Wikipedians celebrate Wikipedia’s birthday
January 15 is known as Wikipedia Day to Wikipedians. On this date in the year 2001, the wiki-based Wikipedia project went public after spending five days on Nupedia.
Wikipedia was formally launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, but its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this. The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.
Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This latter "massively multiplayer" characteristic was in stark contrast to contemporary digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica and even Bomis's Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham. Initially, Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. In practice, Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.
As of January 2014, Wikipedia includes over 30.5 million freely usable articles in 287 languages that have been written by over 44 million registered users and numerous anonymous contributors worldwide. According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website. According to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 85 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.