23 Years Ago, Wikipedia Was Launched on 15th January 2001

On 15th January 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a free internet-based encyclopedia- Wikipedia. It was the successor to Nupedia, a website also created by Wales and Sanger. It was written by volunteers and checked by experts. Nupedia failed to garner any success as its process was very slow. In the first six months, only two articles were published. Following its failure, Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia, which allowed anyone to write an article without review. This attracted massive growth, and the website had more than 20,000 articles by the end of its first year. 

By 2006, there were one million articles on Wikipedia written in English. By its tenth anniversary in 2011, there were around 4 million articles on different topics. To reach a wider audience, Wikipedia launched 250 non-English versions. Some non-English versions available in India are Assamese Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia and Bengali Wikipedia. 

Wikipedia was named after the Hawaiian word ‘wiki’, meaning quick, and the English word Encyclopedia. Wikipedia presented an open website that anyone can edit, making it broad and more updated than the traditional encyclopedias. As of January 2024, there are 4.6 crore users of Wikipedia.