History of Wikipedia Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered.[2] It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations. The technological and conceptual underpinnings of Wikipedia predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was