Charter/Sources/History of Wikipedia

History of wikipedia - very rough and still contains POV statements - add what you can, but avoid removing anything until we can spend time cleaning up. History is hard. It requires patience. Avoid settling on any dogma, and be careful about adjectives and such. An early Muslim view of history might be helpful to those of you who don't have much experience writing history itself.

Prehistory

• earlier free encyclopedia projects
• open content initiatives at MIT
• the GNU FDL
• early discussions with Stallman about a GNU FDL library for free universities
• Stallman's GNUpedia proposal
• Nupedia
• January 10, 2001: Nupedia's wiki launches[1]
  • "It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia", said Larry...
• January 11, 2001: The name "Wikipedia" is coined: [2]

Primordial Soup

• January 15, 2001: Wikipedia launches at Wikipedia.com
• January 20, 2001: Wikipedia-L mailing list created to remove Wikipedia talk from Nupedia-L[3]
• formation of w:NPOV consensus
• March 01, 2001: two minor slashdottings of Wikipedia
• Shift to Free Links
• Incorporation of 1911 encyclopedia articles in Project Gutenberg initiated by BryceHarrington with the 'A' articles; see w:Wikipedia_talk:1911_Encyclopedia_Britannica
• June 26, 2001: "Wikipedia is now useful!", announces Larry Sanger. [4]
• Naming Conventions begins to normalize page names
• "basic topic pages" spring up
• July 26, 2001: Kuro5hin article brings large traffic. [5]
• September 1, 2001: Questions such as "What is an encyclopedia": Wikipedia defines what it is not
  • (see the current Wikipedia self-references to see what it has become anyway)

Expansion

• 9/11: a 12-hour marathon by The Cunctator and other Wikipedians results in the Sept. 11 page collection
• September 20, 2001: New York Times article
• Second Kuro5hin article [6]
• Killing of subpages begins
• February 2002: Phase II software
• February 2002: the Spanish Fork
• March 1, 2002: resignation--Larry_Sanger Larry Sanger resigns

Controversy

Until his resignation, Larry Sanger had an official position as the chief editor of the English encyclopædia. Naturally, he attracted his share of controversy, as some contributors (such as The Cunctator) objected to his handling of the various problems that arose. Some Meta-Wikipedia articles dating from this period (some by Sanger, some by his detractors) are at [7].

Political controversy became a major focus of editorial policy in mid-2002 - Larry Sanger returned after his resignation to wade in to the following:

In March 2002, the user "24" (named after his internet address) began to make a large number of controversial edits many perceived as left-wing or simply idiosyncratic; heated discussions with him lead to personal attacks and insults and Jimbo Wales banned his IP from the site for two days in April 2002 after lengthy debate on the mailing list - he never returned although some believe he has been active anonymously since. His many contributions remain visible on the meta site - as does much of his text in the main wikipedia, suggesting the controversy was not so much a matter of content as style, and ideological posturing on both sides: 24 famously denied that Wikipedia was or could ever be a 'community' which angered some very longtime Wikipedians.

"Helga", who had persistently made controversial edits to pages related to German history, which were perceived as right-wing by most, and which were lamented by Wikipedia's historians, was IP-banned in September 2002, again after discussion on the mailing list. Much less of her text remains in the wikipedia, and she made no contributions to the meta site anyone deemed worthwhile.

Some believe that the controversy was inevitable, as the wikipedia began to exhaust non-controversial subject matter, such as the hard sciences and well-documented European history, and began to cover more difficult issues where multiple points of view fiercely competing for attention is normal: the many views of economics, ethics and its applications (only the simplest view seems to lead to any agreement), sociology, Islam and its implications in politics, psychology, law and legal codes, political science and of course politics itself. The correlation between numbers of articles on these questions and the level of controversy has not been explored. One constructive suggestion that came from this period was that Wikipedia recruit a board to make major editorial decisions for the project.

However, there was and is no official or central way to make editorial decisions after Larry. In general, historical and ideological controversy has been dealt with since fall 2002 by informal means, e.g. Talk files, more careful policy, and less use of judgemental language, when intent has not been proven - but a lot of users have been IP-banned since, for much lesser offenses, without being permitted to make the amount of noise that 24 or Helga did. Some think that's a good thing, some a very bad thing. Controversy continues.

Consolidation

• Summer 2002: Phase III software
• Standard presentations for chemical elements & biological species
• Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across wikipedia
• 40,000 reached
• 50,000 reached

• October 2002:
  • the random page bugs causes everyone to land on unexpeccted pages
  • pagecount leaps up to 70k with the bot-creation of pages for US towns from census data

• December 2002:
  • December 10 -Article count jumps over 100 000 articles due to bugs in the counter; corrected back to 93 301.
  • December 12 - Wiktionary, the parallel lexical project to Wikipedia is launched. Basic dictionary functions move, but Wikipedia retains its usefulness as a comprehensive.

Reflection

• January 2003:
  • Wikipedia3 and Wikipedia4 discussions begin, timelines proposed
  • January 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.
• February 2003:
  • February 1 - coverage of Space Shuttle Columbia disaster appears in more or less real time, with facts entered from the news. Background information on the entire space program also filled in as time permits. Suggestion that "Wikews" (Wiki news) might be viable project.
  • February 6 - Wikipedia self-references begin to be compiled, tracking all mention of wiki in articles across name-spaces. First deliberate efforts to see what Wikipedia has become, in practice, as opposed to what it was intended to be, and steer it reflexively.
  • February 26 - Iraq crisis coverage begins to attempt to comprehensively list reputed impacts and outcomes of the crisis, e.g. credibility of the UN Security Council, 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.
• March 2003:
  • invasion of the ENDLESS POINTLESS LISTS. ENDLESS album listings. 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 consistutes a "silly list" varied from person to person. Older lists such as and provoked protest as well.
  • Seeding of other projects: The wikipedia phase 3 software is used for several other projects including Internet Encyclopedia (a non-NPOV alternative)., 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.
  • Iraq war causes news capacity to develop. Wikipedia becomes an important point of consolidation of information from alternative news and litt-e-read-but-reliable sources. are compiled in advance of the invasion, enabling later comparison with the.
• June 2003:
  • 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.
  • Jim Wales announces formation of Wikimedia to recruit a board and write a board manual to help them manage an ever-growing Wikipedia with 600 regular contributors, and over 7000 occasionals. He first reveals his commitment to this plan in an article pulished on.
• July 2003:
  • On July 15, Andrew Lih ("") 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.
• October/November 2003:
  • 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 and are set up. Members of the mediation committee are tasked with 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.
  • On Oct 12, the English Wikipedia switched to the Nohat logo (Logo history)
  • On Oct 28, the first time a "real" meeting of Wikipedians happened in Munich. Since then in a lot of cities worldwide regulare meetings of fellow Wikipedians are being held.
• 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.

Hitting the big time?

• Christmas 2003
  • A major computer crash prompts Jimbo Wales to launch a fund-raising drive. In less than a week more than $30,000 is raised, thanks partly to another healthy dose of publicity on Slashdot. The money allows nine new computers to be purchased. These are brought online during January 2004, and as a result the location of the Wikimedia computers moves from San Diego to Florida, within an hour of Jimbo's home, allowing a better emergency response in the future. The editing and viewing experience is dramatically improved. (Full explanation of new server set-up at Wikimedia servers).
• January 2004
  • 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 a barely a hint of a slow down. See Milestones.
• February 2004
  • 500,000 articles across all Wikipedias is reached. Non-English Wikipedias are now growing much more rapdily 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.
• February 2004
  • Yahoo! announces that Wikipedia is included in their Public Site Match arm of their Content Acquistion 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. Yahoo!'s press release.
• February 2004
  • On February 26 2004 Jimbo Wales announces on the mailing list ([8]) 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.
• February 2004
  • The first full month at the new server location with all nine new machines available sees a massive increase in traffic to the site. Around 660GB of data are served in February from the English Wikipedia alone across 77 million hits. It is very likely that more than 1TB was served across all Wikipedias for the first time. En also now has over 50,000 registered usernames. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/.
• April 2004 - The English Wikipedia reaches a quarter of a million articles.

Rewarded

• May 4, 2004
  • Wikipedia wins a in the category Digital Communities. A five-figure cash pile is reported to come as part of the prize.
• May 12, 2004
  • Wikipedia wins a in the category Community. No free money is reported to be forthcoming.
• September 20, 2004
  • The All-Wikipedia article count surpasses one million articles.
• January 2005
  • The first Wikimedia servers installed outside the United States are put in production use near Paris, France. They cache some content for some European countries.
• 2005
  • Wikipedia becomes a top 100 website according to Alexa.

Anticipate future important scheduled events in Future of Wikipedia

References

Adapted from the Meta-Wikipedia article, "Wikipedia timeline" http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline , used under the GNU Free Documentation License.