---
title: "Which came first, Twitter or Wikipedia?"
description: "Twitter vs Wikipedia: Wikipedia came first, by 5 years — 2001 against 2006. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/twitter-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# 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.

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## Sources

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