th article, the Polish the 20,000th article.
  • January 17th: First Wiki get-together in Berlin.
  • January 21: Swedish Wikipedia hits 20,000 articles, making it the sixth largest Wikipedia. The Wikipedia fork Wikinfo can be reached under the domain www.wikinfo.org ; the previously used domain www.internet-encyclopedia.org will be retained in parallel.
  • January 24th: Presentation of the statutes of the Wikimedia Foundation (PDF document).
  • January 30th: The Göttingen Administrative Court is the first court in the world to quote Wikipedia in a published decision (file number: 2 A 2145/02): “Arabic belongs to the Hamitosemitic language family (see the following graphic, quoted from Wikipedia of the free encyclopedia , www.wikipedia.de). "
  • February: Articles about Wikipedia appear in Spiegel Online (Netzwelt) and in the online edition of Computerwoche , in the print and online edition of Focus and the Berliner Zeitung (February 16, Diderot's Enkel - the online lexicon Wikipedia is growing Each day by day can. it participate ) in Merkur-Online.de and a TV report in the evening news of ARD . Wikipedia beats ElectronicArts and Slashdot.org in the traffic ranking of Alexa.com .
  • February 2nd: The English Wikipedia exceeds the number of 200,000 articles shortly after 1:00 a.m. CET.
  • February 7th: The Dutch Wikipedia hits the mark of 20,000 articles.
  • February 8: 50,000th article in the German-language Wikipedia.
  • February 9: Japanese Wikipedia hits the 30,000 article mark. It is the third largest Wikipedia in terms of number of articles.
  • February 13th: The entire Wikipedia is switched to new servers, which are still centralized in the USA.
  • February 14th: First meeting of Wikipedians in Frankfurt am Main .
  • February 16: An article about Wikipedia appears in the Berliner Zeitung ( Diderot's grandchildren - the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is growing day by day. Everyone can work on it ) .
  • February 18: The ten most extensive Wikipedias are the English (209,637 articles), the German (52,299), the Japanese (31,284), the French (26,941), the Polish (23,941), the Swedish (21,641), the Dutch (20,847 ), the Spanish (17,969), the Danish (15,526) and the Esperanto Wikipedia (10,964).
  • February 19: The English language Wikipedia lists the 210,000th article; it has grown by 10,000 articles within 17 days. This is the largest, regular, absolute growth of a Wikipedia so far (only in October 2002 there was an increase of 38,000 articles within one month through script-supported input).
  • February 23: Thomas Karcher presents a new idea with the first WikiReader on Sweden : WikiReader is an irregularly published series of magazines which thematically bundle selected Wikipedia articles and presents them in an editorially prepared form. The selection of the articles does not claim to be complete, but is intended to serve as a “snapshot” of the respective topic. We expressly encourage our readers to do their own research, to improve articles on Wikipedia or to add new articles, and thus to provide suggestions for future WikiReader issues .
  • February 24th: The Chinese Wikipedia reaches 5,000 articles. In Spiegel Online , an article appears on Wikipedia on the occasion of the 500,000th mark ( Wikipedia: I know something you do not know ... ) .
  • March 1st: Short article about Wikipedia in RTL II News , two-page article in Spiegel , mention on Intrinet.de. The number of processing operations per day quadruples from around 2,500 (January 2004) to over 10,000 (beginning of March 2004).
  • March 2: Yahoo announces a new content acquisition program . (CAP), in which the Wikipedia project is one of eleven government and non-government projects in the non-commercial sector of CAP.
  • March 3: The German wave reports in its German-language Internet site on Wikipedia ( It could be a peaceful revolution for the knowledge described in the world ) .
  • March 6th to 7th: Chemnitz Linux Days 2004; Lecture on Wikipedia .
  • March 9: The German language Wikipedia reaches the 60,000th article. The quantitative growth in the number of articles stabilizes with almost a thousand new articles every two days, so around 20 new articles are created every hour.
  • March 14: The Galician and Korean Wikipedia cross the 1,000 article mark, the Italian Wikipedia reaches 8,000 and the French 30,000.
  • March 22nd: The German-language Wikipedia exceeds one million versions of all articles; With a total of around 68,000 articles in the main namespace, this corresponds to an average of almost 15 edits of each article.
  • March 27: The German language Wikipedia reaches the 70,000th article; In keeping with the ideology of Wikipedia, he deals with Brecht's radio theory , the theoretical foundation for a mass medium that was still fictional at the time, in which communication is not only asymmetrical and unidirectional in one direction (from sender to receiver), but symmetrical and bidirectional, thus enabling emancipatory media use. The German-language Wikipedia has grown by 10,000 articles in just 20 days, which corresponds to an average of 500 new articles per day.
  • April 8: The Wikipedia fork Wikinfo reaches the size of 25,000 articles after 20,000 of them have been imported from Wikipedia via the XML import function of the GetWiki software.
  • April 14: At 3:18 p.m. the first documented and sufficiently official contact (dead link) with a representative of Brockhaus Duden Neue Medien GmbH takes place.
  • April 19: The German language Wikipedia reaches the 80,000th article ( press reports ); it doubled the number of items in just four months.
  • May 1st: The German language Wikipedia changes the design of the main page after a lengthy discussion process. The German-language Wiktionary starts at //de.wiktionary.org/ .
  • June 10th to 13th: At the third Wizards of OS conference in Berlin , Jimmy Wales gives a lecture in Germany for the first time. On June 13, the German-language Wikipedia reached the 100,000th article that was celebrated with a party in Berlin's c-base . The association Wikimedia Germany - Society for the Promotion of Free Knowledge is founded (see press release ).
  • July 30th: The German-language Wikipedia was switched to UTF-8 .
  • September 20: Wikipedia reaches its millionth article in over 100 languages ​​(see press release ).
  • October 8: The German language Wikipedia reaches the 150,000th article.
  • October 19: The first edition of the German language Wikipedia appears on CD (see Wikipedia CD ).

2005

First page WikiDiki Portuguese - German - Portuguese
  • February 5: Based on the German model (see October 23, 2003), Portal: Biology is founded as the first topic portal of the English Wikipedia.
  • February 15: The German-language Wikipedia reaches the 200,000th article.
  • March: Wikimedia Germany is represented with a Wikipedia booth at CeBIT .
  • April: For the first time, an explicit alternative project to the German-language Wikipedia is created with the wiki style . The aim of a more serious encyclopedia is to be promoted in particular by compulsory real names.
  • April 6: Wikipedia distribution on DVD-ROM.
  • April 17th: The WikiReader gets reinforcements. The first WikiDiki appears in a preliminary version with the language pairing Portuguese - German - Portuguese.
  • June 30th: Wikipedia receives the Grimme Online Award in the category Knowledge and Education .
  • 5th-7th August: The first Wikimania conference of the Wikimedia Foundation takes place in Frankfurt am Main with 380 participants.
  • October 7th: The German-language Wikipedia has 300,000 articles with the new article Common Binsenjungfer (a dragonfly species).
  • October 24th: The German-language Wikipedia has its own article on all 12,336 independent municipalities in Germany.

2006

Design of the main page since April 2006
  • January 26th: The history editorial team is founded. Editorial offices are a more active and comprehensive type of wiki project , some of which comes from portal discussion pages and Wikipedia: Review . Ten more editorial offices are set up in the following two years.
  • March 2: The English version reaches over 1,000,000 articles.
  • March 7th: The Spanish language version reaches over 100,000 articles.
  • April 24th: Redesign of the main page according to opinions
  • June 16-17: First Wikipedia Academy in Göttingen .
  • August 16: The Russian language Wikipedia reaches over 100,000 articles.
  • November 23: The German-language Wikipedia reaches the 500,000th article.

2007

  • April 17th: A study was published according to which 4.6 percent of Wikipedia visitors also edit it.
  • April 27th: After the conclusion of an opinion poll , the arbitration tribunal was introduced in the German language Wikipedia. Initially the establishment was provisional and participation voluntary, from October 2007 the SG was established permanently.
  • April 29: The mentoring program was launched based on the English Adopt-A-User program.
  • After the German-language Wikipedia had been regularly available on CD or DVD since 2004, such a data carrier was also published for the English Wikipedia in April . However, with just 2,000 articles which were specially checked beforehand.

2008

  • On February 19, the 2,000,000th page of the German-language Wikipedia was written. There were 710,000 articles.
  • On the night of March 25th, the long announced and anticipated by many single user login was activated. The administrators made the start, a short time later this option was also activated for the other Wikipedians. All newly created accounts are now global accounts.
  • March 27: The 10 millionth Wikipedia article worldwide is created.
  • On May 6 , the viewed versions were introduced in the German language Wikipedia.
  • The Wikipedia binding appeared on September 15th .
  • On October 3 the Wikipedia was the Quadriga presented.
  • On October 12th, the German-language Wikipedia was “read only” for five hours due to a full server hard drive.
  • With the aim of blocking child pornography, access to the article en: Virgin Killer was blocked for many Internet users in Great Britain .
  • On November 13th , Lutz Heilmann obtained an interim injunction from the Lübeck Regional Court that the forwarding of wikipedia.de to the still accessible internet address de.wikipedia.org had to be canceled due to factual assertions made there.
  • December 4th: Wikimedia Commons receives a picture donation from the German Federal Archives.

2009

  • January 9th: The spotted versions are activated on Wikisource in the two languages ​​Hebrew and Portuguese.
  • March 5th: Wikipedia in Pontic language is created.
  • March 19th: Visited versions are activated in Wikipedia on Interlingua and the Wiktionary in Icelandic.
  • April 6: Wikiversity in Finnish is set up.
  • April 12th: Voting for license updates starts.
  • June 26th: All projects are switched from the previous GFDL license to a double license GFDL and cc-by-sa 3.0 .
  • July 9: A Wikipedia on Wiesenmari is set up.
  • August 6th: Wikipedia in Arabic receives the spotted versions extension.
  • August 12th: Wikipedias in Achinese, Mirandés, Sorani and West Punjabi, as well as Wikinews in Turkish were created.
  • August 17th: The English language Wikipedia reaches three million articles.
  • Wikipedia receives image donations from the German Photo Library and the Royal Netherlands Tropical Institute.
  • A heated dispute about the relevance criteria arises in the German-language Wikipedia.
  • September 14th: A test of the LiquidThreads begins in the Prototype Wiki.
Excerpt from the main page with 1,000,000 articles.
  • September 30th: A laboratory wiki for LiquidThreads is set up.
  • October 2nd: Phase 2 of the “Usability Initiative” goes online.
  • November 12: Wikiversity in Russian opens.
  • December 24th: Wikipedia starts in Picardy.
  • December 27: The German-language Wikipedia crosses the one million article mark with an article about Ernie Wasson ( Wikipedia: one million article page ).

2010

  • January 10th: 7 new search servers are added.
  • February 22nd: The following projects are closed: Wikipedia on Oshivambo; Wikibooks in Zhuang, Kannada, and plain English; Wikiquote in Kazakh; Wikinews in Dutch
  • April 16: The projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach a total of one billion edits.
  • March 19: Wikipedia in Karachay-Balkar is set up.
  • March 24th: Due to an overheating problem in the European data center, all traffic is rerouted via the data center in Florida.
  • May: Jimmy Wales deletes various pictures with sexual representations on Commons and thus triggers a "porno dispute". In the subsequent discussions, a petition and an application to withdraw his founding rights , he voluntarily surrenders some of his rights.
  • May 13th: The English language Wikipedia receives the new vector skin. At the same time, the new puzzle ball in 3D design will be introduced.
  • June 4th: The first GLAM project takes place in the British Museum . Liam Wyatt becomes the first Wikipedian in residence there .
  • June 10: Vector becomes the standard skin on the major Wikimedia projects.
  • June 15: The English Wikipedia tests the "Faced Versions" extension on 2000 articles for two months. The German version will be updated at the same time.
  • June 25th: The private wikis get the Vector skin.
  • June 30th: Most of the Wikimedia projects are switched to Vector.
  • July 5: All Wikimedia projects were down for several hours due to a power outage in the Florida data center.
  • August 20: A new Wikipedia in North Frisian and a new Wikinews in Korean are set up.
  • September: The Wiki loves Monuments campaign is launched in the Netherlands for the first time. The aim is to photograph as many of the more than 50,000 monuments in the Netherlands as possible.
  • September 1st: All other Wikimedia projects are switched to Vector.
  • September 14: Wikibooks on Kiswahili will be closed.
  • Mid-September: The Dutch Nationaal Archief and the archive of the magazine publishers Spaarnestad Archief donate more than 1,000 (mostly political) images to Wikipedia.
  • September 21: The French language Wikipedia reaches one million articles.
  • September 25: The Finnish language Wikipedia reaches 250,000 articles.
  • October: All articles of the month are available as spoken versions thanks to a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the German Central Library for the Blind in Leipzig .
  • October: A study by "Wiki-Watch" about the admins causes discussions.
  • October 7th: Wikibooks in Zulu will be closed.
  • October 17th: Three new Wikipedias in the languages Bergmari , Banjar and Komi-Permjakisch , as well as a new Wikinews project in Persian are created.
  • October 20: An integration of the OpenStreetMap maps now shows the position on the map directly in articles if required. Wikimedia Germany has set up its own server for this purpose, so that the load of generating maps is not entirely on the OSM servers.
  • November 9th: Wikibooks in Low German will be closed.
  • November 12th: Wikibooks in Nauruan will be closed.
  • November 13th: The following new projects are created: Wikipedia in Palatinate and Gagauz language; Wikisource in Venetian and Breton languages; Wikibooks in Limburgish; Wikinews in Esperanto
  • November 14th: A Swedish Wikiversity was set up.

2011

  • January 9: The Malay Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles.
  • January 15th: Wikipedia turns 10. The “ tenwiki ” was set up to coordinate the worldwide events . In addition, the first 10,000 versions were excavated ( Wikipedia 10K Redux ( Memento from December 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive )) and a replica of the German-language Wikipedia from 2001 was created. (see also: Wikipedia: 10 years of Wikipedia )
  • February 11th: The Latin Wikipedia reaches 50,000 articles.
  • February 23: Commons now contains 9 million files.
  • March: According to a study by the Wikimedia Foundation , the proportion of newcomers who have been involved in the project on a long-term basis seems to have decreased since 2005. Getting started has also become more difficult.
  • March 9: The German language Wikipedia reaches 1.2 million articles.
  • March 25: Wikipedia is to become a World Heritage Site. For this purpose the page Wikipedia: World Heritage was created and the association Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. has started an initiative.
  • April 8: The Vietnamese Wikipedia reaches 200,000 articles.
  • April 12: The Russian language Wikipedia reaches 700,000 articles.
10 million files on Commons
  • April 16: A total of 10 million files were uploaded to the Commons.
  • April 17th: The Spanish language Wikipedia reaches 750,000 articles.
  • May 7th: The Norwegian language Wikipedia reaches 300,000 articles.
  • May 11: The Polish-language and Italian-language Wikipedia reach 800,000 articles.
  • May 18 & 19: In the Thuringia state parliament project , almost all members of the parliament were photographed to illustrate their articles.
  • May 22nd: The Japanese language Wikipedia reaches 750,000 articles and the Basque language Wikipedia 100,000 articles.
  • May 29: The Board of Directors of the Foundation wants to develop a filter so that readers can hide controversial content (eg: "pornographic" and youth protection-relevant images).
  • June 19: The Swedish language Wikipedia reaches 400,000 articles.
  • June 19: As a result of a check user query, it became known that employees of the Wiki-Watch project , which is supposed to be used to research Wikipedia, were active under several user names and that articles were also changed.
  • June 20: The Dutch language Wikipedia reaches 700,000 articles.
  • June 22nd: The Alemannic Wikipedia reaches 10,000 articles.
  • July 6th: The Czech Wikipedia reaches 200,000 articles.
  • July 7: The Ukrainian Wikipedia reaches 300,000 and the Croatian Wikipedia 100,000 articles.
  • July 12th: A Wikipedia in Mingrelian and a Wikiversity in Arabic are launched.
  • July 13: The Spanish Wikipedia reaches 800,000 articles.
  • August 31: Wikipedia in Hindi reaches 100,000 articles.
  • September: The Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition takes place across Europe for the first time, with a total of 166,000 images uploaded.
  • September 11: The Hungarian language Wikipedia reaches 200,000 articles.
  • End of October: The first users put a white paper bag as a sign against the planned image filter on their user page. (White Bag Movement)
  • October 1: 2,000 articles are rated as excellent .
  • October 3rd: All WMF projects are accessible via HTTPs. Before, this was only possible with a lot of effort via secure.wikimedia.org.
  • October 4th: All inquiries from Italian Wikipedia are directed to a page that represents the Italians' protest against a draft law that gives anyone the right to remove anything they consider to be reputational without being checked. The action is tolerated by the Wikimedia Foundation . A declaration of solidarity with the Italian Wikipedia strike is signed by over 700 Wikipedians and linked on the main page.
  • October 8: Portuguese Wikipedia reaches 700,000 articles.
  • October 16: The German language Wikipedia reaches 1.3 million articles.
  • October 24: All Wikipedia versions in the world add up to 20 million articles.
  • October 30th: A Wikipedia in North Sotho is created.
  • December 10: The Russian language Wikipedia reaches 800,000 articles.

2012

Screenshot of the wp: en SOPA protest
  • January 18: The English language Wikipedia is "switched off" for one day. Instead of the normal side, a notice is being used to protest against the planned SOPA and PIPA laws . In the German language, and many others, Wikipedia, a protest banner (similar to the Sitenotice) is placed and a reference is made to Wikipedia: Initiative against SOPA .
  • February 2: A Wikipedia in Wepsisch , a Wikisource in Marathi , and a Wiktionary in West Punjabi become active.
  • February 22: At 3:49 p.m., an IP in the article The Wire made the 100 millionth edit in the German-language Wikipedia. ( Diff )
  • July 13: The English language Wikipedia reaches 4 million articles with Izbat Al Burj ( Izbat al-Burj ).
  • October 30th: The sister project Wikidata officially starts.
  • November 10: The previously independent Wikivoyage is launched as a Wikimedia project in seven languages: German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Swedish.
  • November 18: The German-language Wikipedia reaches 1.5 million articles.
  • December 15: Wikidata contains one million data records (items).

2013

  • January 14: The Hungarian language version Wikidata is the first Wikipedia to be activated , followed by the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedia at the end of January, and the English version in February. The interwiki links between the pages of the various wiki media are managed via a central system instead of individually in all pages.
  • January 22nd: The Wikimedia Foundation servers move from Tampa, Florida to Ashburn, Virginia.
  • January 30th: The new special page In the vicinity lists the reader (especially on mobile devices) Wikipedia articles on places and objects in his vicinity.
  • February 19: The Lua scripting language enables the development of high-performance and more complex templates in the Wikimedia projects.
  • March 6th: Wikidata is now used in all Wikipedia editions to manage the Interwikilinks.
  • March 19: The German-language Wikipedia starts testing the article feedback tool , which allows readers to conveniently submit suggestions for improving articles. After the test phase, it will be switched off again by opinion polls.
  • March 27: The first eleven Wikipedia editions introduce phase 2 of Wikidata. This makes it possible to integrate certain data (e.g. the place of birth of a person or the link to imdb in a film article) directly from the centrally maintained data repository. This option will be activated in German-language Wikipedia on April 24th.
  • April: Change from the “Facebook fork of MySQL 5.1” to MariaDB 5.5
  • April 4: Wikidata hits ten million items.
  • April 25th: Registered users can test the Visual Editor in an alpha version. This will allow Wikipedia articles to be edited in a WYSIWYG manner in future , instead of users having to edit the source text directly with special markup.
  • May 11th: The Russian language Wikipedia reaches 1,000,000 articles.
  • August 28th: Registered users now receive Wikipedia as standard via the encrypted HTTPS protocol .

2014

  • January 14th: Commons reaches 20 million media files.

2015

  • January 15th: The Erasmus Prize , endowed with € 150,000 , is awarded to the Wikipedia community and ceremoniously presented to a delegation on November 25th by King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands .
  • March 11th: Commons reaches 25 million media files.

2016

2019

  • March 21: The German-language Wikipedia can not be used for one day due to a protest against the copyright reform of the European Union .
  • September 18: Wikidata now has more than 60 million entries and is the fastest growing sister project.

2020

  • February 19 : The non-attached MP Sarah Sauermann (previously AfD ) places a small request in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt with the title "Abolish Wikipedia in Saxony-Anhalt".
  • January 27 : Wikipedia author Bernd Schwabe receives the Federal Republic of Germany's Medal of Merit in the New Town Hall of Hanover for "ten years of voluntary work in the fields of education and culture [...] and over 4,000 Wikipedia articles related to Hanover".

future plans

Web links

Additional information:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Hive . The Atlantic, September 2006
  2. ^ Marshall Poe: The Hive . The Atlantic . September 2006. Retrieved June 15, 2010.
  3. ↑ Larry Sanger: Mailing list of Nupedia nupedia-l, March 15, 2000 ( Memento of May 16, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h slashdot.org: "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir", April 18, 2005 , accessed on January 16, 2013.
  5. ↑ Editorial Policy Guidelines , 4th version of May 2000 ( Memento of June 7, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) nupedia.com
  6. ↑ Nupedia tools-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Jimmy Wales from June 8, 2000 ( Memento from May 20, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ^ Larry Sanger: Mailing list of Nupedia tools-1, June 23, 2000 ( Memento of May 20, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Nupedia tools-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Jimmy Wales from December 27, 2000 ( Memento from May 19, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ larrysanger.org: Jimmy Wales on advertisement
  10. ^ Larry Sanger: Nupedia tools-1 mailing list, November 30, 2000 ( Memento of July 6, 2002 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Nupedia nupedia-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Larry Sanger from January 10, 2001 ( Memento from August 22, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ Nupedia nupedia-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Larry Sanger from January 10, 2001 ( Memento from April 25, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Larry Sanger: Mailing list of Nupedia tools-1, January 17, 2001 ( Memento of May 19, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Magnus Manske: Wikipedia wikipedia-1 mailing list, August 2001
  15. ↑ nostalgia.wikipedia: Wikipedia Announcements / August 2001
  16. ↑ sourceforge.net: MediaWiki
  17. ↑ Magnus Manske: [Wikipedia-1 PHP Wikipedia, Part 2] ( English ) lists.wikimedia.org. August 25, 2001. Retrieved September 27, 2019.
  18. ↑ sourceforge.net: News section, August 31, 2001
  19. ↑ Wikipedia Announcements / September 2001 nostalgia.wikipedia.org
  20. ↑ Mailing list of Wikipedia wikipedia-1, Jimmy Wales of October 18, 2001
  21. ↑ Mailing list of Wikipedia wikipedia-1, Jimmy Wales of October 18, 2001
  22. ^ Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia wikipedia-1 mailing list, October 19, 2001
  23. ↑ Magnus Manske: Wikipedia wikipedia-1 mailing list, November 2001
  24. ↑ Magnus Manske: Wikipedia wikipedia-1 mailing list, January 2002
  25. ^ Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia mailing list wikipedia-1, January 25, 2002
  26. ↑ Wikipedia software upgrade status meta.wikimedia.org
  27. ↑ Nupedia tools-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Larry Sanger from January 25, 2001 ( Memento from June 9, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  28. ↑ Nupedia nupedia-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Larry Sanger from March 23, 2001 ( Memento from July 11, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  29. ↑ Nupedia nupedia-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Larry Sanger of July 6, 2001 ( Memento of July 12, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  30. ↑ Nupedia tools-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Larry Sanger from July 11, 2001 ( Memento from May 18, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  31. ↑ Nupedia tools-l mailing list on web.archive.org, Magnus Manske from February 24, 2002 ( Memento from May 19, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  32. ↑ en: User: Lee Daniel Crocker
  33. ↑ sourceforge.net: nunupedia
  34. ↑ Sheldon Rampton: Suggested name Wikimedia. (Email, March 16, 2003)
  35. ↑ Jimmy Wales: Announcement of the foundation. (Email, June 20, 2003)
  36. ^ Wikimedia Foundation restructures its board . Retrieved September 27, 2019.
  37. ↑ sourceforge.net: MediaWiki
  38. ↑ sourceforge.net: MediaWiki: Member List
  39. ↑ sourceforge.net: MediaWiki - Project of the Month, October 2005
  40. ↑ Larry Sanger: Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. December 31, 2004, accessed March 20, 2012 .
  41. ^ "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia, Part II", April 19, 2005 , accessed January 16, 2013.
  42. ↑ Wikipedia co-founder is planning a new project . Netzeitung , December 21, 2005
  43. ^ Dan Goodin: Website aims to build non-profit research storehouse . Associated Press, March 5, 2006
  44. ↑ news posting 1992
  45. ↑ See also there: Ward Cunninghams Wiki History
  46. ↑ See announcement at fsf.org and message on Heise online heise.de
  47. ↑ a b c d e f Comma Count: A page only counts as an article if it is in the article namespace (or is generally not a discussion page), is not forwarded and contains at least one comma (,). Alternatively, the presence of wikilinks, interwikilinks or categories (in all cases [[)] can be used as a criterion for each project.
  48. ↑ From polymerase chain reaction
  49. ↑ Source: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-a.html
  50. ↑ See mail.wikipedia.org
  51. ↑ a b c d e f g h i cf. Wikipedia.org is more popular than ...
  52. ↑ Wikicurians
  53. ↑ Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak . reuters.com, April 17, 2007
  54. ↑ wikipediaondvd.com, Wikipedia 0.5 available on a CD-ROM , accessed on August 27, 2008
  55. ↑ Wikipedia: Project news: on May 6, 2008
  56. ↑ British providers block Wikipedia articles . heise.de, December 7, 2008
  57. ↑ The Relevance of the Death Star . Zeit Online , November 10, 2009
  58. ^ Sue Gardner: March 2011 Update / de .
  59. ↑ Wikipedia Adopts MariaDB . blog.wikimedia.org
  60. ↑ Wikipedia: Languages ​​#The Wikipedias with the most articles
  61. ↑ Erasmusprijs 2015 on Wikipedia on erasmusprijs.org
  62. ↑ Printed matter KA 7/3361 (PDF) from February 19, 2020.