Wikipedia History

Wikipedia began as a project in English on January 15, 2001. The original idea soon caught in other languages, since only two months later, on March 16, 2001, the German Wikipedia was the second to be created, but, ironically, two months after its creation was not collaborators. In this period, the user Cdani used the German Wikipedia for testing for the Wikipedia in Catalan, the second to contain articles. At March 31, 2008 all editions had added 9,790,407 items, of which 2,259,431 (24.136%) for the English Wikipedia (see statistics to update multilingual).

In March 2000 Nupedia Jimbo Wales created a free encyclopedia project based on an ambitious process of peer review designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias thanks to the participation of scholars (mainly PhD students and academics ), which is intended to work so unpaid.

Due to the slow progress of the project in 2001, a wiki (UseMod) connected to Nupedia Originally intended to expedite the creation of items in parallel, before they pass the peer review system. There is some controversy among the founders of Nupedia about who originally proposed the idea of using a wiki to Jimbo Wales, Larry Sanger or if a third person, but the fact is that the success of that "little side project" (Wikipedia) ended up eclipsing to Nupedia, which ceased operation in 2003.

Larry Sanger, editor responsible for Nupedia, went to work with Wikipedia and worked actively in the organization and project guidelines. His contribution marked an important bias in the initial orientation of the project until the project is split in February 2002. Wales currently holds the reins of the initiative, both in time spent and resources, and is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation, which deals with supervision. At this point there is no publisher, nor are staff employed by the project. Wikipedia is powered by the voluntary contribution of thousands of Wikipedians.

On September 20, 2004 Wikipedia reached one million articles in 105 languages and caused a considerable attention from the media. The article "a million" was published in Hebrew and addresses the issue of the official teaching of Kazakhstan.

For the March 1, 2006 English Wikipedia had over a million articles and on 8 March of that year the Spanish language Wikipedia reached one hundred thousand.

Jimmy Wales said "Wikipedia is just an employee, a software expert. "And it takes a lot." The rest of the infrastructure-servers, network connectivity, maintenance, etc.-is funded by donations and grants from individuals and organizations. According to the creator of the encyclopedia: "Our level of spending is very low and this makes us viable. I see no problem for the project to go live in coming years."