---
title: "Which came first, Instagram or Wikipedia?"
description: "Instagram vs Wikipedia: Wikipedia came first, by 9 years — 2001 against 2010. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/instagram-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Instagram or Wikipedia?

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

2001 — 9 years before Instagram

Wikipedia came first, by 9 years. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

## Side by side

|  | Instagram | Wikipedia |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2010 | 2001 |
| Date | 2010-10-06 | 2001-01-15 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The app launched on iOS. | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. |

## Instagram

Instagram launched in October 2010 as an iPhone-only app and took 25,000 users on its first day. Facebook bought it in April 2012 for about $1 billion when it had thirteen employees and no revenue. It is four years younger than Twitter and six years older than TikTok.

## 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, Instagram or Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, by 9 years — 2001 against 2010.

### When did Instagram start?

2010. The app launched on iOS.

### 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]