Wikipedia

In the late 1990s, the American businessman Jimmy Wales, a former Chicago trader, funded together with Tim Shell and Michael Davis a web portal called Bomis. In March 2000 he launched Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia whose articles were to be written by experts and then validated by an editorial board. The process proved extremely slow, producing only twenty-one articles in its first year. The philosopher Larry Sanger, recruited by Wales as editor-in-chief, suggested adopting the wiki engine designed in 1995 by the programmer Ward Cunningham to enable fast open collaborative editing. The idea then largely outgrew the initial project. Wikipedia was officially launched on 15 January 2001 at wikipedia.com, in English, as a side laboratory attached to Nupedia. As early as February 2001 the French version appeared, followed in May by German, Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Chinese and Esperanto versions. Within a year the project already had 20,000 articles in English. The simplicity of the principle — anyone can edit any page, the notation [[brackets]] creates an internal link, the history preserves every revision — combined with the free GFDL licence and later Creative Commons BY-SA, allowed exponential growth. The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation, was created in June 2003 to ensure the project's long-term survival. In 2024, Wikipedia has more than 60 million articles in roughly 330 languages and consistently ranks among the ten most visited sites in the world, entirely funded by donations. The model has been replicated by thousands of thematic wikis (Fandom, Wiktionary, Wikidata). It constitutes a major resource for search engines and for large language models such as those behind ChatGPT and GPT-4, whose training corpora extensively incorporate Wikipedia. The encyclopedia remains today one of the largest collaborative projects in human history and the most convincing illustration of the civic potential of the Web.