The first edit in

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...

's database, to ''

HomePage A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. The term may also refer to the start page shown in a web browser when the application first opens. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's domain or subdomain. ...

'' was made on January 15, 2001, and states in its entirety "This is the new WikiPedia!". In December 2021, co-founder

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikip ...

announced that he would sell a website containing a re-creation of an earlier edit that he said he made and then later deleted, which contained the text "Hello, World!", to the highest bidder as a

non-fungible token A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the ...

(NFT).

Background

The concept of a collaboratively written, freely licensed

hypertext Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references ( hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typicall ...

encyclopedia was first posited in the 1990s;

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to u ...

proposed a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998. In 2001,

was initially conceived of by

Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original govern ...

as a source of volunteer entries from the general public that could then be "fed into"

Nupedia Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by ...

, a collaborative encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and written by "qualified volunteer contributors" with a multi-step

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

process. A message sent by Sanger to the Nupedia mailing list said "Humor me ..go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes". On January 13, 2001, Wikipedia's

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. ...

was registered, and on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched.

First edit

Historically, the earliest surviving edit on Wikipedia's database was a January 16, 2001, revision of the page '' UuU'', created as a list of countries starting with the letter U and oddly titled due to software considerations of the time. However, page histories during that time were unreliably stored by the

UseModWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by ...

software; in 2010, previously inaccessible records of early UseModWiki revisions were found in archives by Wikimedia developer Tim Starling. When these edits were imported into Wikipedia's database on July 30, 2019 (UTC), its earliest recorded edit became the January 15, 2001, creation of ''

'' with the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" by an anonymous person using the office.bomis.com server. On being informed of the importation of these edits, Wales said:

For the record, these are the earliest edits that have been found, but not the earliest edits. In the early days of Usemod wiki, I did a lot of deleting things *on the hard drive* (as this was the only way to really do that). Those will never be found of course. The first words, soon deleted, were " Hello, World!"

Non-fungible token sale

On December 3, 2021, Wales announced that he would be selling, through auction house

Christie's Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, at Rockefeller Center in New York City and at Alexandra House in Hong Kong. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, t ...

, a

(NFT) of a re-creation of what he claimed to be the first Wikipedia edit, made earlier than the "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit. Wales' edit, whose timestamp was listed as 18:29 UTC on January 15, 2001, was on the page ''

.'' It consisted of the text "Hello, World!"; it was made as a test and subsequently erased. Previously, other tokens referencing " iecesof internet history" had been turned into "wildly expensive NFTs" — in June 2021,

Sotheby's Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...

auctioned off a token referencing an

animated GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987 ...

made from a

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profe ...

's original

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

for some features of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

; it sold for $5,434,500 USD. The product being sold was not actual ownership of the edit (as Wikipedia content is released under a

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...

license), but rather a "digital item" that records the purchaser's name alongside a

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...

of the edit and by itself confers the owner no special rights. However, plans were made to set up a website, "Edit This NFT", mirroring only the original page; the purchaser would be allowed to edit it. It sold for US$750,000. Numerous Wikipedia editors objected to the sale on various grounds. Some editors, including administrators, argued that Wales' use of his own

user profile A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user. It contains critical information that is used to identify an individual, such as their name, age, portrait photograph and individual characteristics such as ...

page to advertise the sale was a violation of Wikipedia guidelines against self-promotion. Other editors criticized the sale on the grounds that the

artificial scarcity Artificial scarcity is scarcity of items despite the technology for production or the sufficient capacity for sharing. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by laws that restrict competition or by high fix ...

of NFTs is incompatible with Wikipedia's open-source

free knowledge Open knowledge (or free knowledge) is knowledge that is free to use, reuse, and redistribute without legal, social, or technological restriction. Open knowledge organizations and activists have proposed principles and methodologies related to the ...

principles. They were broadly not opposed to Wales selling the iMac he used at the time, but objected to the NFT for representing what they perceived as

monetization Monetization ( also spelled monetisation) is, broadly speaking, the process of converting something into money. The term has a broad range of uses. In banking, the term refers to the process of converting or establishing something into legal tend ...

encroaching onto the platform.

References

{{Wikipedia History of Wikipedia January 2001 events Jimmy Wales Non-fungible tokens