This may surprise you: Wikipedia turned 25 this January. (Be honest—how many Wikipedia rabbit holes have you gone done in the past quarter-century?)
From “Hello, World!” to 7 million articles
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales made the first edit (“Hello, World!”) to the site’s home page on Jan. 15, 2001, using his Strawberry iMac. At the time, Wikipedia was an addition to Nupedia, the first web-based encyclopedia, which Wales had co-founded with Larry Sanger in 2000.
Because Nupedia relied on expert review and editing, it was experiencing a slow start, so the co-founders decided to add a wiki feature. Within two weeks, Wikipedia offered 600 articles, and by 2003, the Nupedia project was abandoned entirely. (Sanger and Wales eventually parted ways.)
Wikipedia, though, only continued to grow, and as of Jan. 30, 2026, the site boasts more than 7.1 million articles containing over 5 billion words. Despite widespread initial skepticism, it’s now a first stop on the internet. Approximately 15 million people have contributed edits to the English Wikipedia.
These Wikipedians are fulfilling the vision Wales describes in this 2021 video produced by Christie’s auction house: making the world a better place, one entry at a time. People want information to be free and freely shared, Wales said, but it’s expensive to produce. His passion for creating online encyclopedic knowledge was inspired by his own search for answers during his daughter’s NICU stay. One of Wikipedia’s first collective moments occurred after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when volunteer editors began collaborating on a host of related articles about the sites of the attacks, possible culprits, and more.
That video was produced for “The Birth of Wikipedia” sale, at which an NFT recreation of the first “Hello, World!” edit sold for $750,000 and the Strawberry iMac sold for $187,500. The NFT is editable.
Did you enjoy this installation of SmarterMSP’s Tech Time Warp? Check out others here.
Photo: Ink Drop / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.