The first edit in Wikipedia's database, to HomePage , was made on January 15, 2001, and states in its entirety "This is the new WikiPedia!" In December 2021, co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that he would sell a website containing a re-creation of an earlier edit that he said he made and then later deleted, which contained the text "Hello, World!", to the highest bidder as a non-fungible token (NFT).
The concept of a collaboratively written, freely licensed hypertext encyclopedia was first posited in the 1990s; Richard Stallman proposed a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998. [1] In 2001, Larry Sanger conceived of Wikipedia as a source of volunteer entries from the general public that could then be "fed into" Nupedia, a collaborative encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and written by "qualified volunteer contributors" with a multi-step peer review process. [2] A message sent by Sanger to the Nupedia mailing list said "Humor me [...] go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes". [2] On January 13, 2001, Wikipedia's domain name was registered, [3] and on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched. [3] [4]
Historically, the earliest surviving edit on Wikipedia's database was a January 16, 2001, revision of the page UuU, created as a list of countries starting with the letter U and oddly titled due to software considerations of the time. [5] [6] However, page histories during that time were unreliably stored by the UseModWiki software; in 2010, previously inaccessible records of early UseModWiki revisions were found in archives by Wikimedia developer Tim Starling. [7] When these edits were imported into Wikipedia's database at 02:28, July 30, 2019 (UTC), [8] [9] its earliest recorded edit became the January 15, 2001, creation of HomePage with the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" by an anonymous person using the office.bomis.com server. [10] On being informed of the importation of these edits, Wales said:
For the record, these are the earliest edits that have been found, but not the earliest edits. In the early days of Usemod wiki, I did a lot of deleting things *on the hard drive* (as this was the only way to really do that). Those will never be found of course. The first words, soon deleted, were "Hello, World!" [8]
On December 3, 2021, Wales announced that he would be selling, through auction house Christie's, a non-fungible token (NFT) of a re-creation of what he claimed to be the first Wikipedia edit, made earlier than the "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit. [4] [11] [12] Wales' edit, whose timestamp was listed as 18:29 UTC on January 15, 2001, [13] [14] was on the page HomePage. It consisted of the text "Hello, World!"; it was made as a test and subsequently erased. [13] [15] Previously, other tokens referencing "[pieces] of internet history" had been turned into "wildly expensive NFTs" – in June 2021, Sotheby's auctioned off a token referencing an animated GIF made from a text file of Tim Berners-Lee's original source code for some features of the World Wide Web; [4] it sold for $5,434,500 USD. [16]
The product being sold was not actual ownership of the edit (as Wikipedia content is released under a copyleft license), but rather a "digital item" that records the purchaser's name alongside a URL of the edit and by itself confers the owner no special rights. [17] [ failed verification ] However, plans were made to set up a website, "Edit This NFT", [18] mirroring only the original page; [15] the purchaser would be allowed to edit it. [19] [15] It sold for US$750,000. [20] Numerous Wikipedia editors objected to the sale on various grounds. [21] [22] Some editors, including administrators, argued that Wales' use of his own user profile page to advertise the sale was a violation of Wikipedia guidelines against self-promotion. [21] Other editors criticized the sale on the grounds that the artificial scarcity of NFTs is incompatible with Wikipedia's open-source free knowledge principles. [21] [22] They were broadly not opposed to Wales selling the iMac he used at the time, but objected to the NFT for representing what they perceived as monetization encroaching onto the platform. [22]
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one for each language. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.
GNE was a project to create a free-content online encyclopedia, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation. The project was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000 and officially started in January 2001. It was moderated by Héctor Facundo Arena, an Argentine programmer and GNU activist.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on 10 May 2001, and first edited on 11 June 2001. As of 26 October 2024, it has 1,888,328 articles and more than 2,566,246 registered accounts. It is the 9th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles.
Jimmy Donal Wales, also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the non-profit free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.
A certificate of authenticity (COA) is a seal or small sticker on a proprietary computer program, t-shirt, jersey, or any other memorabilia or art work, especially in the world of computers and sports. It is commonly a seal on paper authenticating a specific art work which and is made to demonstrate that the item is authentic.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
Bomis, Inc. was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Nupedia was an English-language online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with relevant subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by a committee of experts who predefined the rules. It had only 21 articles in its first year, compared with Wikipedia having 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Sarah Zucker, born 1985, is an American visual artist and writer based in Hollywood, Los Angeles. She specializes in mixing contemporary digital techniques with older analog approaches as well as the use of VHS. Zucker is considered a pioneer of crypto art, releasing digital editions of her video art as non-fungible tokens since 2019.
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity. It cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the blockchain and can be transferred by the owner, allowing NFTs to be sold and traded. Initially pitched as a new class of investment asset, by September 2023, one report claimed that over 95% of NFT collections had zero monetary value.
CryptoPunks is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection on the Ethereum blockchain. The project was launched in June 2017 by the Larva Labs studio, a two-person team consisting of Canadian software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson. The experimental project was inspired by the London punk scenes, the cyberpunk movement, and electronic music artists Daft Punk. The crypto art blockchain project was an inspiration for the ERC-721 standard for NFTs and the modern crypto art movement, which has since become a part of the cryptocurrency and decentralized finance ecosystems on multiple blockchains.
Michael Joseph Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator known for selling NFTs. In his art, he uses various media to create comical, phantasmagoric works that make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures as references. British auction house Christie's has called him "A visionary digital artist at the forefront of NFTs". Beeple was introduced to NFTs in October 2020 and credits Pak for providing his first "primer" on selling NFTs. The NFT associated with Everydays: the First 5000 Days, a collage of images from his "Everydays" series, was sold on March 12, 2021, for $69 million in cryptocurrency to an investor in NFTs. It is the first purely non-fungible token to be sold by Christie's. The auction house had previously sold Block 21, an NFT with accompanying physical painting for approximately $130,000 in October 2020.
Everydays: the First 5000 Days is a digital work of art created by Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple. The work is a collage of 5000 digital images created by Winkelmann for his Everydays series. Its associated non-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in 2021, making it the most expensive non-fungible token ever.
OpenSea is an American non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace headquartered in New York City. The company was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017.
Pak, formerly known as Murat Pak, is a digital artist, cryptocurrency investor, and programmer. Pak is known for creating the curation platform Archillect, an internet bot which reshares media based on user interactions with content hosted on various social platforms and for launching a platform for burning NFTs to receive tokens of the cryptocurrency Ash.
Curio Cards are collectible digital artworks located on the Ethereum blockchain. Created in 2017, Curio Cards are commonly viewed as the first digital art collectibles on the Ethereum blockchain. In October 2021, a complete collection of Curio Cards, including the card "17b" misprint, was sold for ETH393 ($1,267,320) at the Christie's Post-War to Present auction. The collection was tested for security vulnerabilities in September 2021 by softstack.
Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
That edit… was originally penned… shortly after the site first rolled out to the public in mid-January, 2001.
[p. 90:] Figure 3.2 The earliest still-extant Wikipedia editing entry. [Shows image of 'Project page / Wikipedia:UuU'.]
I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001! / This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here which was assumed to be lost forever.
