Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
(Larry resigned later on). It has quickly grown into the largest
reference website on the internet, financed by donations, with no
advertising. Its multilingual content is free and written
collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym.
Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct, and
improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the
property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL
(GNU Free Documentation License) and the Creative Commons license. In
December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles (by 13,000
contributors) in 100 languages. In December 2006, Wikipedia was among
the ten top sites on the web, with 6 million articles. In May 2007,
Wikipedia had 7 million articles in 192 languages, including 1.8
million articles in English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000
articles in French, 260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000
articles in Spanish. In 2008, Wikipedia was in the top five websites.
In september 2010, Wikipedia had 14 million articles in 272 languages,
including 3.4 million articles in English, 1.1 million articles in
German and 1 million articles in French.
January 2001 > UNL (Universal Networking Language), a digital
metalanguage project
The UNDL Foundation (UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language) was
founded in January 2001 to develop and promote the UNL (Universal
Networking Language) project. The UNL project was launched in mid-1990s
as a main digital metalanguage project by the Institute of Advanced
Studies (IAS) of the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan.
As explained on the bilingual (English, Japanese) website in 1998: "UNL
is a language that - with its companion 'enconverter' and 'deconverter'
software - enables communication among peoples of differing native
languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for popular web browsers, on
the internet, and will be compatible with standard network servers." In
2000, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a multilingual project
in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese, English, French, German,
Hindu, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Mongolian, Russian,
Spanish, Swahili, and Thai).
January 2001 > The Cybook was launched as the first European ebook
reader
Developed by Cytale, a French company created by Olivier Pujol, the
Cybook (21 x 16 cm, 1 kilo) was available in January 2001 as the first
European ebook reading device. Its memory - 32 M of SDRAM and 16 M of
flash memory - could store 15.000 pages, or 30 books of 500 pages. But
sales were far below expectations, and
Cytale ended its activities in July 2002. The Cybook project was taken
over by Bookeen, a company created in 2003 by Michael Dahan and Laurent
Picard, two former engineers from Cytale. The Cybook second generation
was available in June 2004. Bookeen launched the Cybook Gen3 in July
2007, with a screen using the E Ink technology.