Wales and Sanger had spent a year on Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia funded by Wales's company Bomis, in which every article passed through a seven-step expert approval process. Progress was painfully slow. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed a wiki as a 'feeder' for Nupedia, and five days later Wikipedia went live as a single English-language edition. Within its first year it had grown to some 20,000 articles in 18 languages, and it went on to become one of the most visited sites on the internet.
Nupedia's problem was not ambition but caution. Its articles were written by volunteers with subject expertise and then vetted by expert editors through seven stages of review before anything was published. After its first year, the project had just 21 articles to show for it.
On January 10, 2001, Sanger suggested on the Nupedia mailing list that the project try a wiki, a kind of website any visitor could edit, as a place to draft material that might later be polished for Nupedia. Wikipedia opened on January 15 at the domain www.wikipedia.com, and Sanger announced it on that same mailing list. Wales is usually credited with the goal of an encyclopedia the public could edit, and Sanger with the idea of using a wiki to get there.
The feeder soon outgrew the project it was meant to serve. Wikipedia had about 200 articles in its first month and roughly 20,000, in 18 languages including French, German, Hebrew, Chinese and Esperanto, by the end of its first year. Nupedia shut down in 2003 and its articles were moved into Wikipedia. The launch date is still celebrated as Wikipedia Day.
Key people: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger