Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day

January 15 is known as Wikipedia Day to Wikipedians. On this date in the year 2001, the Wikipedia went public after spending five days on Nupedia.

Wikipedia Day 2003

With well over 100,000 articles spread across 28 languages, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 2 years old January 15, 2003. Several Wikipedia contributors (Wikipedians), in the collaborative spirit which has brought us so far, have redesigned the Main Page of the English Wikipedia in celebration of Wikipedia's birthday.

During the first year of its existence, Wikipedia went from zero to 20,000 articles in the English version and that was considered to be an impressive growth rate. The second year of Wikipedia saw the addition of nearly 80,000 more articles in the English version alone, making it the world's largest Wiki and the world's largest free content encyclopedia. With edits being made 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by hundreds of bright and enthusiastic volunteers from around the world, who knows where we will be one year from today? (according to mathematical analysis assuming the Wikipedia follows exponential growth, we will have around 500,000 articles on Wikipedia's 3^rd anniversary.)

Our original goal was to make 100,000, and at the time we speculated that this might take us five or more years. We now know that the 100,000 article milestone is just the tip of the iceberg. The power of the collaborative WikiWiki editing model, the freedom that the GNU Free Documentation License gives us, and our strong nonbias policy (the neutral point of view), combined with our goal of creating the world's largest encyclopedia will ensure the continued growth and success of our project.

Many people have told us that we would fail. "What?" they said, "You let anyone edit anytime they wish? It is preposterous to think that anything of any value could be created that way. You are destined to fail!" It is, however, becoming more and more apparent with each passing day that they are wrong. Let's celebrate Wikipedia Day by continuing to build the world's best encyclopedia!

Time Machine

The internet archive has date sampled versions of the Wikipedia front page from an earlier era. Here is the oldest one archived (March 30, 2001): http://web.archive.org/web/20010331173908/http://www.wikipedia.com/

Celebration

Why not celebrate by writing an encyclopedia article on a topic of your choice? See how to start a page.