Hello Steemians!
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Welcome to today's episode of the "Today in History" serial, where I bring you daily historical facts and events of the current date.
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On January 15 in 2001, Wikipedia was launched!

http://puu.sh/tnvhW/88a3206b02.jpg
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Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia which anyone can edit.

The founders of Wikipedia were the CEO of Bornis, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the chief editor of Nupedia, the predecessor of Wikipedia.

http://puu.sh/tnvET/c07a2b597d.jpg
*Jimmy Wales*
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In the start Wikipedia was only in English hosted at the domain www.wikipedia.com announced by Larry Sanger.

http://puu.sh/tnvv9/1624f83d5f.jpg
*Larry Sanger*
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By August of 2001, same year it launched, Wikipedia already had over 8,000 articles published and by the end of the year it grew and spread on 18 languages and over 20,000 articles.

http://puu.sh/tnvZY/8c9d1cefb5.jpg
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Nupedia kept coexisting with Wikipedia until it's content was incorporated in Wikipedia and it's servers shut down in 2003.

http://puu.sh/tnwko/56c93eafa1.jpg
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The language adoption quickly spread and by end of 2004 Wikipedia had articles written in 161 languages.

http://puu.sh/tnwu3/1edfc26fd5.jpg
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On September 9, 2007, Wikipedia made history when it passed the number of two million published articles and became the largest encyclopedia ever put together.

http://puu.sh/tnwHE/a08caec228.jpg
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In January 2012, Wikipedia marked another milestone by participating in protests against the Stop Online Privacy Act  and the PROTECT IP Act.

http://puu.sh/tnwXH/159d32396d.jpg
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By February 2014, it had 18 billion views and about 500 million unique visitors on a monthly basis.

At the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular website online, behind the Baidu search engine, Facebook, Youtube and Google.

http://puu.sh/tnxpb/66698e02d4.jpg
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Happy birthday Wikipedia!

http://puu.sh/tnxwe/3ed3d61b7f.png
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*Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk
http://nunupedia.sourceforge.net/
https://guillaumepaumier.com
http://dailyolivian.com*
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