Wikipedia Launches

2001

Date: 15 January 2001 · Place: wikipedia.org, San Diego, California · Figures: Jimmy Wales, co-founder · Larry Sanger, co-founder · Ward Cunningham, wiki concept (1995) · Tags: Platform, Encyclopedia, Substrate 01. Nupedia's Bastard Side Project Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger are running Nupedia, a slow expert-reviewed encyclopedia, and it is going nowhere. Sanger proposes a wiki as a feeder for draft articles. They launch it on 15 January 2001 as a side experiment. Within a month it has more articles than Nupedia ever produced. Wikipedia is not a meme. Wikipedia is the substrate on which the next two decades of memes are documented, fact-checked, debated, and canonised. 02. The Meme Notability Wars By 2005 the Articles for Deletion debates over internet memes are themselves a meme. Editors argue whether Star Wars Kid, All Your Base, and Caturday deserve articles. The threshold is notability, defined by reliable secondary coverage. The result is a feedback loop: a meme covered by a newspaper becomes notable, becomes Wikipedia-eligible, becomes canon. Every meme historian who comes after, including this archive, owes Wikipedia the timestamps. Many of the only surviving primary sources for early 2000s memes are Wikipedia article histories from 2004-2007. "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." — Wikipedia masthead, 2001 onward Sources • Wikipedia, History of Wikipedia • Andrew Lih, 'The Wikipedia Revolution' (Hyperion, 2009) • Slashdot, Wikipedia launch announcement (17 January 2001)