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The first edit in Wikipedia's database, to HomePage, was made on January 15, 2001, at 19:27 (UTC), and stated in its entirety "This is the new WikiPedia!" In 2019, co-founder Jimmy Wales said that there had been earlier edits that could not be recovered and that the first words were the text "Hello, World!". In December 2021, Wales announced that he would sell a website containing a re-creation of this first edit to the highest bidder as a non-fungible token (NFT).

Background

[edit]
Main article: History of Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales' iMac used to make the first edit to Wikipedia

The concept of a collaboratively written, freely licensed hypertext encyclopedia was first posited in the 1990s; Richard Stallman proposed a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998.[1] In 2001, Larry Sanger conceived of Wikipedia as a source of volunteer entries from the general public that could then be "fed into" Nupedia, a collaborative encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and written by "qualified volunteer contributors" with a multi-step peer review process.[2] 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".[2] On January 13, 2001, Wikipedia's domain name was registered,[3] and on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched.[3][4]

First edit

[edit]
For detailed information about UuU, see Wikipedia:UuU.
"UuU" redirects here. For other uses, see UUU (disambiguation).
The January 16, 2001 (UTC), edit of "UuU" that was formerly the earliest-surviving edit in the Wikipedia database

Historically, the earliest surviving edit on Wikipedia's database was a revision of the page UuU from January 16, 2001, at 20:08 (UTC), created as a list of countries starting with the letter U and oddly titled due to software considerations of the time.[5][6] However, page histories during that time were unreliably stored by the UseModWiki software; in 2010, previously inaccessible records of early UseModWiki revisions were found in archives by Wikimedia developer Tim Starling.[7] When these edits were imported into Wikipedia's database at 02:28, July 30, 2019 (UTC),[8][9] its earliest recorded edit became the January 15, 2001, creation of HomePage with the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" by an anonymous person using the office.bomis.com server.[10] 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!"[8]

Non-fungible token sale

[edit]
A re-creation of the "Hello, World!" edit, as auctioned by Christie's for US$750,000

On December 3, 2021, Wales announced that he would be selling, through auction house Christie's, a non-fungible token (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.[4][11][12] Wales' edit, whose timestamp was listed as 18:29 UTC on January 15, 2001,[13][14] was on the page HomePage. It consisted of the text "Hello, World!"; it was made as a test and subsequently erased.[13][15]

The product being sold was not actual ownership of the edit (as Wikipedia content is released under a copyleft license), but rather a "digital item" that records the purchaser's name alongside a URL of the edit and by itself confers the owner no special rights.[16][failed verification] However, plans were made to set up a website, "Edit This NFT",[14] mirroring only the original page;[15] the purchaser would be allowed to edit it.[17][15] It sold for US$750,000.[18]

Numerous Wikipedia editors objected to the sale on various grounds.[19][20] Some editors, including administrators, argued that Wales' use of his own user profile page to advertise the sale was a violation of Wikipedia guidelines against self-promotion.[19] Other editors criticized the sale on the grounds that the artificial scarcity of NFTs is incompatible with Wikipedia's open-source free knowledge principles.[19][20] 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 encroaching onto the platform.[20]

References

[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

First Wikipedia edit

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![NFT representing the first Wikipedia edit "Hello, World!" by Jimmy Wales][float-right] The first Wikipedia edit was a test entry consisting of the text "Hello, World!" added to the project's homepage by co-founder Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001, immediately following the installation of the UseModWiki software that powered the site's initial collaborative editing functionality. This simple phrase, a longstanding convention in computer programming to verify basic system operation, symbolized the launch of what would become the world's largest online encyclopedia, enabling open contributions from volunteers worldwide. Although some historical records indicate an even earlier surviving edit reading "This is the new WikiPedia!" potentially from pre-launch tests, Wales has consistently attributed the inaugural custom content to his "Hello, World!" input as a programmatic nod. The edit's significance was later highlighted in 2021 when a non-fungible token (NFT) representing it, paired with Wales' original iMac used for the entry, sold at auction for $750,000, underscoring its cultural and historical value in the digital knowledge-sharing movement.

Founding Context

Pre-Wikipedia Efforts

Prior to the launch of Wikipedia, and developed as an ambitious attempt to create a free, expert-driven online encyclopedia. , through his company —a established in 1996 that generated revenue via —provided the initial funding for the project. In early 2000, hired , who held a PhD in , as to oversee content creation. officially launched on March 9, 2000, with the goal of producing high-quality articles comparable to traditional encyclopedias like . Nupedia's core mechanism was a rigorous seven-step peer-review designed to ensure academic-level reliability: articles were assigned to qualified authors, reviewed by a lead , subjected to primary and secondary reviews, open-edited for feedback, copy-edited, and finally approved before publication. This structure relied on volunteer subject-matter experts, often requiring advanced credentials, to draft and vet content. However, the proved cumbersome and slow; by January 2001, fewer than two dozen articles had been completed, with many more stalled in review stages, limiting the site's growth despite Bomis's promotional efforts. To address Nupedia's content bottleneck, Sanger proposed a complementary wiki-based system in early January 2001, inspired by a conversation with software developer Ben Kovitz about technology's collaborative potential. This "feeder" project would allow unrestricted drafting of articles to supply raw material for Nupedia's formal review, bypassing initial expert gatekeeping. approved the idea, leading to the rapid setup of and the inception of what became on January 15, 2001.

Launch Mechanics

Wikipedia's launch on January 15, 2001, involved installing the UseModWiki software, an early open-source wiki engine developed by Clifford Adams, on a server separate from the existing project. This setup enabled rapid, collaborative editing without the expert-review bottlenecks of , which had produced only 12 articles in its first year despite employing PhD-holding contributors. The software's core mechanics relied on plain-text markup for page creation and revision history tracking, allowing users to link pages dynamically and revert changes via timestamps, fostering incremental content growth from a minimal seed. Following installation, performed the inaugural edit by adding the text "Hello, World!" to the site's homepage, a programmatic nod to traditions that served as a proof-of-concept for the editable interface. This single-line entry, made via Wales' personal , instantiated the wiki's foundational principle of open authorship, immediately exposing the blank to potential contributors through the Nupedia mailing list and Bomis-hosted domain. , who had proposed the approach days earlier to bypass Nupedia's delays, coordinated initial promotion, emphasizing its role as a "feeder" for vetted articles. The absence of pre-loaded content—starting from zero articles—meant launch mechanics prioritized software accessibility over curated seed data, with hyperlinks to blank pages inviting immediate expansion. Technically, the deployment leveraged and for backend persistence, though UseModWiki initially used flat files for revisions to simplify setup, scaling via user-driven forking of discussions into articles. No formal user authentication existed at launch; edits were pseudonymous, tied to IP addresses or self-chosen handles, which accelerated adoption but introduced early risks mitigated only by norms and later tooling. Within hours, the first substantive page—a boilerplate article template—emerged, demonstrating the mechanics' efficacy in catalyzing content from collaborative impulses rather than top-down commissioning. This model, devoid of seed capital beyond ' server costs, contrasted with Nupedia's grant-funded structure, enabling Wikipedia to amass 20 articles by month's end through volunteer momentum.

The Edit Itself

Database Record

The earliest surviving revision in Wikipedia's database is recorded for the page titled "HomePage", created on , 2001, at 19:27 UTC, with the full content consisting of the single sentence "This is the new !". This edit was performed from the IP address office.bomis.com, associated with Inc., the company founded by , indicating it was likely made by Wales himself during the initial setup. No edit summary or comment is preserved for this revision, consistent with the rudimentary logging capabilities of the early UseModWiki software used at launch. This database entry represents the first traceable change after the site's software installation, as prior test inputs, such as ' reported "Hello, World!" entry—a standard programming verification phrase—were overwritten without generating a distinct revision record due to the software's initial configuration lacking full versioning or the edit being immediately replaced. The revision's timestamp aligns with the site's public launch announcement on Nupedia's that day, marking the transition from expert-only content creation to open editing. Subsequent archives recovered in 2010 confirmed no earlier database-preserved edits exist in the current system, though they highlighted potential unlogged activity from the software's bootstrap phase. In Wikipedia's database schema (adopted later but retroactively applicable to early dumps), this would correspond to an entry in the revision table with fields including rev_id (sequential, likely low-numbered such as 1 or near), rev_page (mapping to the page_id of HomePage), rev_timestamp ("20010115192700"), rev_user (0 for IP edits, with user table linking via IP), rev_text_id (referencing stored text blob), and minimal rev_comment (empty). The content blob itself was without markup, reflecting the site's nascent state before wikitext standardization. This record underscores early technical constraints, where revisions were not atomically versioned until subsequent software updates enabled comprehensive history tracking.

Attributed Claims

, co-founder of , has claimed responsibility for the site's inaugural edit, stating it was a test entry of the text "Hello, World!" added to the homepage immediately after installing the UseModWiki software on January 15, 2001. This assertion positions the edit as a standard software verification step, akin to the traditional programmer's greeting for new systems. The "Hello, World!" claim received prominent promotion during a December 2021 auction by , which described the NFT as representing "the first edit to : 'Hello, World!' Made by on the day launched." Auction materials and related media coverage echoed ' narrative, framing it as the symbolic birth of the collaborative project. Independent analysis of Wikipedia's early technical records, however, attributes the oldest surviving revision—timestamped at 19:27 UTC on , —to the text "This is the new !" rather than "Hello, World!". historian Joseph Reagle, in reconstructing the launch sequence from archival sources, concluded that any "Hello, World!" entry was likely overwritten or not captured in the persistent database, casting doubt on its status as the definitive first edit. This discrepancy highlights potential memory between initial setup tests and logged contributions, with ' recollection prioritizing the programmatic tradition over database fidelity.

Commercial Exploitation

NFT Auction

In December 2021, Wikipedia co-founder announced the auction of a (NFT) representing the site's inaugural edit, titled "Hello, World!", created on January 15, 2001. The NFT, minted on the , encapsulated the original edit's content and layout, allowing the owner interactive privileges to temporarily modify the associated page for up to five minutes before changes reverted automatically. The auction, hosted by under the title "The Birth of Wikipedia," ran online from December 3 to December 15, 2021, as one of two lots alongside ' 2000 Strawberry used in Wikipedia's early development. Proceeds from the sale were designated to support ' WT Social platform, an alternative to mainstream emphasizing community-driven content. The NFT fetched $750,000 USD, acquired by investor Santiago Santos, significantly outpacing the iMac's sale price of $187,000. This transaction highlighted the 2021 NFT market's valuation of digital artifacts tied to internet history, though subsequent market fluctuations have impacted broader NFT liquidity.

Asset Sales

In December 2021, auction house conducted "The Birth of Wikipedia" sale, which included physical artifacts tied to the platform's origins alongside digital items. The centerpiece physical asset was Jimmy Wales's personal Strawberry iMac G3 from 2000, a bondi blue-tinted Apple computer he used at home to program the initial Wikipedia software using and to make early edits, including the site's launch on , 2001. This model, notable for its translucent casing and all-in-one design that popularized personal aesthetics, represented the hardware foundation for 's development before its rapid expansion into a collaborative . Bidding for the opened alongside other lots and concluded on December 15, 2021, with the device fetching $187,500 from an anonymous buyer. The sale price reflected collector interest in artifacts from , though it trailed the concurrent NFT lot's $750,000 result, highlighting divergent valuations between tangible hardware and blockchain-verified digital provenance. Proceeds from the iMac auction, combined with the NFT sale, were earmarked to support WT Social, Wales's alternative social media platform aimed at reducing and promoting user-driven content curation. No additional physical assets directly linked to the first Wikipedia edit have been publicly auctioned or sold since.

Controversies and Reception

Community Backlash

The auction of a (NFT) representing 's first edit, announced by co-founder on his user talk page on December 3, 2021, elicited swift condemnation from the site's volunteer editors for breaching 's strict policies against self-promotion. Editors argued that the post, which detailed the sale of the NFT—depicting the "Hello, World!" edit from January 15, 2001, alongside the original used in 's creation—constituted undue advertising of a personal commercial venture, potentially benefiting Wales or his competing project, WT:Social. In response, editors promptly deleted the announcement thread, with long-time contributor Floquenbeam describing it as "self-promotion 101" and seeking consensus to remove it outright. Another editor, Smallbones, emphasized the community's longstanding stance: "The community has made it very clear that anything… promotional… may be removed by any editor at any time." XOR'easter questioned the appeal of such an NFT to genuine enthusiasts, underscoring emotional investment in the project's history over commodified artifacts. Broader discontent focused on the philosophical rift: NFTs, reliant on blockchain scarcity and private ownership, clashed with Wikipedia's core principles of open, freely shareable knowledge, prompting accusations that the sale undermined the volunteer-driven Wales himself had championed. Debates extended to the Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents page and the Wikimedia-L , where editors debated of neutrality rules against founders. The incident was slated for coverage in the next issue of The Wikipedia Signpost, the site's internal newspaper, highlighting ongoing frictions between Wikipedia's governance model and its figureheads. Despite the uproar, the NFT fetched $750,000 at auction on December 16, 2021, including rights for the buyer to editable versions of the recreated edit page. The backlash underscored persistent tensions in Wikipedia's , where volunteer editors enforce policies with little deference to institutional founders, even as Wales defended the sale as a harmless nod to the site's origins without direct involvement.

Broader Implications

The sale of the "Hello, World!" edit as a (NFT) for $750,000 in December 2021 exemplified the tension between Wikipedia's foundational principle of freely accessible knowledge and the potential for individual commercialization of its historical artifacts. This transaction, involving ' claimed inaugural contribution from January 15, 2001, alongside the used for the edit, underscored how founders of collaborative platforms can extract value from communal digital origins, prompting debates on whether such actions align with or erode the non-profit that propelled Wikipedia's growth to over 6 million by 2021. Critics argued that tokenizing a purported first edit—despite its absence from Wikipedia's preserved database, where the earliest logged revision to the HomePage reads "This is the new !" at 19:27 UTC—risks prioritizing speculative markets over verifiable history, potentially influencing how future open projects handle claims. This event highlighted broader challenges in authenticating early internet-era records, where software limitations and manual deletions obscured , as evidenced by the discrepancy between ' recollection of a test edit and database artifacts like the January 16, 2001, revision to "UuU" listing countries starting with 'U'. In a of increasing digital forgery concerns, the NFT's reliance on for immutability offered a model for timestamped verification but also exposed vulnerabilities, such as the edit's reconstruction rather than direct archival pull, raising questions about the reliability of self-attested digital milestones in academic and historical . More profoundly, the NFT auction symbolized the convergence of encyclopedic knowledge production with , illustrating how collaborative tools could intersect with Web 3.0 ownership paradigms. While proponents viewed it as legitimizing blockchain's role in preserving cultural —evident in the buyer's intent to display the asset publicly—it also fueled toward NFTs as mechanisms for genuine in inherently copyable , with transaction volumes peaking at $25 billion in before declining sharply. This episode may presage reforms in successor platforms, emphasizing explicit policies on edit to prevent similar privatizations, thereby safeguarding the causal from individual innovations to collective utilities that defined Wikipedia's improbable success.

Historical Significance

Verification Challenges

The absence of the claimed "Hello, World!" edit from Wikipedia's revision history database presents a primary obstacle to verification, as it relies solely on ' personal recollection rather than preserved server logs or snapshots. Wales has stated that, upon installing the UseModWiki software on January 15, 2001, he performed a standard programming test by entering "Hello, World!" on the homepage before immediately overwriting or deleting it, leaving no trace in the system's records. This aligns with the rudimentary nature of early , which did not automatically version or log transient changes unless explicitly saved, allowing edits to be wiped without archival remnants. The earliest surviving edit in the database, by contrast, occurred at 19:27 UTC on the same day, modifying the HomePage to read "This is the new !"—a record rediscovered in and formally imported into Wikipedia's history in 2019. No independent backups, server timestamps, or contemporaneous witnesses corroborate Wales' earlier intervention at approximately 18:29 UTC (as later timestamped in the NFT recreation), exacerbating doubts about its precedence. Early UseModWiki implementations lacked robust auditing features, and without access to private server data from 2001—now unavailable publicly—empirical confirmation remains impossible. Further complicating is the NFT's status as an "artistic recreation" rather than a direct , initially timestamped at 19:29 UTC before adjustment to precede the database's first entry by 58 minutes. This reconstruction, hosted on a custom emulation, introduces interpretive layers absent in verifiable historical data, underscoring how anecdotal founder testimony can conflict with archival evidence in collaborative platforms. Critics, including historians, note that such unlogged tests are common in but unverifiable post-facto, potentially inflating symbolic claims without causal proof of sequence.

Symbolic Role

The "Hello, World!" edit made by on January 15, 2001, to Wikipedia's homepage represents the inaugural activation of the platform's collaborative editing mechanism, echoing the canonical first-output program in computing traditions that verifies basic system functionality. This simple phrase, drawn from programmer rituals dating back to Brian Kernighan's 1972 tutorial, underscored the experimental launch of a wiki-based , testing the UseModWiki software's capacity for real-time, user-driven content generation. Symbolically, the edit embodies the foundational ethos of production, initiating a where non-experts could incrementally build a comprehensive reference work, contrasting with gatekept traditional encyclopedias like . Wales later emphasized its role in sparking rapid content growth after adopting , transforming a stalled project into a scalable, volunteer-fueled enterprise that amassed over six million articles by 2016. The edit's persistence in historical narratives highlights its status as a digital , illustrating causal mechanisms of network effects in collaborative systems where initial enabled exponential contributions. In broader cultural terms, it signifies the Web's early promise for decentralized aggregation, predating social media's rise and influencing models of crowdsourced verification despite subsequent challenges in editorial control. Unlike proprietary databases, this starting point privileged empirical accumulation over curated authority, though its legacy includes debates over systemic biases emerging from unvetted expansions.

References

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  6. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/27/people-thought-i-was-a-communist-doing-this-as-a-non-profit-is-wikipedias-jimmy-wales-the-last-decent-tech-baron
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