Hardware and software • In January 2001, Wikipedia ran on
UseModWiki, written in
Perl by
Clifford Adams. The server still runs on
Linux, although the original text was stored in files rather than in a database. Articles were named with the
CamelCase convention. • In January 2002, "Phase II" of the wiki software powering Wikipedia was introduced, replacing the older
UseModWiki. Written specifically for the project by
Magnus Manske, it included a
PHP wiki engine. • In July 2002, a
major rewrite of the software powering Wikipedia went live; dubbed "Phase III", it replaced the older "Phase II" version, and became
MediaWiki. It was written by
Lee Daniel Crocker in response to the increasing demands of the growing project. • In October 2002, Derek Ramsey created a
botan automated program called
Rambotto add a large number of articles about United States towns; these articles were automatically generated from
U.S. census data. He thus increased the number of Wikipedia articles by 33,832. This has been called "the most controversial move in Wikipedia history". • In January 2003, support for mathematical formulas in
TeX was added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Węgrzanowski. • On 9 June 2003, Wikipedia's
ISBN interface was amended to make ISBNs in articles link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page . Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software and new ones were suggested on the page. See the edit that changed this. • After 6 December 2003, various system messages shown to Wikipedia users were no longer
hard coded, allowing Wikipedia to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface, such as the message shown to blocked users. • On 12 February 2004, server operations were moved from San Diego, California to
Tampa, Florida. • On 29 May 2004, all the various websites were updated to a new version of the
MediaWiki software. • On 30 May 2004, the first instances of "categorization" entries appeared. Category schemes, like Recent Changes and Edit This Page, had existed since the founding of Wikipedia. However, Sanger had viewed the schemes as lists, and even hand-entered articles, whereas the
categorization effort centered on individual categorization entries in each article of the encyclopedia, as part of a larger automatic categorization of the articles of the encyclopedia. • After 3 June 2004, administrators could edit the style of the interface by changing the
CSS in the monobook stylesheet at
MediaWiki:Monobook.css. • Also on 30 May 2004, with MediaWiki 1.3, the Template namespace was created, allowing
transclusion of standard texts. • On 7 June 2005 at 3:00 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time, the bulk of the Wikimedia servers were moved to a new facility across the street. All Wikimedia projects were down during this time. • In March 2013, the first phase of the
Wikidata interwiki database became available across Wikipedia's language editions. An editing interface optimised for mobile devices was also released. was moved to the Wikipedia namespace from the article namespace. • Around 15 October 2003, a new Wikipedia logo was installed. The logo concept was selected by a voting process, which was followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The final selection was created by David Friedland (who edits Wikipedia under the username
"nohat") based on a logo design and concept created by Paul Stansifer. • On 22 February 2004, Did You Know (DYK) made its first Main Page appearance. • On 23 February 2004, a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared at 19:46 UTC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look. • On 10 January 2005, the multilingual portal at www.wikipedia.org was set up, replacing a redirect to the English-language Wikipedia. • On 5 February 2005, was created, becoming the first thematic "portal" on the English Wikipedia. However, the concept was pioneered on the German Wikipedia, where
Portal:Recht (law studies) was set up in October 2003. • On 16 July 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page. • On 19 March 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English-language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years. • On 13 May 2010, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. By January 2023, Wikimedia had made the update available to 300 of
its language editions; it was the default for the Arabic and Greek versions. Vector 2022 features a revised
user interface which makes numerous changes to the arrangement of the interface elements. Among them, the language selection menu, previously located to the left of the screen, now is found in the top right corner of the display of the article that is currently read. The
Wikimedia Foundation said that the change was motivated by a desire to modernize the site and improve the navigation and editing experience for readers inexperienced with the internet, as the previous skin was deemed "clunky and overwhelming." The skin went live as the default skin for readers of Wikimedia sites in 300 (out of 318) languages on 18 January 2023.
Wikipedia users were divided on the changes. A request for comment on the
English Wikipedia asking the community whether or not Vector 2022 should be deployed as the default skin accumulated over 90,000 words in responses. Despite the larger number of editors who expressed that they did not want Vector 2022 to be deployed in its then-current form, as consensus on Wikipedia is not decided by vote, the discussion was closed in favor of the redesign, considering the positive comments left by other users. Users on the
Swahili Wikipedia unanimously disagreed with the enactment of the new skin. Wikipedia's core non-negotiable editorial policy, a reformulation of the "Lack of Bias" policy outlined by Sanger for Nupedia in spring or summer 2000, which covered many of the same core principles. • In September 2001, collaboration by subject matter in is introduced. • In February 2002, concerns over the risk of future censorship and commercialization by Bomis Inc (Wikipedia's original host) combined with a lack of guarantee this would not happen, led most participants of the
Spanish Wikipedia to break away and establish it independently as the
Enciclopedia Libre. Following clarification of Wikipedia's status and non-commercial nature later that year, re-merger talks between
Enciclopedia Libre and the re-founded Spanish Wikipedia occasionally took place in 2002 and 2003, but no conclusion was reached. By 2011,
Enciclopedia Libre was considered to be in decline; it ceased operations in late 2024. • Also in 2002, policy and style issues were clarified with the creation of the
Manual of Style, along with a number of other policies and guidelines. • In November 2002, new mailing lists for WikiEN and Announce were set up, as well as other language mailing lists, to reduce the volume of traffic on mailing lists. • In July 2003, the rule against editing one's
autobiography is introduced. • On 28 October 2003, the first "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in
Munich. Many cities followed suit, and soon a number of regular Wikipedian get-togethers were established around the world. Several Internet communities, including one on the popular blog website
LiveJournal, have also sprung up since. • From 10 July to 30 August 2004 the and formerly on the Main Page were replaced by links to overviews. On 27 August 2004 the
Community Portal was started, to serve as a focus for community efforts. These were previously accomplished on an informal basis, by individual queries of the Recent Changes, in wiki style, as ad hoc collaborations between like-minded editors. • During September to December 2005 following the
Seigenthaler controversy and other similar concerns, several anti-abuse features and policies were added to Wikipedia. These were: • The
policy for "Checkuser" (a
MediaWiki extension to assist detection of abuse via
internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005.
Checkuser function had previously existed but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, so there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis. • Creation of new pages on the English Wikipedia was restricted to editors who had created a user account. • The introduction and rapid adoption of the policy
Wikipedia:Biographies of living people, giving a far tighter quality control and fact-check system to biographical articles related to living people. • The "semi-protection" function and policy, allowing pages to be protected so that only those with an account could edit. • In May 2006, a new "oversight" feature was introduced on the English Wikipedia, allowing a handful of highly trusted users to permanently erase page revisions containing copyright infringements or libelous or personal information from a page's history. Previous to this, page version deletion was laborious, and also deleted versions remained visible to other administrators and could be un-deleted by them. • On 1 January 2007, the subcommunity named
Esperanza was disbanded by communal consent. Esperanza had begun as an effort to promote "
wikilove" and a social support network, but had developed its own subculture and private structures. Its disbanding was described as the painful but necessary remedy for a project that had allowed editors to "see themselves as Esperanzans first and foremost". A number of Esperanza's subprojects were integrated back into Wikipedia as free-standing projects, but most of them are now inactive. When the group was founded in September 2005, there had been concerns expressed that it would eventually be condemned as such. • In April 2007, the results of a 4-month policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia policies into one core policy (
Wikipedia:Attribution) were polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focused policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal. • A one-day blackout of Wikipedia was called by
Jimmy Wales on 18 January 2012, in conjunction with Google and over 7,000 other websites, to protest the
Stop Online Piracy Act then under consideration by the
United States Congress.
The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures • In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the
URL of Wikipedia was changed from
wikipedia.com to
wikipedia.org (
.com and
.org). • On 20 June 2003, the
Wikimedia Foundation was founded. • Communications committee was formed in January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Wikipedia via the newly implemented
OTRS (a ticket handling system). • Angela Beesley and
Florence Nibart-Devouard were elected to the Board of
Trustees of the
Wikimedia Foundation. During this time, Angela was active in editing content and setting policies, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation. • On 10 January 2006,
Wikipedia became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation. • In July 2006, Angela Beesley resigned from the board of the
Wikimedia Foundation. • In October 2006,
Florence Nibart-Devouard became chair of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Edit milestones and projects • On 15 January 2001, the first recorded edit of Wikipedia was performed. • In December 2002, the first sister project,
Wiktionary, was created; aiming to produce a
dictionary and
thesaurus of the words in all languages. It uses the same software as Wikipedia. • On 22 January 2003, the
English Wikipedia was again
slashdotted after having reached the
100,000 article milestone with the
Hastings, article. Two days later, the German-language Wikipedia, the largest non-English language version, passed the
10,000 article mark. • On 20 June 2003, the same day that the
Wikimedia Foundation was founded, "
Wikiquote" was created. A month later, "
Wikibooks" was launched. "
Wikisource" was set up towards the end of the year. • In January 2004, Wikipedia reached the
200,000-article milestone in English with the article on
Neil Warnock, and reached
450,000 articles for both English and non-English Wikipedias. The next month, the combined article count of the English and non-English reached
500,000. • On 20 April 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached
250,000. • On 7 July 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached
300,000. • On 20 September 2004, Wikipedia's total article count exceeded
1,000,000 articles in over 105 languages; the project received a flurry of related attention in the press. The one millionth article was published in the
Hebrew Wikipedia and discusses the
flag of Kazakhstan. • On 20 November 2004, the article count of the English Wikipedia reached
400,000. • On 18 March 2005, Wikipedia passed the
500,000-article milestone in English, with
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union being announced in a
press release as the landmark article. • In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company
Hitwise, relegating
Dictionary.com to second place. • On 29 September 2005, the
English Wikipedia passed the
750,000-article mark. • On 1 March 2006, the
English Wikipedia passed the
1,000,000-article mark, with
Jordanhill railway station being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article. • On 8 June 2006, the
English Wikipedia passed the
1,000-featured-article mark, with
Iranian peoples. • On 15 August 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation launched
Wikiversity. • On 1 September 2006, Wikipedia exceeded
5,000,000 articles across all 229 language editions. • On 24 November 2006, the English Wikipedia passed the
1,500,000-article mark, with
Kanab ambersnail being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article. • On 22 April 2007, the English Wikipedia passed the
1,750,000-article mark.
RAF raid on La Caine HQ was the 1,750,000th article. • On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia passed the
2,000,000-article mark.
El Hormiguero was accepted by consensus as the 2,000,000th article. • On 28 March 2008, Wikipedia exceeded
10 million articles across all 251 language editions. • On 11 October 2008, the English Wikipedia passed the
2,500,000-article mark. While no attempt was made to officially identify the 2,500,000th article,
Joe Connor (baseball) has been suggested as the possible article. • On 17 August 2009, the English Wikipedia passed the
3,000,000-article mark, with
Beate Eriksen being announced on the Main Page as the milestone article. • On 27 December 2009, the
German Wikipedia exceeded
1,000,000 articles, becoming the second Wikipedia language edition to do so. • On 21 September 2010, the
French Wikipedia exceeded
1,000,000 articles, becoming the third Wikipedia language edition to do so. • On 12 December 2010, the English Wikipedia passed the
3,500,000-article mark. • On 22 November 2011, Wikipedia exceeded
20 million articles across all 282 language editions. • On 7 November 2011, the
German Wikipedia exceeded
100 million page edits. • On 24 November 2011, the
English Wikipedia exceeded
500 million page edits. • On 17 December 2011, the
Dutch Wikipedia exceeded
1,000,000 articles, becoming the fourth Wikipedia language edition to do so. • On 13 July 2012, the
English Wikipedia exceeded
4,000,000 articles, with
Izbat al-Burj. • On 3 February 2021, the
Malagasy Wikipedia exceeded
1,000,000 page edits. • On 4 February 2021, the
English Wikipedia exceeded
1 billion page edits. • On 14 October 2021, the
Cebuano Wikipedia exceeded
6,000,000 articles, becoming the second Wikipedia language edition to do so. • On 14 December 2021, the
Polish Wikipedia exceeded
1,500,000 articles, becoming the twelfth Wikipedia language edition to do so. • On 27 November 2022, Wikipedia exceeded
60 million articles across all 329 language editions.
Fundraising Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation runs fundraising campaigns on Wikipedia to support its operations. These generally last about a month and happen at different times of the year in different countries. In addition to the fundraising banners on Wikipedia itself, there are also email campaigns; some emails invite people to leave the Wikimedia Foundation money in their wills. Revenue has risen every year of the Wikimedia Foundation's existence, reaching as of 30 June 2023, versus expenses of . In addition, the Wikimedia Endowment, an organizationally separate fundraising effort begun in 2016, reached $100 million in 2021, five years sooner than planned.
External impact • In 2007, Wikipedia was deemed fit to be used as a major source by the
UK Intellectual Property Office in a
Formula One trademark case ruling. • Over time, Wikipedia gained recognition amongst more traditional media as a "key source" for major new events, such as the
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and related
tsunami, the
2008 American Presidential election, and 2007
Virginia Tech shooting. The latter article was accessed 750,000 times in two days, with newspapers published locally to the shootings adding that "Wikipedia has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event." • On 21 February 2007, Noam Cohen of the
New York Times reported that some academics were banning the use of Wikipedia as a research tool. • On 27 February 2007, an article in
The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some professors at
Harvard University included Wikipedia in their
syllabi, but that there was a split in their perception of using Wikipedia. • In July 2013, a large-scale study by four major universities identified the most
disputed articles on Wikipedia, finding that Israel,
Adolf Hitler, and God were more fiercely debated than any other subjects.
Effect of biographical articles Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated with new information comes, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of
notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (
Controversies) and has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. • In November 2005, the
Seigenthaler controversy occurred when a hoaxer asserted on Wikipedia that journalist John Seigenthaler had been involved in the
Kennedy assassination of 1963. • In December 2006, German comedian
Atze Schröder sued Arne Klempert, secretary of
Wikimedia Deutschland because he did not want his real name published in Wikipedia. Schröder later withdrew his complaint but wanted his attorney's costs to be paid by Klempert. A court decided that the artist had to cover those costs himself. • On 16 February 2007, Turkish historian
Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at
Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport because of false information on his Wikipedia biography claiming he was a terrorist. • In November 2008, the German
Left Party politician
Lutz Heilmann claimed that some remarks in his Wikipedia article caused damage to his reputation. He succeeded in getting a court order to make Wikimedia Deutschland remove a key search portal. The result was a national outpouring of support for Wikipedia, more donations to Wikimedia Deutschland, and a rise in daily pageviews of the Lutz Heilmann article from a few dozen to half a million. Shortly after, Heilmann asked the court to withdraw the court order. • In December 2008, Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch chapter, won a preliminary injunction after an entrepreneur was linked in "his" article with the criminal
Willem Holleeder and wanted the article deleted. The judge in
Utrecht believed Wikimedia's assertion that it has no influence on the content of Dutch Wikipedia. • In February 2009, when the German politician
Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg became a federal minister on 10 February 2009, an unregistered user added an eleventh given name in the article on German Wikipedia:
Wilhelm. Numerous newspapers adopted it. When wary Wikipedians tried to remove
Wilhelm, the edit was reverted citing those newspapers. This case about Wikipedia reliability and journalists copying from Wikipedia was dubbed
Falscher Wilhelm ("wrong Wilhelm").
Early roles of Wales and Sanger Wales, along with others, came up with and funded the idea of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would accept contributions from ordinary people. Sanger suggested using a wiki to provide a complementary project for people "intimidated and bored" by Nupedia's elaborate processes, and "Neutral point of view" In April 2005 he published a two-part memoir of his work on Nupedia and Wikipedia, highlighting his role in their creation and continuing belief that Nupedia deserved to be saved. By 2006, after the launch of Citizendium, Sanger was harshly critical of Wikipedia, describing it as "broken beyond repair." In 2005, Wales described himself simply as the founder of Wikipedia; and 2002. Before January 2004, Wales did not dispute Sanger's status as co-founder. In 2006, Wales said, "He used to work for me [...] I don't agree with calling him a co-founder, but he likes the title". Starting in 2006, when Sanger wrote and was interviewed extensively about the launch of Citizendium, he emphasized his status as co-founder, and these earlier sources that described him as such.
Controversies • In November 2005, the
Seigenthaler controversy caused Brian Chase to resign from his employment, after his identity was ascertained by Daniel Brandt of
Wikipedia Watch. Following this, the scientific journal
Nature undertook a
peer reviewed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in
Encyclopædia Britannica, and concluded they are comparable in terms of accuracy.
Britannica rejected their methodology and their conclusion.
Nature refused to release any form of apology, and instead asserted the reliability of its study and a rejection of the criticisms. • During early-to-mid-2006, the
congressional aides biography scandals were publicized, whereby political aides were caught trying to influence the Wikipedia biographies of several politicians. The aides removed undesirable information (including pejorative quotes and broken campaign promises), added favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replaced the article in part or whole by staff-authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated:
Marty Meehan,
Norm Coleman,
Conrad Burns,
Joe Biden, and
Gil Gutknecht. The activities documented were: In a separate but similar incident, the campaign manager for
Cathy Cox for
governor of Georgia, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents. Following media publicity, the incidents tapered off around August 2006. • In July 2006, Joshua Gardner was exposed as a fake Duke of Cleveland with a Wikipedia page. • In January 2007, English-language Wikipedians in
Qatar were briefly blocked from editing, following a spate of vandalism, by an administrator who did not realize that the country's internet traffic is routed through a single
IP address. Multiple media sources promptly declared that Wikipedia was banning Qatar from the site. • On 23 January 2007, a
Microsoft employee offered to pay
Rick Jelliffe to review and change certain Wikipedia articles regarding an open-source document standard which was rival to a Microsoft format. • In February 2007,
The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction that a prominent
English Wikipedia editor and administrator known as "Essjay", had invented a persona using fictitious credentials. The editor,
Ryan Jordan, became a
Wikia employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, and communicated to the original article author (
Essjay controversy). • Also in February 2007, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued Wikimedia for defamation and causing harm to her business, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. In
Bauer v. Glatzer, Bauer claimed that information on Wikipedia critical of her abilities as a literary agent caused this harm. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Wikipedia and moved to dismiss the case on 1 May 2008. The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed on 1 July 2008. • In June 2007, an anonymous user
posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the
Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in the sister site
Wikinews. • In October 2007, in their obituaries of recently deceased TV theme composer
Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media organisations reported that he had co-written the
S Club 7 song "
Reach". In fact, he had not, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article. • On 14 July 2009, the National Portrait Gallery issued a cease-and-desist letter for alleged breach of copyright, against a Wikipedia editor who downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the NPG website, and placed them on
Wikimedia Commons (
National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute). • In April and May 2010, there was controversy over the hosting and display of sexual drawing and pornographic images including images of children on Wikipedia. It led to the mass removal of pornographic content from Wikimedia Foundation sites. • In November 2012,
Lord Justice Leveson wrote in his report on British press standards, "
The Independent was founded in 1986 by the journalists Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Brett Straub..." He had used the Wikipedia article for
The Independent newspaper as his source, but an act of vandalism had replaced Matthew Symonds (a genuine co-founder) with Brett Straub (an unknown character).
The Economist said of the
Leveson report, "Parts of it are a scissors-and-paste job culled from Wikipedia." • In late 2013, commentators publicly shared observations of the reappearance of many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010.
Notable forks and derivatives There are a large number of . Other sites also use the MediaWiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia. No list of them is maintained. Specialized foreign language forks using the Wikipedia concept include
Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish),
Wikiweise (German),
WikiZnanie (Russian),
Susning.nu (Swedish), and
Baidu Baike (Chinese). Some of these (such as
Enciclopedia Libre) use
GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to the exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias. In 2006, Sanger founded
Citizendium, based upon a modified version of
MediaWiki. The site said it aimed 'to improve on the Wikipedia model with "gentle expert oversight", among other things'. In 2006, conservative activist and lawyer
Andrew Schlafly founded
Conservapedia, based on MediaWiki.
Publication on other media The
German Wikipedia was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004 and more extended versions on CDs or DVD in April 2005 and December 2006. In December 2005, the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia, published a 139-page book explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies, which was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German Wikipedia. Originally, Directmedia also announced plans to print the German Wikipedia in its entirety, in 100 volumes of 800 pages each. The publication was due to begin in October 2006, and finish in 2010. In March 2006, however, this project was called off. In September 2008,
Bertelsmann published a 1000 pages volume with a selection of popular German Wikipedia articles. Bertelsmann paid voluntarily 1 Euro per sold copy to
Wikimedia Deutschland. A free software project has also been launched to make a static version of
English Wikipedia available for use on
iPods. The "Encyclopodia" project was started around March 2006 and can currently be used on 1st to 4th-generation iPods.
English Wikipedia CD/DVD/Kiwix ZIM file releases As of June 2022, there have been no more article selection releases since Wikipedia Version 0.8.
Lawsuits In limited ways, the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In the defamation action
Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., it was held that Wikimedia had no case to answer because of this section. A similar law in France caused a lawsuit to be dismissed in October 2007. In 2013, a
German appeals court or Oberlandesgericht (the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart) ruled that Wikipedia is a "service provider" not a "content provider", and as such is immune from liability as long as it takes down content that is accused of being illegal. ==See also==