What was the first entry in wikipedia

Most of the earliest entries were deleted with no trace left. But in , the Wikimedia Foundation discovered this missing data stored on a single server, including the oldest surviving editing of the mentioned article. Wikipedia is a collaborative universal and multilingual encyclopedia, created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, It is managed on wikipedia. Whatever their language, all versions use the same publishing software, MediaWiki. All of the versions also have the same appearance, but they contain variations in the structure, the content, and the editing and management methods.

Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization, custodian of the Wikipedia brand, funds the servers for Wikipedia. This encyclopedia is open access in reading as in writing, which means that anyone can, by accessing the site, modify almost all of the articles that you can find there.

Wikipedia was first created as a complementary project to Nupedia. Wikipedia articles are reviewed by expert editors before publication and licensed as free content. Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, who was the majority shareholder.

Nupedia had elaborate review procedures a scientific committee supervised it and required the participation of highly qualified contributors. In , the year the project was launched, article writing was particularly slow, despite the existence of a discussion list of the publishers concerned, and a full-time editor, Larry Sanger.

Wales says Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept of a wiki. It is the 15th most popular destination on the web, is available in more than languages and is maintained by a community of volunteer editors. At least, I think that is accurate - I found all those facts in the online encyclopedia's own entry on Wikipedia. It is where everyone from students, to politicians to yes, journalists, turn for a quick briefing on any subject, although even Wikipedia says it should not be used as a primary source.

George W Bush was inaugurated as the 43rd president of the United States five days after the launch of Wikipedia. His Wiki entry went on to provide a fundamental challenge to its core principle: openness. The vicious edit war about the Bush entry, where disputed lines about controversies such as the Gulf War were entered and removed time and again, was one factor which saw a change in the rules. Some entries were protected, meaning there were limits on editing, particularly from new or anonymous users.

Jimmy remembers that one idealistic administrator was so unhappy about this that he said he would unlock the Bush page and look after it. It was on 5 January that a Wikipedia editor, who lists their country as China and current location as Cambridge, created a page with the title: China pneumonia outbreak.

The title changed once the virus became known as Covid Over the last year, hundreds of editors have contributed to what now amounts to a short book about every aspect of the pandemic. The internet has been awash with disinformation about the virus, but David says Wikipedia's policy on reputable sources for medical information keeps up the quality. This does not stop battles breaking out between editors. One comment in the edit history reads: "This is speculation. There is zero direct evidence that this happened, therefore it should not be included here.

But Jimmy says Wiki Project Medicine - a community of doctors and scientists formed in the early days of the encyclopedia - has helped keep the Covid page pretty accurate. The article has also had quite a light form of edit protection since May , meaning you have to have been an editor for four days and have done 10 edits elsewhere before you are allowed to tinker with it.

David says it is unusual to have restrictions imposed for so long. This page about an American mathematician whose work was fundamental to the development of the GPS navigation system is one of more than 1, created by Dr Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London. Wikipedia has long had problems with diversity, both in the subjects it includes and in its editors - who have been predominantly male and white. Jess has been part of a movement to change that, in her case focusing on making women scientists more prominent.

A browser plug-in which tells you about the gender balance on a Wikipedia page shows that just 1. For many years the George W Bush page was the one with the most edits, but now it has been overtaken by this one.