Wikipedia Is Up (2001)
Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia was live at wikipedia.com on January 15, 2001. The site was intended to be a "really quite snazzy" wiki complement to the Nupedia project, offering a more collaborative and less formal environment for building an encyclopedia.
Background
- This is the announcement that Wikipedia, originally conceived as a feeder project to generate draft articles for the expert-reviewed Nupedia encyclopedia, was launched on January 15, 2001.
- Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and edited by Larry Sanger; it had rigorous peer review but produced very few articles. Wikipedia was set up as a wiki (a website anyone could edit) to speed up content creation.
- The post reflects the early days of one of the most visited websites in history — at this moment, Wikipedia was a tiny, experimental side project with no guarantee of success.
- Understanding this email helps explain why Wikipedia, not Nupedia, became the dominant free encyclopedia: the open-edit model proved far more scalable than expert review.