The History of Wikipedia formally began with the launch of Wikipedia on Monday 15 January

2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; however, its technological and conceptual

underpinnings predate this. The earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made

by Rick Gates in 1993,[2] but the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia

(as distinct from mereopen source or freemium)[3] was proposed by Richard Stallman in

December 2000.[4]

Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should

control editing. This "massively multiplayer" characteristic was in stark contrast to contemporary

digital encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and

even Bomis's Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license for

Nupedia was changed toGFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the concept

and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham.[5] 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 March 2015, Wikipedia includes more than 34.5 million freely usable articles in 288

languages[1] that have been written by over 53 million registered users and numerous anonymous

contributors worldwide.[6][7][8] According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-

popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic.[9] Wikipedia's total worldwide monthly readership

is approximately 495 million;[10] according to comScore, Wikipedia receives over 117 million

monthly unique visitors from the United States alone