Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day/Past events

Wikipedia Day 2022
If you would host an event, create a WP:Meetup page for your city or organization and then list it here.

United States
West Coast:
 * New York
 * San Diego
 * Virtual Editathon, Kansas City Public Library

United States
Northeast:
 * New England
 * Philadelphia
 * New York

Southeast:
 * University of Virginia

Midwest:
 * University of Texas

West Coast:
 * San Diego

Online

 * WALRUS
 * Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network
 * Wikimedia Café
 * One World Birthday
 * WikiBlind User Group

US
Northeast:
 * New York City (TBD)

Southeast:
 * University of Virginia, January 11, 2020

Mountains:
 * Texas

West Coast:
 * San Diego Central Library, January 19, 2020
 * Los Angeles (TBD)

Australia

 * Perth – 19 January 2020

Hungary

 * Wikipedia Day 2020 in Budapest, Hungary - 18 January 2020

Serbia

 * Wikipedia Day 2020 in Belgrade, Serbia - 15 January 2020

Nepal

 * Wikipedia Day 2020 in Rajbiraj, Nepal - 15 January 2020

Online

 * WALRUS - 13 January 2020
 * Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network - 15 January 2020
 * Wikimedia Café - 25 January 2020

Wikipedia Day 2019
On January 15, 2019 Wikipedia celebrated turning 18 years old.

US

Northeast:
 * MIT & New England Wikimedians, Public Domain Day editathon (Jan 15, 2019, 3–6p)
 * New York City – January 13, 2019

Southeast:
 * University of Virginia
 * Gainesville, Florida
 * North Carolina – January 31, 2019
 * Washington DC
 * Nashville, TN – January 15, 2019

Midwest:
 * St. Louis – January 15, 2019
 * Chicago – January 26, 2019
 * Minnesota – January 19, 2019

Mountains:
 * Colorado Springs – March or April, 2019
 * Boulder, Colorado – March 16, 2019

West Coast:
 * Stanford, California – January 15, 2019
 * Los Angeles
 * Seattle – January 15, 2019

SPAIN


 * Wikikedada Donostia-San Sebastián. January 11, 2019
 * Wiki Loves Photography en Medialab-Prado, Madrid. January 12, 2019
 * Club Wikipedia en Valladolid. January 14, 2019
 * Instituto de Análisis y Aplicaciones Textuales Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. January 15, 2019
 * Espacio de Igualdad Nieves Torres en Madrid. January 15, 2019
 * Casa das Letras, Ribadeo. January 17, 2019.
 * Editatón Wiki4MediaFreedom Madrid. January 18, 2019.
 * Wikikedada Leioa, Vizcaya. January 25, 2019

SERBIA
 * Celebration of Wikipedia 18 at Wikimedia Serbia office, Belgrade - January 15, 2019

Wikipedia Day 2018
On Monday, 15 January 2018, Wikipedia turned 17.
 * Los Angeles (Sunday, February 24)
 * Dhaka, Bangladesh (Monday, January 15)
 * East Sarajevo, Republic of Srpska (Monday, January 15)
 * London Wikimedia Meetup No. 126 (Sunday, January 14)
 * New Delhi, India (Sunday, January 14)
 * New York City (Sunday, January 14)
 * Columbus, Ohio (Wednesday, January 24)

Wikipedia Day 2017
On Sunday January 15, 2017 Wikipedia celebrates turning 16 years old.

Planned events in different cities:
 * Accra (Feb 11)
 * Columbus, Ohio (Jan 18)
 * Los Angeles (Feb 18)
 * New York City (Jan 15)
 * San Francisco (Jan 15)
 * Seattle (Jan 15)

Wikipedia Day 2016
On January 15, 2016 Wikipedia celebrated turning 15 years old. Across the world, this milestone was marked at community events, in press, in a birthday site, and across Wikimedia projects in banners translated to 143 languages. Planned events are at Wikipedia 15/Events.

Wikipedia Day 2015
On Wikipedia Day 2015, Wikipedia turned 14!

At this day a symposium with the title Wikipedia as a research tool was organised at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. One of the speakers who gave a presentation was Jimmy Wales. At the symposium the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation announced that the 2015 winner of the Erasmus Prize is the Wikipedia community.

Wikipedia Day 2014
On Wikipedia Day 2014, Wikipedia turned 13! The English Wikipedia had 4,425,000 articles (give or take a couple hundred) and 30,600 editors who had made 5 edits or more (user stats from November); and across all languages there were 30.3 million articles and 69,500 active (5+) editors (global statistics from November).
 * Minnesota: meetup at the Seward Community Cafe, Minneapolis, noon.
 * Nepal: Cake party and Get together is organized to mark Wikipedia's 13th Anniversary at Siddhartha Cottage, Kathmandu. (Time 4:00-6:00 p.m., 15 January 2014)

Wikipedia Day 2013
Several pages may be set up on English Wikipedia, for coordination of events in different countries:


 * Wikipedia Day/United States
 * Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia Day 2015
 * Wikipedia Day India
 * Wikipedia Summit India - January 12-13 in Pune
 * Meetup/Melbourne_26

Wikipedia Day 2012


Several pages may be set up on English Wikipedia, for coordination of events in different countries:


 * Wikipedia Day/Australia
 * Wikipedia Day/Canada
 * Wikipedia Day/India (celebrations in several cities)
 * Wikipedia Day/Mexico - celebrated as Free Knowledge Day
 * Wikipedia Day/United Kingdom - London Wikimedia Meetup Number 53
 * Wikipedia Day/United States

Wikipedia Day 2011
Wikipedia's tenth birthday led to events and celebrations planned around the world, with commemorative T-shirts, stickers, parties and cakes! Events were planned and coordinated on a special wiki, Wikipedia 10. Photos and logos from the anniversary's celebrations are here: commons:Category:Wikipedia 10.

Wikipedia Day 2010
Wikipedia Day New York City – A Wikipedia Day NYC celebration was held at New York University in New York City on Sunday January 24, 2010.

Wikipedia Day Bangalore – A Wikipedia Day celebration was held in Bangalore, India on Saturday January 16, 2010.

Hebrew Wikipedia 100,000 articles celebrations – was held in Tel Aviv, Israel on January 15, 2010.

Wikipedia Day 2009
On the eighth anniversary of Wikipedia, January 15, 2009, the English Wikipedia had nearly 2,700,000 articles, (2,699,721 as of 20:00 UTC) and just over 15,750,000 pages overall. Just before Wikipedia Day 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation's most successful fundraiser to date was concluded (on January 1, 2009), with over $6M U.S. raised. Microsoft's Encarta (1993–2009) Encyclopedia over the years consolidated many traditional print encyclopedias into its digital version (CD/DVD/online) until ending Encarta in 2009 due to the overwhelming success and popularity of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Day 2008
On January 15, 2008, the English Wikipedia celebrated its seventh birthday with 2,176,875 articles, with El Hormiguero being the 2 millionth article. The site is hovering between a 7 and 8 Alexa rating. By now, Wikipedians seek more quality contributions than quantity ever since the millionth article was created.

A wide spread of controversies occurred throughout the year of 2007, (e.g. Essjay Controversy).

Wikipedia Day 2007
On January 15, 2007, Wikipedia turned six years old. According to statistics, the English language Wikipedia had around 1,500,000 articles and Wikipedians had made 104,000,000 edits. The millionth article was Jordanhill railway station, created on March 1, 2006.

Wikipedia.org has moved from an Alexa rank of 20 to a rank of 11 (3-month average) having already briefly visited rank 8 (current rank). At the news of wikipedia.org hitting the top 10, our beloved developers screamed "INCOMING!!!" and dove for cover. But they've been doing that every day since 2004.

Wikipedia Day 2006
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 5 years old January 15, 2006.

As of January 15, the English Wikipedia alone had more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.

For a few days now, Wikipedia has been listed on as the 20th most popular website in the world (one week average). The current trend should see it entering the top ten this year.

129 new servers were purchased during 2005, bringing the total to 171. The Wikimedia cluster had to be moved to another facility (also in Tampa, Florida) to obtain more space. Wikimedia now has three auxiliary server clusters, in Paris, Amsterdam and Seoul.

This year, Wikipedia has been criticized for the Seigenthaler controversy, but it was also reviewed in Nature, which found articles on scientific subjects to be comparable in accuracy to Encyclopedia Britannica. New tools were adopted to make it easier to prevent vandalism and reference sources in articles. In 2006, Wikipedia will work on pushing to 1.0 for a large number of articles.

Wikipedia Day 2005
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 4 years old January 15, 2005.

The English Wikipedia now has more than 450,000 articles, and bets will soon close on when the millionth English article will be reached (Million pool). Fifty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles.

On 29 December, 2004, for the first time, Wikipedia was listed on Alexa's list of the top 100 English-language web sites, at #99. On Wikipedia Day 2005, it was listed at rank 87.

Wikipedia Day 2004
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, turned 3 years old January 15, 2004.

The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 190,000 articles, and the combined Wikipedias for other languages now exceed the English Wikipedia in size, giving an estimated total of over 420,000 articles in over 40 languages. The English Wikipedia alone now contains over 56 million words, making it comparable in size with the largest previously existing encyclopedias.

18 of the non-English Wikipedias now have over 1000 articles, which seems to be the "lift-off" point for rapid growth, and non-English growth is expected to accelerate rapidly. A significant factor in aiding the growth of these Wikipedias is that they have almost without exception migrated to use the MediaWiki software. A further conversion challenge still awaits progression in 2004 towards using UTF-8 on all Wikipedias, allowing greater ease of use in articles including multilingual text.

Overall article growth continues to increase exponentially, but at a rate less than we estimated last year at this time (we originally estimated in 2001 that it would take 5 or more years to reach our first 100,000 articles in English). This analysis suggests that the "organic" hand-edited growth rate of a mature Wikipedia is slightly less than doubling growth per year, with younger Wikipedias growing somewhat faster.

This growth has not been at the expense of quality, as the level of polish and breadth of expertise has continued to grow throughout the Wikipedias. Further software features, such as new automated category indexes, are being developed to allow Wikipedia to scale with this massive growth in content and traffic.

The creation of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation has provided an independent legal foundation for Wikipedia, and has allowed Wikipedia to spin off a number of sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikibooks.

As the number of articles has increased, so has the amount of traffic from readers, to the point where the servers have begun to struggle to keep up in the face of recent hardware failures. In response to this, a fundraising drive brought in sufficient donations to allow the parts for a new scalable and fault-tolerant server farm to be ordered. The new server farm is anticipated to return Wikipedia to being fast and responsive, and to be able to continue to keep up with the growth in load over the next year.

Along with fundraising, Wikipedia is also experimenting with innovations in its self-governance.

Wikipedia Day 2003
With over 130,000 articles spread across 28 languages, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, turned 2 years old January 15, 2003. Several Wikipedia contributors (Wikipedians), in the collaborative spirit which has brought us so far, have redesigned the Main Page of the English Wikipedia in celebration of Wikipedia's birthday.

During the first year of its existence, Wikipedia went from zero to 20,000 articles in the English version and that was considered to be an impressive growth rate. The second year of Wikipedia saw the addition of nearly 80,000 more articles in the English version alone, making it the world's largest Wiki and the world's largest free content encyclopedia. With edits being made 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by hundreds of bright and enthusiastic volunteers from around the world, who knows where we will be one year from today?

Wikipedia's original goal was to make 100,000, and at the time we speculated that this might take us five or more years. It is now known that the 100,000 article milestone is just the tip of the iceberg. The power of the collaborative WikiWiki editing model, the freedom that the GNU Free Documentation License gives users, and Wikipedia's strong nonbias policy (the neutral point of view), combined with our goal of creating the world's largest encyclopedia will ensure the continued growth and success of our project.

Many people have told Wikipedians that they would fail. "What?" they said, "You let anyone edit anytime they wish? It is preposterous to think that anything of any value could be created that way. You are destined to fail!" It is, however, becoming more and more apparent with each passing day that they are wrong. Wikipedia celebrates Wikipedia Day by continuing to build the world's best encyclopedia where everyone can contribute!!!

Wikipedia Day 2002
On Wikipedia Day 2002 this article was created. Wikipedia had roughly 20,000 articles then. The Wikipedia at that time can be viewed at http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/

For even earlier than that, you can find copies in the Internet Archive. Here is the oldest one archived: February 28, 2001.

Wikipedia Day 2001
2001 was the year that Wikipedia was publicly launched.