Wikipedia was a side project meant to feed a stricter expert encyclopedia
In January 2001 Larry Sanger suggested a wiki as a feeder for Nupedia, an online encyclopedia whose expert-written articles went through formal review. The feeder launched five days later. Nupedia's servers were switched off in 2003, while its informal offshoot became the largest reference work ever assembled.
Nupedia began on 9 March 2000, owned by the web portal company Bomis, whose chief executive was Jimmy Wales, with Sanger as editor-in-chief. Wales is usually credited with the goal of an encyclopedia anyone could edit and Sanger with the tactic of using a wiki. Wikipedia went live on 15 January 2001, now celebrated as Wikipedia Day, in English only; Sanger picked the name, blending wiki and encyclopedia, partly to protect Nupedia's brand if the experiment went badly. Wales has said Friedrich Hayek's essay The Use of Knowledge in Society was central to his thinking about running it.
Rules were sparse at first, though the neutral point of view policy appeared within a year. Bomis had imagined a profitable business, but in February 2002 Spanish-language editors, worried about advertising and control, walked out to build a rival called Enciclopedia Libre. Wales responded by promising no ads and moving the site from a dot com to a dot org address. Since 2003 it has been hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit funded largely by readers' donations.
Growth was explosive, then slowed. Other language editions started in March 2001, reaching 161 by the end of 2004. On 9 September 2007 the English edition passed 2 million articles, overtaking the Yongle Encyclopedia compiled in Ming China in 1408, which had been the largest for almost six centuries. New articles fell from about 1,800 a day in 2006 to roughly 800 by 2013; researchers blamed coordination costs and hostility to newcomers, while others argued the obvious topics had simply been covered.
The project now spans more than 300 languages and over 68 million articles, with more than 7 million in English, and draws upward of 1.5 billion unique device visits a month. Its reliability was widely doubted in the 2000s and has earned more praise since the late 2010s, yet critics still point to systemic gaps, including a bias against coverage of women and of the Global South, and some governments block pages or the whole site.
Source: Wikipedia
