Wikipedia Debuts

BROUGHT TO YOU BY MASTERS OF TRIVIA

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JAN 15, 2001

Online (launched as an English-language website)
25 years ago

On January 15, 2001, a new kind of encyclopedia went live: Wikipedia, a free, Internet-based reference work built around open collaboration. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and it began as a side-project to an earlier expert-driven encyclopedia called Nupedia.

The premise was disarmingly simple: instead of requiring gatekeepers for every entry, let a community draft, improve, and refine articles continuously, then build rules and norms as the project grows.

It didn’t look like a revolution at first. But it was.

Wikipedia’s breakthrough was cultural as much as technical: it treated the encyclopedia as a living process rather than a finished product. Anyone could contribute, pages could evolve in real time, and debates about accuracy, neutrality, and sourcing happened out in the open.

That model created obvious risks—errors, vandalism, bias—but it also created an engine that traditional publishing couldn’t match: scale. Once enough contributors showed up, the project began to grow faster than any centralized editorial system ever could.

Over time, Wikipedia’s community built core norms—especially around citations, verifiability, and a “neutral point of view”—that helped it mature from a bold experiment into a default reference layer of the modern internet.

—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——

Wikipedia matters because it changed how society handles “what’s true” at internet speed:

• It democratized participation in knowledge-building—for better and sometimes for messier.

• It redefined credibility around sources and transparency, not authority titles alone.

• It became infrastructure—powering search results, voice assistants, education, and everyday curiosity.

Just as important: Wikipedia showed that large-scale collaboration between strangers can work; if you build the right incentives, norms, and tools for dispute resolution.

—— THE TAKEAWAY ——

Wikipedia’s debut reminds us that the biggest innovations often aren’t new facts—they’re new systems for organizing facts.

In 2001, the daring part wasn’t “an encyclopedia online.” The daring part was betting that a global crowd, with the right rules, could build something reliable together.

At Masters of Trivia, with our MOT utility token, we turn turning points like this into daily interactive learning—so curiosity becomes a habit, and history becomes something you can use.

How much do you know about Wikipedia’s early days, its Nupedia origins, the people behind it, and the rules that helped a chaotic experiment become a global reference?

Take today’s quiz and test your knowledge of the platform that turned learning into a daily, collaborative act.