Timeline: Wikipedia's history and milestones

Wikipedia's been through a lot over the last decade, but despite the occasional setback, very little has slowed the site's inexorable growth. Over the years there have been scandals, arguments, achievements, controversies and milestones.

As part of Wired.co.uk's Wikipedia Week, here's a timeline of some of the most important moments in the site's ten-year history (and a little earlier, too!).

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22 October, 1993: Rick Gates proposes an "internet-based encyclopedia", which would allow anyone to contribute articles to a central database. It was named Interpedia shortly afterwards by R. L. Samuell, though the project never left the planning stages.

25 March, 1995: Ward Cunningham installs the first user-editable website on a server, naming it WikiWikiWeb. He developed the software himself to help programmers exchange ideas more easily. It was named after a Honolulu airport employee directed Cunningham to the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle", which drives passengers between airport terminals.

9 March, 2000: Nupedia goes live. Nupedia was a web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts, but licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by his dot com company Bomis, which sold advertising on a search portal. Larry Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief of Nupedia.

2 January, 2001: " The conversation at the taco stand" takes place, which was a conversation between Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz at a taco stand at 1932 Grand in Pacific Beach, San Diego. Sanger said he was looking for ways to speed up the process of editing, and Kovitz told him about wikis, which he hadn't previously been aware of. A day or two later, on 3 or 4 January, Jimmy Wales set up a server with a wiki on for Sanger to test out.

15 January, 2001: Wikipedia.com and Wikipedia.org formally open to the internet.

29 January, 2001: Slashdot interviews Jimmy Wales, and participation increases a little. A series of interviews and articles about the site over the following year each deliver extra spikes of traffic and attention, as well as the all-important new users.

16 March, 2001: The first non-English Wikipedia opens, with French, German, Catalan, Swedish and Italian sites all in place by the end of May.

16 April, 2001: Jimmy Wales formally defines the "neutral point of view", or NPOV, one of the core tenets of Wikipedia.

26 February, 2002: The users of the Spanish-language Wikipedia depart en-masse to form Enciclopedia Libre. They forked all the Spanish Wikipedia content in protest at perceived fears of censorship, advertising being placed on the site, and the commercialisation of the project.

1 March, 2002: Larry Sanger leaves Nupedia and Wikipedia, following the funding for his position being cut by Bomis. The reasons for his departure have been debated considerably over the years, but his stated reason at the time was that he couldn't do justice to the task as a part-time volunteer. In 2004, he claimed his departure was due to "a certain poisonous social or political atmosphere in the project".

2 June, 2002: China blocks Chinese Wikipedia to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The Chinese Wikipedia had several articles on topics considered controversial within China. An appeal was filed against the block by Chinese Wikipedia users, and the ban was lifted on June 21, 2002.

August 2002: Wales announces he would never run advertisements on Wikipedia, likely in response to the "Spanish Fork" during the preceding February. The site moves to Wikipedia.org to cement the principle, with Wikipedia.com still in use today as a redirect.

12 December 2002: Following repeated deletions of pages under the principle " Wikipedia is not a dictionary", Wiktionary is formed as the first of many sister projects. Its stated goal is "to be a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus linked to Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles".

20 June, 2003: Jimmy Wales announces the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up to administrate  Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and a few other nascent projects that existed at the time.

15 July, 2003: Hong Kong University students are set an assignment by instructor Andrew Lih to write articles on Hong Kong-related topics. The students are welcomed by the community, and their work is appreciated. Lih later discussed his experiences of the project.

September 2003: Nupedia's servers crash and it goes offline. It never returns.

October/November 2003: Mediation and arbitration committees are set up for Wikipedia. Previously, Jimmy Wales had been a "benevolent dictator" of the project, with the final say on any decision, but that power was then vested in the arbitration committee. The mediation committee didn't have any power, it simply existed to help resolve disputes. Initial members of both committees were chosen by Wales, and then an election was held the following year.

December 2003: The first of Wikipedia's annual fundraising drives takes place after a crash means the site is unstable for a week surrounding Christmas. More than $30,000 is raised, thanks partially to more publicity from Slashdot.

20 September, 2004: Article count across Wikipedia hits the 1 million mark.