---
title: "Which came first, TikTok or Wikipedia?"
description: "TikTok vs Wikipedia: Wikipedia came first, by 15 years — 2001 against 2016. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/tiktok-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, TikTok or Wikipedia?

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

2001 — 15 years before TikTok

Wikipedia came first, by 15 years. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

## Side by side

|  | TikTok | Wikipedia |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2016 | 2001 |
| Date | — | 2001-01-15 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017. | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. |

## TikTok

The app launched in China as Douyin in September 2016 and internationally as TikTok in 2017. What made it global was the 2018 acquisition and merger of Musical.ly, a lip-sync app that had launched in 2014 and already had a large Western user base — so part of TikTok is two years older than TikTok. Douyin and TikTok remain separate apps on separate infrastructure.

## 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, TikTok or Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, by 15 years — 2001 against 2016.

### When did TikTok start?

2016. ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017.

### When did Wikipedia start?

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

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## Sources

- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]