Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Wikipedia timeline

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Timeline edit

Topic Date Event Sources Notes
Wikipedia 2000-03-09
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger found Nupedia, funded by Bomis.
Wikipedia 2000-03
en:GNU Free Documentation License version 1.1 released. Early discussions with en:Richard Stallman about a GNU FDL library for free universities
Wikipedia 2000
(June/July) 'Atonality' is believed to be the first Nupedia article officially published.
Wikipedia 2000
(Summer 2000) The Nupedia Advisory Board is in place
Wikipedia 2000-12
Jeremy Rosenfeld purportedly introduces Jimmy Wales to wikis.
Wikipedia 2001-01-02
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.
"Instead of preventing error and bias, invite error and bias and make it very easy for people to correct them."
Wikipedia 2001-01-10
Nupedia's wiki launches.
"It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia", said Sanger.
Wikipedia 2001-01-11
Larry Sanger coins the name "Wikipedia".
Wikipedia 2001-01-15
Wikipedia launches at Wikipedia.com, after Nupedia's Advisory Board expresses concern about a Wiki being associated with Nupedia.
Since then, January 15th is known among Wikipedians as "Wikipedia Day".
Wikipedia 2001-01-20
The Wikipedia-l mailing list is created to remove Wikipedia talk from Nupedia-l.
Wikipedia 2001-01
Wikipedia has ~600 articles.
Wikipedia 2001-01
Formation of w:NPOV (Neutral point of view) consensus. A policy that all articles must represent all significant views fairly, proportionately, and without bias.
Wikipedia 2001-01
There are approximately 2,000 people on the Nupedia mailing list
Wikipedia 2001-01
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 2001-03
Wikipedia has ~1300 articles.
Wikipedia 2001-03
Incorporation of 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica articles in Project Gutenberg initiated by Bryce Harrington with the 'A' articles.
AbbevilleFrance shows a page creation on 2001-01-28, which conflicts with this.
Wikipedia 2001-03-16
German and Catalan versions of Wikipedia are created
Wikipedia 2001-04
Jimmy Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Larry Sanger for Nupedia.
Wikipedia 2001-06-26
Larry Sanger is reported to have found content in Wikipedia that he didn't already know.
The quote "Wikipedia is now useful!" has been attributed to Larry Sanger himself, but the source given doesn't support this fact.
Wikipedia 2001-07
w:Naming conventions begins to normalize page names
Wikipedia 2001-07
"basic topic pages" spring up
Wikipedia 2001-07-06
Larry Sanger publicly proposes a wiki-based "chalkboard" to the Nupedia community (now that Wikipedia seems to have a life of its own).
Wikipedia 2001-09-01
In response to "What is an encyclopedia", Wikipedia defines what it is not though related discussions continue.
Wikipedia 2001-09-11
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.
Wikipedia 2001-09
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 2001-09
Collaboration by subject matter in WikiProjects is introduced.
Wikipedia 2001-10
Wikipedia has ~13,000 articles.
Wikipedia 2001-11-06
Larry Sanger announces his decision to "get rid of [subpages]".
  • Subpages, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia-l, 2001-11-06.
Wikipedia 2001-12
The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee is created.
Wikipedia 2001
(Winter) a proposal for a simpler Nupedia two-step system is proposed, but never implemented
Wikipedia 2002-02-26
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.
Wikipedia 2002-03-01
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
Wikipedia 2001-04-04
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.
Wikipedia 2002-04
User "24" is the first to be "banned" (blocked for 2 days).
Wikipedia 2002-08
The URL of Wikipedia is changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia 2002-08-23
Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across Wikipedia
Wikipedia 2002-10
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.
Wikipedia 2002-11
Sanger proposes and Wales concedes to nonnegotiable policies
Wikipedia 2003-01-15
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 also passed about this time.
Page views per month? Or since a particular date?
Wikipedia 2003-02-01
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.
Wikipedia 2003-02-26
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.
Wikipedia 2003-03
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.
Wikipedia 2003-03
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.
Wikipedia 2003-03
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.
Wikipedia 2003-06
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.
Wikipedia 2003-07
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.
Wikipedia 2003-09
Nupedia goes off-line (server crash) never to return.
Wikipedia 2003-10
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.
Wikipedia 2003-10
The first topical Portal is set up on the German Wikipedia
Wikipedia 2003-10-12
The English Wikipedia switches to the Nohat logo (Logo history)
Wikipedia 2003
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.
Wikipedia 2003
The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee were developed, mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other early Wikipedians.
Wikipedia 2004-01
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.
Wikipedia 2004-02
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.
Wikipedia 2004-02
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.
Wikipedia 2004-02-22
Did You Know (DYK) makes its first Main Page appearance on the English Wikipedia.
Wikipedia 2004-02-26
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.
Wikipedia 2004-02
Birth of infoboxes, briefly called taxoboxes.
"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)."
Wikipedia 2004-04
The English Wikipedia reaches a quarter of a million articles.
Wikipedia 2004-05-04
Wikipedia wins a Prix Ars Electronica in the category Digital Communities.
Wikipedia 2004-05-12
Wikipedia wins a Webby Award in the category Community.
Wikipedia 2004-06-05
First international meetup(?) and first meetup that Jimmy Wales attends, in London.
Wikipedia 2004-09-20
The All-Wikipedia article count surpasses one million articles.
Wikipedia 2005-01-10
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
Wikipedia 2005-02
The English Wikipedia main page is locked down after major vandalism
Wikipedia 2005-03
English Wikipedia: half-million English articles
Wikipedia 2005-05
German publishing company Directmedia Publishing donated digital images of some 10,000 works of art to the Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia 2005-06
Spoken Wikipedia project moves into podcasting
Wikipedia 2005-07
PC World magazine "The 100 Best Products of 2005" included Wikipedia as one of 23 honorees that are available free of charge
Wikipedia 2005-07
London bombings article tracks breaking news with record editing pace
Wikipedia 2005-11
800,000th article created
Wikipedia 2005-11
Wikipedia breaks Alexa Top 40
Wikipedia 2005-12
USA Today published a column by its former editorial page editor, John Seigenthaler Sr., who told of finding his own false biography
Wikipedia 2005-12
Restriction of new article creation to registered users only
Wikipedia 2005-12-17
Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons page is started. It will become a guideline in January 2006 and a policy in July 2006.
Wikipedia 2005
Wikipedia's first subject portals were established
Wikipedia 2006-03-01
The English Wikipedia gains its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station.
Wikipedia 2006-10-03
Larry Sanger announces Citizendium as a fork of the English Wikipedia
Wikipedia 2006
first approved Wikipedia article selection made freely available to download
Wikipedia 2006
Wikipedia 2006-12
1.5 Million English articles, 4 million total articles
Wikipedia 2007-03-25
public launch of Citizendium in favor of emphasizing original articles
Wikipedia 2007-03
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
Wikipedia 2007-04-17
The Wikimedia Foundation announces the release of Wikipedia Version 0.5, "a CD collection of articles from the English Wikipedia".
Wikipedia 2007-09-09
The English Wikipedia gains its two-millionth article
Wikipedia 2007
Wikipedia 2009-05-28
Wikipedia 2009-08-17
3 million articles in English, approximately 13 million articles on all Wikipedias.
Wikipedia 2009-12-27
the German Wikipedia is the second edition after the English Wikipedia to exceed one million articles.
Wikipedia 2009
Wikipedia 2011-10-04
Italian Wikipedia blackout
Wikipedia 2012-01-18
SOPA/PIPA blackout on the English Wikipedia
Wikipedia 2012-7-12
English Wikipedia reaches 4 million articles
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