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Which came first, Harry Potter or Wikipedia?

Which came first, Harry Potter or Wikipedia?
Harry Potter
1997 — 4 years before Wikipedia

Harry Potter came first, by 4 years. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK.

Side by side

Harry Potter Wikipedia
Year 1997 2001
Date 1997-06-26 2001-01-15
Category media technology
What happened Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Harry Potter

Bloomsbury published the first book in June 1997 with a print run of 500 copies, most of which went to libraries, after twelve other publishers had rejected the manuscript. The company's chairman gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, who demanded the rest. It came out the same year as Netflix was founded and a year before Google.

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, Harry Potter or Wikipedia?
Harry Potter, by 4 years — 1997 against 2001.
When did Harry Potter start?
1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK.
When did Wikipedia start?
2001. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked