Wikipedia is one of the most popular modern information portals, translated into many languages and duplicated in several domain zones. However, initially it was not an independent project, but part of another, larger resource.
The history of the appearance of Wikipedia
In March 2000, the online project Nupedia was founded, which later became widespread in America, but almost unknown in Russia. The essence of this project was that it made it possible to read encyclopedic articles written by experts for free. Nupedia was owned by Bomis Inc. and developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. A year after the discovery of this resource, Larry proposed a special concept of "wiki": it was to allow readers to edit and supplement articles.
According to Sanger's idea, by giving the general public the right to edit texts, it was possible to achieve rapid growth of both the encyclopedia itself and its popularity.
Initially, Wikipedia was open to preliminary development of texts that were later planned to be published on Nupedia. In a word, it was an experimental site, a kind of "shop" where articles were created. In January 2001, the official English-language Wikipedia site appeared, and news of this was immediately sent to all Nupedia subscribers. In the rules of both resources, emphasis was placed on the neutrality of the point of view and the objectivity of each article - the resource policy was, in principle, very similar.
How Wikipedia evolved
At first, for the development of Wikipedia, the developers used announcements, "luring" Nupedia users into a new project and publishing interesting news in the official mailing list of their main encyclopedic site. Also, a lot of attention was paid to the promotion of the resource in the search networks.
Careful work on the development of Wikipedia led to the fact that in just a year more than 20 thousand articles appeared in it, and by the end of 2004 the number of language sections reached 161.
In 2003, Nupedia, which had previously used Wikipedia as an additional resource, ceased to exist. All articles that were published on it migrated to the Wikipedia site. By 2007, the English-language version of the site had surpassed the 2 million encyclopedic entry mark, breaking the Yongle record held since 1407, i.e. 600 years old.
Wikipedia is a "living" project that is constantly changing and refined. Regularly appear and amend the rules regarding the publication and editing of articles, as well as the search for sources of information. In the list of the most stable resource rules, one can mention the absence of commercial advertising, anglocentrism and subjective points of view that distort the facts.
