Very swiftly, Wikipedia became the tail that swallowed the dog (Nupedia). In less than a month, it had 1,000 articles; by the end of its first year, it had 20,000; by the end of its second year, it had 100,000 articles in just the English edition. (By then it had begun to spawn foreign-language editions, of which there are now 185, from Abkhazian to Klingon to Zulu, with the German edition the largest after English.) Sanger himself did not stay around to enjoy Wikipedia’s runaway growth. By late 2001 the tech boom was over, and Bomis, like most other dot-coms, was losing money and laying off employees. An effort to sell ads to pay Sanger’s salary foundered as Internet advertising tanked, and Sanger lost his job in February 2002. He continued intermittently as a volunteer but finally broke with the project in January 2003 over the project’s tolerance of problem participants and its hostility to experts.8
Since then, Wikipedia’s growth has accelerated. It had almost a half million articles by its third anniversary in January 2004; it broke the million mark just nine months later. More than fifty-five thousand people have made at least ten contributions to Wikipedia.9 Over this short history, it has also evolved a style of operation and a set of operating principles that require explanation before any discussion of history on Wikipedia.