---
title: "Which came first, Amazon or Wikipedia?"
description: "Amazon vs Wikipedia: Amazon came first, by 7 years — 1994 against 2001. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/amazon-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Amazon or Wikipedia?

**Which came first, Amazon or Wikipedia?: Amazon**

1994 — 7 years before Wikipedia

Amazon came first, by 7 years. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.

## Side by side

|  | Amazon | Wikipedia |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1994 | 2001 |
| Date | 1994-07-05 | 2001-01-15 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state. | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. |

## Amazon

Amazon was incorporated on 5 July 1994, originally as Cadabra, and the website opened in July 1995 selling only books. The 1994 incorporation date is used here because it is the company's own founding date; if you mean the shop, 1995 is the answer. Either way it predates Google by three or four years and eBay by about a year.

## Wikipedia

Wikipedia launched in January 2001 as a scratchpad for Nupedia, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia project started in 2000 that had produced about two dozen articles in a year. The wiki produced more than that in its first month and Nupedia was abandoned in 2003. Wikipedia is older than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the iPhone.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Amazon or Wikipedia?

Amazon, by 7 years — 1994 against 2001.

### When did Amazon start?

1994. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.

### When did Wikipedia start?

2001. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]