First Wikipedia edit

The concept of a collaboratively written, freely licensed hypertext encyclopedia was first posited in the 1990s; Richard Stallman proposed a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1998.[2] In 2001, Wikipedia was initially conceived of by Larry Sanger as a source of volunteer entries from the general public that could then be "fed into" Nupedia, a collaborative encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and written by "qualified volunteer contributors" with a multi-step peer review process.[3] A message sent by Sanger to the Nupedia mailing list said "Humor me [...] go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes".[3] On January 13, 2001, Wikipedia's domain name was registered,[4] and on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched.[5]

The January 16, 2001, edit of UuU that was formerly the earliest-surviving edit in the Wikipedia database

Historically, the earliest surviving edit on Wikipedia's database was a January 16, 2001, revision of the page UuU, created as a list of countries starting with the letter U and oddly titled due to software considerations of the time.[6][7] However, page histories during that time were unreliably stored by the UseModWiki software; in 2010, previously inaccessible records of early UseModWiki revisions were found in archives by Wikimedia developer Tim Starling.[8] When these edits were imported into Wikipedia's database in 2019,[9] its earliest recorded edit became the January 15, 2001, creation of HomePage with the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" by an anonymous person using the office.bomis.com server.[10] On being informed of the importation of these edits, Wales said:

For the record, these are the earliest edits that have been found, but not the earliest edits. In the early days of Usemod wiki, I did a lot of deleting things *on the hard drive* (as this was the only way to really do that). Those will never be found of course. The first words, soon deleted, were "Hello, World!"[9]

On December 3, 2021, Wales announced that he would be selling, through auction house Christie's, a non-fungible token (NFT) of a re-creation of what he claimed to be the first Wikipedia edit, made earlier than the "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit.[5][11][12] Wales' edit, whose timestamp was listed as 18:29 UTC on January 15, 2001,[13][14] was on the page HomePage. It consisted of the text "Hello, World!"; it was made as a test and subsequently erased.[13][15] Previously, other tokens referencing "[pieces] of internet history" had been turned into "wildly expensive NFTs" — in June 2021, Sotheby's auctioned off a token referencing an animated GIF made from a text file of Tim Berners-Lee's original source code for some features of the World Wide Web;[5] it sold for $5,434,500 USD.[16]

The product being sold was not actual ownership of the edit (as Wikipedia content is released under a copyleft license), but rather a "digital item" that records the purchaser's name alongside a URL of the edit and by itself confers the owner no special rights.[17] However, plans were made to set up a website, "Edit This NFT",[18] mirroring only the original page;[15] the purchaser would be allowed to edit it.[19][15]