---
title: "Which came first, JavaScript or Wikipedia?"
description: "JavaScript vs Wikipedia: JavaScript came first, by 6 years — 1995 against 2001. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/javascript-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, JavaScript or Wikipedia?

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

1995 — 6 years before Wikipedia

JavaScript came first, by 6 years. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

## Side by side

|  | JavaScript | Wikipedia |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1995 | 2001 |
| Date | — | 2001-01-15 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator. | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. |

## JavaScript

JavaScript was written in about ten days in May 1995, shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0 later that year, and was called LiveScript until December, when Netscape renamed it as part of a marketing deal with Sun. It has nothing to do with Java beyond some borrowed syntax. Standardisation as ECMAScript followed in 1997, and the language spent a decade being treated as a toy before it became the most widely deployed programming language in the world.

## 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, JavaScript or Wikipedia?

JavaScript, by 6 years — 1995 against 2001.

### When did JavaScript start?

1995. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

### When did Wikipedia start?

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

## Related pages

- [Apple or JavaScript?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-javascript/)
- [Apple or Wikipedia?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-wikipedia/)
- [the internet (ARPANET) or JavaScript?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-javascript/)
- [the internet (ARPANET) or Wikipedia?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-wikipedia/)
- [email or JavaScript?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-javascript/)
- [email or Wikipedia?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-wikipedia/)
- [the Macintosh or Wikipedia?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/macintosh-vs-wikipedia/)
- [Python or Wikipedia?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/python-vs-wikipedia/)
- [Java or JavaScript?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/java-vs-javascript/)
- [Java or Wikipedia?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/java-vs-wikipedia/)
- [JavaScript or Microsoft?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/javascript-vs-microsoft/)
- [JavaScript or the Macintosh?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/javascript-vs-macintosh/)

## Sources

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