Wikipedia Launches: The Free Encyclopedia Era Begins

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a website on January 15, 2001, with no articles, no budget, and a premise that most experts considered absurd: anyone with an internet connection could write and edit an encyclopedia, and the result would be reliable. Twenty-five years later, Wikipedia contains more than 60 million articles in over 300 languages and ranks among the ten most-visited websites on earth. The project grew out of Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that Wales had founded in 2000 with Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia used a traditional editorial model with expert reviewers, and after a year of operation had produced exactly twelve finished articles. The bottleneck was obvious: peer review was slow, and unpaid experts had limited motivation. Sanger suggested adding a wiki, a website format that allowed any user to edit any page, as a feeder system for Nupedia. The wiki took on a life of its own and quickly eclipsed its parent. Wikipedia's growth was explosive. The English-language edition reached 20,000 articles within its first year. By 2004, it had surpassed the Encyclopaedia Britannica in both scope and traffic. The site operated on a radical model of editorial governance: no credentials were required to contribute, disputes were settled by consensus, and content was governed by policies developed collaboratively by the community itself. The "neutral point of view" policy, requiring articles to represent all significant perspectives without editorial bias, became the site's defining principle. The project attracted fierce criticism. Traditional encyclopedists dismissed it as unreliable. A 2005 study published in Nature compared 42 science articles from Wikipedia and Britannica, finding comparable error rates and lending the project unexpected credibility. Critics also identified systemic biases in coverage, particularly an overrepresentation of Western, English-language, and male-oriented subjects, gaps the community has worked to address with uneven results. Sanger departed in 2002, later founding the rival Citizendium, which never gained traction. Wales became Wikipedia's public face and the chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts the site on donated servers funded by annual fundraising campaigns. Wikipedia's annual budget of roughly $150 million supports a site used by over a billion people monthly, making it arguably the most cost-effective knowledge project in human history.