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 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: My resignation--Larry Sanger

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 History of Wikipedia/Articles by and about Larry Sanger.

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 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 - begin to be compiled, tracking all 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 - coverage begins to attempt to comprehensively list reputed impacts and outcomes of the crisis, e.g. credibility of the, re-election prospects for in the, growth in the 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.

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.