The name originated from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Its integral policy of 'neutral point-of-view' was codified in its first few months.
Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended for it to be a for-profit business. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. Ĭiting fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from to.