There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the idea of

associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own
name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on
Monday 15 January 2001. The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these initial
projects were donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later contributed content to
the encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of Bomis, and programmer Jason
Richey.

Wales stated in December 2008 that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text
"Hello, World!", but this edit may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which soon after was
scrapped and replaced by a restart;[30] see [1]. The oldest article still preserved is the article
UuU, created on Tuesday 16 January 2001, at 21:08 UTC.[31][32] The existence of the project
was formally announced and an appeal for volunteers to engage in content creation was made
to the Nupedia mailing list on 17 January 2001.[33]

The "UuU" edit, the first edit that is still preserved on Wikipedia to this day, as it appears using
the Nostalgia skin

The project received many new participants after being mentioned on the Slashdot website in
July 2001,[34] having already earned two minor mentions in March 2001.[35][36] It then
received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture
website Kuro5hin on 25 July.[37] Between these relatively rapid influxes of traffic, there had
been a steady stream of traffic from other sources, especially Google, which alone sent hundreds
of new visitors to the site every day. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in The New
York Times on Thursday 20 September 2001.[38]

The project gained its 1,000th article around Monday 12 February 2001, and reached 10,000
articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000 encyclopedia entries
were created – a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On Friday 30 August 2002, the article
count reached 40,000.

Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki software
deleted old data after about a month. On Tuesday 14 December 2010, developer Tim Starling
found backups on SourceForge containing every change made to Wikipedia from its creation in
January 2001 to 17 August 2001.[39] It showed the first edit as being to HomePage on 15
January 2001, reading "This is the new WikiPedia!".

The first three edits that were known of before Tim Starling's discovery, are: