Wikipedia:2002

Events

 * February 2002: Most participants of the Spanish Wikipedia break away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre.
 * March 1: Larry Sanger resigns from Wikipedia.
 * August 2002: The URL of Wikipedia changes from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org after Jimbo Wales announces that he will never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia.
 * September 2002: The Finnish Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles.
 * October 2002: Derek Ramsey ("Ram-Man") starts to use a bot to add tens of thousands of articles about United States towns by data taken directly from the 2000 United States Census, e.g. Garrison, North Dakota, drastically increasing the size of Wikipedia.
 * November 7: The first article on the Russian Wikipedia is created.

Establishments

 * 2002
 * The Korean Wikipedia is created.
 * The Finnish Wikipedia is created.
 * Vandalism in progress is established as early as 2002, but due to cut-and-paste moves and archiving in the early days, establishing the exact date requires more thorough research. It is renamed to Requests for investigation in 2006.
 * January 2002: The Italian Wikipedia is created.
 * February 26: The Slovenian Wikipedia is created.
 * May 2002: The Czech Wikipedia is created.
 * August 2002: The Estonian Wikipedia is created.
 * September 2002: The Japanese Wikipedia is created.
 * October 2002: The Chinese Wikipedia is created.
 * October 11: WikiProject Novels is drafted.
 * December 2002:
 * The sister project Wiktionary was created.
 * The Turkish Wikipedia is created.
 * The Bosnian Wikipedia is created.
 * December 1: The Greek Wikipedia is created.

Holidays

 * January 25: Magnus Manske Day: Wikipedia switches to the MediaWiki software.

Online births

 * February 7: User:Bryan Derksen (user page created)
 * February 25
 * User:Stan Shebs (first logged edit)
 * User:TUF-KAT (first logged edit)
 * April 21: User:SimonP (user page created)
 * September 3: User:Olivier (user page created)
 * September 8: User:Ram-Man (user page created)
 * December 20: User:Zanimum (first logged edit)
 * December 23: User:172 (account created)
 * December 24: User:IZAK (first logged edit)