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2000
In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to have articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by Bomis. -
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WIKI
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2001
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process. -
2003
The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. -
2004
The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continued to grow rapidly in 2004, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of 2004. -
2005
In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to Hitwise, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. -
2006
Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles. -
2007
The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words in approximately 250 languages, by 13 August. -
2008
Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth overall Wikipedia article was created, and by the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles. -
2009
In August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions totalled 14 million. -
2010
On March 24, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. On May 13, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. December 12, the English Wikipedia passed the 3.5-million-article mark, while the French Wikipedia's millionth article was created on 21 September. The 1,000,000,000th Wikimedia project edit was performed on April 16. -
2011
Wikipedia and its users held hundreds of celebrations worldwide to commemorate the site's 10th anniversary on 15 January. The English Wikipedia passed the 3.6-million-article mark on 2 April, and reached 3.8 million articles on 18 November. As of 18 November 2011, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website according to Alexa Internet.