History of Wikipedia

began like project in English language of . The original idea caught soon in other languages, since only two months later, of , began the French project. Since then a great illusion exists to make of the project a genuinely multilingual work. In the present version it has available more than 700.000 articles in English and altogether in all the languages there is approximately 1.500.000 (to consult).

The Wikipedia was created like an alternative a , a free encyclopedia project also founded by . The newness of the Wikipedia consisted of suppressing the committee of publishers, like the existing one in Nupedia, by the serious bureaucratic problems that it implied. Larry Sanger, publisher responsible for the Nupedia happened to collaborate with the Wikipedia and actively worked in the organization and directives of the project. Their contributions marked an important slant in the initial direction of the project, until their march in February of . At the Wales present time it takes the reins of the initiative, as much in time dedicated as in resources, and is member of Wikipedia Foundation, that takes care of the supervision tasks. At this moment it does not exist a responsible publisher, nor either is a personnel contracted in charge of the project. The Wikipedia works thanks to the voluntary contribution of thousands of wikipedistas.

of the Wikipedia reached the million articles in 105 languages and accused a considerable attention on the part of mass media. The article "a million" was published in Hebrew and it approaches the subject of the official standard of .

Antecedents

The Wikipedia is an electronic version of in paper. The first passages in the use of automatic devices that surpassed the more agile average press as and practical of access to the encyclopedic contents they occur in the decade of the Thirties with the fiction novel of H. G. Wells The brain of the World () and the futurist vision Memex, of Vannevar Bush, to use microfilms to later store to all the excellent information of a person (idea exposed in its work of Ace we may think). Another important landmark was the project Xanadu () of Ted Nelson.

With the development of Internet many attempts of encyclopedia development have taken place in network. The leader of the movement of , , proposed in the creation of a "Free and Universal Encyclopedia" and described the birth as the Wikipedia like the exciting news. From the vestibule of Foundation of Free Software one invites the users to visit and to contribute with the Wikipedia.