SHARE “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing," co-founder Jimmy Wales said in 2004, when asked by a user what Wikipedia's mission was. It seemed a long shot at the time. Little did he know that Wikipedia would become precisely that: the world's largest repository of human knowledge, offering more than 55 million articles in 309 languages. How Wikipedia was born It all started in January 2001, when internet entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger registered Wikipedia's domain as an offshoot of an earlier web-based encyclopedia project, Nupedia.