Wikipedia
Wikipedia launches as an independent English-language wiki
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The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The launch announcement didn't unveil a finished encyclopedia. It asked mailing-list readers to spend five or ten minutes writing something.
15 January 2001: 'Wikipedia is up!'
Wikipedia opened at wikipedia.com on 15 January 2001 — one English-language site, running on servers supplied by the for-profit web company Bomis. Larry Sanger announced it to the Nupedia mailing list under the subject line 'Wikipedia is up!' and invited recipients to add a short article.
The earliest recovered database revision from launch day is an edit to the homepage announcing the new site — with a hole in the story: early revision records were lost, so the earliest surviving edit is not necessarily the first one typed.
An escape hatch from Nupedia
Wikipedia began as a workaround. Nupedia, the expert-reviewed encyclopedia Jimmy Wales had founded through Bomis with Sanger as editor-in-chief, produced articles slowly through its multi-stage review. After programmer Ben Kovitz explained the wiki concept to Sanger on 2 January, Sanger proposed a wiki as a fast, open way to develop material — launched under its own name partly out of concern about tying the experiment too closely to Nupedia.
The difference showed immediately: anyone could create or revise entries directly, without expert review. Contributors produced about 600 articles within roughly two weeks, and more than 1,000 by mid-February — far outpacing Nupedia's pipeline.
Who founded it depends on what you count
The founder titles later became contentious. What contemporary evidence securely supports: Wales initiated and funded the project; Sanger proposed the wiki implementation, named it, announced it, and organized its early community and editorial norms. The tidy retrospective split — Wales the vision, Sanger the technology — flattens overlapping contributions.
Nothing launched that day resembled today's institution. The multilingual editions, the .org address, and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation all came later; on 15 January 2001, Wikipedia was a single English-language site inviting strangers to write an encyclopedia.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources 1 audit pass, 1 issue open Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 2001-01-15.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The January 15 launch date is well established. The exact 'first edit' is less certain: the earliest recovered database edit says 'This is the new WikiPedia!', but Wales later said he had made an earlier 'Hello, World!' test edit that was deleted and cannot be recovered.
- Sanger's surviving 'Wikipedia is up!' mailing-list post is timestamped January 17, two days after the accepted launch date. Accounts often merge the launch and announcement.