Wikipedia's Launch in 2001: The Free Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit

Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites in the world, and it has no shareholders, no advertising and no paid editors deciding what goes into an article. It began on 15 January 2001 as a side project of a different, much slower encyclopedia, and the way it grew shaped how many people think about the web.

Nupedia: the first attempt

Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur, started Nupedia in 2000 with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia was meant to be a free online encyclopedia of high quality, written by experts and reviewed through a multi-stage process. The process was rigorous and slow. After a year, only a small number of articles had been completed.

The wiki idea

A wiki is a website whose pages can be edited by its visitors through the browser. The first one, WikiWikiWeb, was created in 1995 by the American programmer Ward Cunningham, who took the name from the Hawaiian word for "quick". In early January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept and suggested using a wiki to let more people contribute draft articles. Wikipedia opened as a separate site on 15 January 2001, intended as a feeder for Nupedia. It quickly grew beyond that purpose, because the open process was much more productive.

Growth

Within its first year, Wikipedia had thousands of articles, and versions in other languages soon appeared. Several decisions helped the growth:

• A free licence. Content was licensed so that anyone could reuse it with credit, and later under Creative Commons licences.
• A neutral point of view. A policy that articles should describe different views fairly, without taking sides.
• Edit history. Every change is saved and visible, so mistakes and vandalism can be reverted quickly.
• Volunteer governance. Communities developed rules and procedures for resolving disputes.

In 2002 Sanger left the project, and in 2003 Wales created the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation to run the technical infrastructure and support the projects. The foundation runs on donations.

The technology behind it

Wikipedia's first software was UseModWiki, which stored pages as files. As traffic grew, the system was replaced by software written in PHP using a MySQL database. That software was later named MediaWiki and has been used by countless other wikis. It is open-source, and it runs on the same LAMP-type stack that powers a great many websites. As Wikipedia grew, the engineers added layers of caching and many servers to keep the site responsive, but the basic structure stayed familiar: PHP, a relational database, a web server, and caching in front.

Criticism and reliability

Teachers and journalists were sceptical in the early years, as anyone could change an article. A well-known comparison published in the journal Nature in 2005 examined science articles in Wikipedia and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and found a similar number of errors, though Britannica disputed the study's methods. The debate showed that openness has both costs and strengths. Over the years, Wikipedia introduced protection for sensitive pages, requirements for sources and tools to detect vandalism.

What Wikipedia changed for the web

Effect	Detail
User-generated content	Showed that large numbers of volunteers could build a high-value resource
Search	Its articles often rank highly for general queries, and its links are used as a reference
Open licensing	Made reuse of knowledge common practice
Open-source software	MediaWiki became a standard for knowledge bases

Running a very large site on modest means

Wikipedia's technical history is also a lesson in scaling gradually. The early site ran on a single server, and the team moved to more servers, separate database machines and layers of caching as traffic increased. Most requests are from people reading articles that have not changed, so serving cached copies instead of rebuilding the page for each visitor makes an enormous difference. That principle, serve the same page to many visitors without recomputing it, is still the best performance advice for any content site, and it is the reason that caching plugins and CDNs are so effective. Edits are the exception, so the system must know when to discard a cached copy, which is a classic problem in computing.

A note on licensing and reuse

Because Wikipedia's text is freely licensed, it has been reused in countless places, from other encyclopedias to the answer boxes of search engines and voice assistants. If you reuse such material on your own site, the licence requires attribution and, for the share-alike terms, that you pass on the same freedoms. The same care is worth applying to any content you did not write yourself: images, fonts and code snippets each have their own terms, and checking them before publishing avoids trouble later.

The lesson for site owners

Wikipedia grew because it made contributing simple, it kept a history so that nothing was lost, and it ran on dependable, inexpensive software. The same ideas apply to a business website: make it easy to update, keep backups and version history, and rely on tools that are widely supported. If you want to run your own knowledge base or wiki, a VPS or a shared hosting plan with Plesk is enough to install MediaWiki or a similar tool, and the knowledgebase can help with the first steps.