History Of Wikipedia

The first edit of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is free to use and is produced and maintained by a community of volunteers called Wikipedians, was made on January 15, 2001, two days after the domain was registered.

It was developed as a means to make it simpler and quicker to write articles and translations. It was created from Nupedia, which was a better organized free encyclopedia.

Before this, the technical and philosophical foundations of Wikipedia were already in place.

Rick Gates presented the first known proposal for an online encyclopedia in 1993, and Richard Stallman offered the idea of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (which is different from just being open source) in 1998.

Stallman's theory contained the explicit notion that no central institution should have authority over editing.

This was different from modern digital encyclopedias like Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was modified to GFDL. At the same time, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger created Wikipedia as a similar project, employing an online wiki as a collaborative drafting tool.

Wikipedia was originally intended to be a place where articles and ideas could be drafted and later polished for Nupedia.

However, it quickly surpassed Nupedia, becoming a home for the polished final product of a global project in hundreds of languages, as well as a place for drafting. This inspired a wide range of other online reference projects.

In 2014, Wikipedia had over 495 million viewers per month. According to comScore, Wikipedia had more than 115 million unique visits from the United States per month in 2015.In September 2018, the projects had 15.5 billion page visits per month.

Sanger departed Nupedia and Wikipedia in March 2002 when Bomis withdrew its financing amid the dot-com crash.

He and Wales had different opinions on the ideal way to run free encyclopedias by the year 2002. Both of them still supported the idea of open cooperation, but they had different opinions on how to deal with disruptive editors, what particular responsibilities specialists should have, and what the best method to lead the project to success would be.

Wales went on to build self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on Wikipedia.

He said clearly that he would not take part in the community's daily administration, but he would support it in learning to manage itself and in discovering the best methods for itself.

Wales limited his responsibilities to providing infrequent comments on severe topics, executive activities, promotion of knowledge, and development of comparable reference initiatives as of 2007.

Sanger said that he considers himself a "inclusionist" and is open to nearly everything. He also suggested that specialists still have a role to play in the Web 2.0 era.

In 2006, he started Citizendium, an online encyclopedia that aimed to avoid disruptive editing by requiring authors to use their actual identities. He also wanted to provide "gentle expert guidance" to improve the accuracy of the information.

The community was supposed to make decisions regarding the substance of the articles, but the website was also supposed to include a disclaimer about "family-friendly content."

Encyclopedia entries that are old or even out of date are very useful for historical study.

You may find previous versions of any Wikipedia article by clicking on the "View history" link located at the top of the page.

Additionally, the ZIM File Archive, which is located at the Internet Archive, has a collection of historical complete snapshots of Wikipedia, as well as choices of articles from various years and in several languages. Kiwix software may be used to open them.