subject: The History Of Wikipedia [print this page] If you have used the internet it is highly likely that at one point you have used the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. This website contains information on just about anything and has deep analysis on everything that you need to know. Although anyone can edit the information on this website the information is generally factual. The information is administered by experts and any updates are often checked over by these people.
The website is relatively old for a website and dates back to 2001. The developing of this website started out as a complimentary project for Nupedia, an online encyclopaedia. The website was officially launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. They developed the name from the old Portmanteau meaning of wiki which was quick; this means the meaning of Wikipedia is quick encyclopaedia and this is what the creators were trying to get at.
The first actual article on Wikipedia is not actually known as many test articles were created although it is believed to be the Wikipedia page of Wolfgang Mozart. From the start of Wikipedia it began to get contributions from search engines and Nupedia and by the start of 2001 they had over 20,000 articles in 18 languages. The website was an instant hit with more articles being uploaded every day. As each year went by they were developing in5to more languages, by late 2002 they were in 26 languages and by 2004 they were in 161 different languages.
Nupedia and Wikipedia co-existed for the early years of Wikipedia but in 2003 the owner of Nupedia took that website down to carry on developing Wikipedia. As the years went by the website continued to grow and in September 2007 it set a new record. This record was that it became the worlds largest encyclopaedia after surpassing the 2 million article mark. This record was previous help by the 1407 Yongle Encyclopaedia which had held the record for over 600 years. Around this time Wikipedia began advertising on its website and this angered many of its users. This led to the Spanish users setting up their own online encyclopaedia and when this happened Wikipedia announced that they would not advertise on their website anymore and then change their website from a .com website to a .org.
The year 2007 was listed as the peak year for Wikipedia as this is when the most articles were added and it had the most editors. During this it was estimated that over 1800 articles were added each day and by 2012 this number had decreased to 1000 per day. In 2009 it is reported that the website lost 49,000 of its editors which is obviously a significant loss when compared to the fact that over the same period the year before they only lost 4,900.
The reason for the decline for Wikipedia was apparently down to the new rules that Wikipedia had introduced. This meant people could no longer post what they wanted as certain material was restricted and this drove people away according to The Wall Street Journal. During 2007 Wikipedia entered the list for the top 10 websites in the world overtaking Apple and The New York Times as they had 42.9 million unique visitors per month. This marked significant growth for 2006 where the website was ranked 33rd and they only record 18 million unique visitors. In September 2012 the website was up to 6th in the world website rankings as they received 12 Billion page views per month in August.
Early in 2012 Wikipedia began campaigning against new laws that were going to be introduced in the US laws that were called SOPA and PIPA. There was a lot of opposition to these laws which have not yet been introduced but to protest against its introduction Wikipedia blacked out the whole of its website for 24 hours as did millions of other websites that were against this. The blacked out page sated Imagine a world without free knowledge as they claimed the new laws world damage the availability of the free and open internet. This page was apparently viewed by 162,000,000 people just on that day.
Wikipedia is still growing and its article numbers are ever increasing. If there is anything that you want to know there is an extremely high chance that it can be found on Wikipedia.
