---
title: "Which came first, Wikipedia or YouTube?"
description: "Wikipedia vs YouTube: Wikipedia came first, by 4 years — 2001 against 2005. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/wikipedia-vs-youtube/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Wikipedia or YouTube?

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

2001 — 4 years before YouTube

Wikipedia came first, by 4 years. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

## Side by side

|  | Wikipedia | YouTube |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2001 | 2005 |
| Date | 2001-01-15 | 2005-02-14 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. | The domain was registered; the first video followed in April. |

## 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.

## YouTube

The youtube.com domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005, the first video — "Me at the zoo", 19 seconds of a co-founder at San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on 23 April, and the site opened publicly in the winter. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered. It is younger than Facebook by a year and older than Twitter by one.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Wikipedia or YouTube?

Wikipedia, by 4 years — 2001 against 2005.

### When did Wikipedia start?

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

### When did YouTube start?

2005. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

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## Sources

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