---
title: "Which came first, the iPhone or Wikipedia?"
description: "the iPhone vs Wikipedia: Wikipedia came first, by 6 years — 2001 against 2007. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/iphone-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the iPhone or Wikipedia?

**Which came first, the iPhone or Wikipedia?: Wikipedia**

2001 — 6 years before the iPhone

Wikipedia came first, by 6 years. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

## Side by side

|  | the iPhone | Wikipedia |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2007 | 2001 |
| Date | 2007-06-29 | 2001-01-15 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement. | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. |

## the iPhone

Announced on 9 January 2007 and on sale from 29 June, the first iPhone had no app store, no copy and paste, no 3G and no video recording. The App Store arrived over a year later in July 2008. Android Inc. had been founded in 2003, four years before the iPhone, but the first Android phone shipped fifteen months after it.

## 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, the iPhone or Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, by 6 years — 2001 against 2007.

### When did the iPhone start?

2007. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.

### 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]