Happy 10th Birthday to Wikipedia

According to popular culture, and Wikipedia, it is ten years today since Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger set up a wiki to help with a problem they were having with their current project, an online encyclopedia called Nupedia. Today the Wikipedia site has become one of the best sources of information on the Internet, and often tops the list of sites returned in the Google search results.

On the 9th September 2007 the English version of Wikipedia passed the two million-article mark which makes it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled. Nupedia servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia.

Invented in the mid-90s by Ward Cunningham, a wiki is social media at its most radical. It is built on the basic assumption that people care, and so edit the pages they care about. You don’t need permission to add, alter, or delete text, and when you are done, you don’t need permission to publish.

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com. Ten years later it has become the largest encyclopedia ever assembled and the most popular general reference work on the Internet. Happy 10th Birthday Wikipedia!

If you havent yet visited Wikipedia check it out now at en.wikipedia.org/