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Which came first, Twitter or Wikipedia?

Which came first, Twitter or Wikipedia?
Wikipedia
2001 — 5 years before Twitter

Wikipedia came first, by 5 years. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Side by side

Twitter Wikipedia
Year 2006 2001
Date 2006-03-21 2001-01-15
Category technology technology
What happened Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Twitter

The first tweet — "just setting up my twttr" — went out on 21 March 2006, and the service opened publicly that July. The 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message allows 160 characters and 20 were reserved for the username. When the limit doubled to 280 in 2017 the SMS constraint had been irrelevant for years.

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, Twitter or Wikipedia?
Wikipedia, by 5 years — 2001 against 2006.
When did Twitter start?
2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.
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