This article covers the history of Wikipedia. For information on page history within Wikipedia, see Help:Page history.
Wikipedia, a project to produce a free content encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone, formally began on 15 January 2001 as a complement to the similar, but expert-written, Nupedia project. It quickly replaced Nupedia, growing to become a large global project. As of 2007, it includes millions of articles and pages worldwide, and content from hundreds of thousands of contributors.
The concept of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945). Another milestone was Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu in 1960.
With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999. One little-acknowledged predecessor was the Interpedia, which Robert McHenry has linked conceptually to Wikipedia.

Overview history
Wikipedia was founded as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project founded by Jimmy Wales

Formulation of the idea
There is a difference of view between Wales and Sanger as to the precise roles and titles they employed in the early stages of Wikipedia. There is evidence that Sanger called himself co-founder, along with Wales, as early as 2001, and he is referred to as such in early Wikipedia press releases and Wikipedia articles, and in a September 2001 New York Times article

Conceptual origins
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15.
The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by Bomis. Many current and past Bomis employees have contributed some content to the encyclopedia; notably Tim Shell, co-founder and current CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason Richey.
The first edits ever made on Wikipedia are believed to be test edits by Wales.
The project passed 1,000 articles around February 12, 2001, and 10,000 articles around September 7. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created — a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On August 30, 2002, the article count reached 40,000. The rate of growth has more or less steadily increased since the inception of the project, except for a few software- and hardware-induced slow-downs.

Founding of Wikipedia
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally. The first domain reserved for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (on 16 March 2001),
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004 less than 50% were English, and internationalization has continued to grow, so that as of 2007 around 75% of all Wikipedia articles are contained within non-English Wikipedia versions.

Internationalization
The project has grown rapidly in the course of its life to date, at several levels. Individual wikis have grown organically by addition of new articles; new wikis have been added in non-English languages, and entire new projects replicating these growth methods in other related areas (news, quotations, reference books and so on) have been founded as well.
To meet this, Wikipedia itself has grown, with the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation to act as an umbrella body, and the growth of software and policies to address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below.

Organization
Articles summarizing each year are held within the Wikipedia project namespace, and are linked below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.
Nupedia project started with Larry Sanger running the daily operations and formulating much of the initial policies. The Wikipedia.com domain was created January 12, 2001,

Historical overview by year

History by subject area

Main article: Mediawiki Hardware and software
The external face of Wikipedia, its look and feel, and the Wikipedia branding, as presented to users

On April 4, 2002 Brilliant Prose, since renamed to Featured Articles
On July 16, 2005, the English Wikipedia began the practice of including the day's "featured pictures" on the Main Page.
On March 19, 2006, following a vote, the Main Page of the English language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years. Look and feel
Landmarks in the Wikipedia community, and the development of its organization, internal structures, and policies.

• The policy for "Checkuser" (a Mediawiki sock puppetry detection tool) was established.
  In April 2007 the results of 4 months policy review by a working group of several hundred editors seeking to merge the core Wikipedia policies into one core policy (See: Wikipedia:Attribution) was polled for community support. The proposal did not gain consensus; a significant view became evident that the existing structure of three strong focussed policies covering the respective areas of policy, was frequently seen as more helpful to quality control than one more general merged proposal. Internal structures
  Legal and organizational structure of the Wikimedia Foundation, its executive, and its activities as a foundation.
  
  In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org (see: .com and .org).
  On June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded.
  Communications committee formed January 2006 to handle media inquiries and emails received for the foundation and Wikipedia via the newly implemented OTRS (a ticket handling system).
  Angela Beesley was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. During this time, she was active in editing content and setting policy, such as privacy policy, within the Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures
  
  
  Main article: Wikipedia:Statistics Funding
  
  In 2007, Wikipedia is deemed fit to be used as a major source by the UK Intellectual Property Office in the Formula One trademark case ruling. External impact
  Because Wikipedia biographies are often updated as soon as new information comes to light, they are often used as a reference source on the lives of notable people. This has led to attempts to manipulate and falsify Wikipedia articles for promotional or defamatory purposes (see Controversies). It has also led to novel uses of the biographical material provided. Some notable people's lives are being affected by their Wikipedia biography.
  
  November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy
  February 16, 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport because of false information on his biography that he was a terrorist. Effect of biographical articles
  
  January 2005: The fake charity QuakeAID, in the month following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, attempts to promote itself on its Wikipedia page.
  October 2005: Alan Mcilwraith is exposed as a fake war hero with a Wikipedia page.
  November 2005: The Seigenthaler controversy causes Brian Chase to resign from his employment. Following this, the scientific journal Nature undertakes a peer reviewed study to test articles in Wikipedia against their equivalents in Encyclopedia Britannica, and concludes they are broadly comparable in terms of accuracy. The editor, Ryan Jordan, became a Wikia employee in January 2007 and divulged his real name; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Public Information Research Inc., and communicated to the original article author. (See: Essjay controversy)
  February 2007: Fuzzy Zoeller sues a Miami firm because defamatory information was added to his Wikipedia biography in an anonymous edit that came from their network.
  February 16, 2007: Turkish historian Taner Akçam was briefly detained upon arrival at a Canadian airport because of false information on his biography indicating that he was a terrorist.
  In June 2007, an anonymous user posted hoax information that, by coincidence, foreshadowed the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hours before the bodies were found by investigators. The discovery of the edit attracted widespread media attention and was first covered in sister site Wikinews. Controversies
  
  A significant number of sites utilize the mediawiki software and concept, popularized by Wikipedia. (Partial list of mirrors and forks. No list of sites utilizing the software is held.)
  Specialized language forks using the Wikipedia concept include Enciclopedia Libre (Spanish), Wikiweise (German), WikiZnanie (Russian), Susning.nu (Swedish), Baidu Baike (Chinese), and Wikinfo (English). Some of these (such as Enciclopedia Libre) use GFDL or compatible licenses as used by Wikipedia, leading to exchange of material with their respective language Wikipedias.
  In 2006, Larry Sanger founds Citizendium, based upon a modified version of Mediawiki, intended to address the absence of an expert-led top-down culture he viewed as a concern in Wikipedia. Notable forks and derivatives
  The German Wikipedia was the first to be partly published also using other media (rather than online on the internet), including releases on CD in November 2004
  
  Publication on other media
  
  Other notable occurences
  Wikipedia has been blocked on some occasions by national authorities. To date these have related to China (June and September 2004, October 2005), Iran, and Tunisia.
  
  Blocking of Wikipedia
  
  

  Main article: Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China Mainland China (June 2004, September 2004, October 2005, November 2006)
  Access to the Persian Wikipedia was blocked for a few days by some ISPs in Iran.
  Further information: Censorship in Iran
  
  Iran
  Wikimedia website were blocked for a few days in Tunisia (November 23 - November 27, 2006).
  
  Tunisia
  Based on the red line in the graph above and the expected value for the 2M article mark:
  
  See also
  "Wikipedia has sometimes suffered from the self-editing that is intrinsic to it, giving rise at times to potentially libellous statements. However, inherently, I cannot see that what is in Wikipedia is any less likely to be true than what is published in a book or on the websites of news organisations. [Formula One's lawyer] did not express any concerns about the Wikipedia evidence [presented by the plaintiff]. I consider that the evidence from Wikipedia can be taken at face value."
  (Multiple attempts)
  Multiple attempts, first using a named account, then an anonymous IP account.