Today, January 15th, is Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary. The site first went online on January 15th of 2001. Back then, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook didn’t even exist!

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Of course this can lead to problems because the information is not always accurate. However, there are systems in place that prevent the editing of some pages which are susceptible to vandalism.

Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Singer. Their original project was called Nupedia, and was a project to produce a free encyclopedia written by professionals. However, production of articles were slow, so they discussed how they might make it better. It was discussed that it should be more open to editing, and on January 10, 2001, the idea of Wikipedia was born.

On January 15, 2001, the wikipedia.com domain was registered and went online.

There are over 3.5 million articles in English alone. The site also features articles in over 270 languages.

To read more about the history of Wikipedia, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About