A timeline of Wikipedia's developments illustrates how the website became what it is today:
2000:Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales alongside editor-in-chief Larry Sanger.
2001:
Wikipedia began and the domain names wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com were registered in January. French, Catalan, Swedish, German, and Italian versions all began between March and May.
2002:
Larry Sanger left Wikipedia due to his dislike of its lack of credibility and its "disrespect towards expertise." The Spanish version of Wikipedia was created. Jimmy Wales also announced that Wikipedia would never run commercial advertisements (which is why there are never any ads on the site).
2003:
The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles. The Wikimedia Foundation was founded and Wikipedia adopted the jigsaw logo.
2004:
Wikipedia went from 500,000 articles at the beginning of the year to 1 million in over 100 languages by the end of the year. China attempted to block Wikipedia for two weeks as part of an ongoing censorship project. Bourgeois v. Peters was the first court case to reference and cite Wikipedia in a case. The first formal projects to remove error from Wikipedia's articles began.
2005:
Wikipedia became the most popular reference site in the world and a formal fundraiser was held to raise money for system upgrades to handle all the traffic. The first major Wikipedia scandal happened when John Seigenthaler's page was vandalized and left unnoticed for months. This led to a more strict policy being introduced that required more article citations for biographies of people.
2006:
Another scandal occurred when congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to secretly change Wikipedia biographies. Wales introduced a new feature that allowed articles that were not verified or were full of errors to be marked as "unviewable."
2007:
By August, Wikipedia contained a combined total of 7.5 million articles, totaling 1.74 billion words in about 250 languages, and grew at a rate of about 1,700 new articles a day. A new trend was created that redirected a person of interest in a news story to the larger story, rather than creating a separate biography page for them.
2008:
The 10 millionth article was created.
2009:
Wikipedia restricted access to its site from the Church of Scientology due to an ongoing article battle between the Church and anti-scientology editors.
2010:
In May, Wikipedia released a new interface. The changes included a new logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard. However, the classic interface remained available.
2011:
Wikipedia and its users held ten year anniversary celebrations worldwide. Wikimedia launched of Wikipedia Zero, a project that allows free mobile access to Wikipedia in developing countries.
2012:
On January 18, Wikipedia shut down for 24 hours as part of a protest meant to call public attention to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, two anti-piracy laws under debate in the United States Congress
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia
