From the wikipedia-l archive:

List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia rocks!
From:       "Larry Sanger"
Date:       2001-01-22 0:02:42

Welcome, o ye five initial members of wikipedia-l, to wikipedia-l!

Actually, the point of this post is to put something in the archives.

On the assumption that all wikipedia articles have the letter "e" in
them, there are now 184 Wikipedia articles.  I added a "best of" page
you might be interested in:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?BrilliantProse

Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far, and that's great.

Larry

For some reason I had the idea Wikipedia was older than that; I suppose it just seems like a lot more than six years’ work. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can see what it looked like in March 2001:

Welcome to Wikipedia! We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 3,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know! Read our welcome message here: Welcome, newcomers!

I wonder how many people read We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch and thought that maybe they were being a little optimistic. I’m pretty sure I would have.

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