Wikipedia
It's from 2001, before you were born.
- Maker
- Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger
- Type
- Online encyclopedia (free)
- Debuted
- 2001
- Note
- Anyone can edit it
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About
As of 2026, it's 25 years old.
Wikipedia launched in January 2001 as a scrappy side project to a stuffier encyclopedia called Nupedia, then promptly ate its parent's lunch. The radical idea: let literally anyone edit, and trust that a horde of strangers will eventually argue their way to the truth.
It worked, mostly. Today it runs in hundreds of languages, survives on donations and the unpaid labor of obsessives, and remains the internet's most-cited 'don't cite this in your essay' source.
Wikipedia is the global brain humanity built by accident: gloriously comprehensive, occasionally vandalized, and the first tab everyone opens to win an argument.
Wikipedia through the years
Launch
Goes live in January as a wiki experiment.
Foundation
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation takes the reins.
2 million articles
English edition crosses two million entries.
